The Later Nineteenth-Century Land Defences of Chatham

The founding of Chatham dockyard in the mid-sixteenth century led to the Medway valley becoming one of the most heavily defended areas in Britain. Although the dockyard declined in importance in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it revived with the coming of steam dredging and the steam warship. This paper describes in outline the various sixteenth- to early nineteenth-century defence works on the river and around Chatham. Chatham was the last of the major dockyards to be provided with new fortications after the 1860 Commission report, some of its defence works not being completed until 1899. This makes them the last of the great permanent fortifications to be built in Great Britain, their design differing considerably from those completed elsewhere in the 1860s and 1870s.1

Ancient history · Archaeology · Commission · Dredging · Economic history · Political science · Shipbuilding · Shipyard · Civil and Structural Engineering Research · History · Law · Maritime and Coastal Archaeology · Oceanography · Structural Engineering and Vibration Analysis

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