Chatham and London

This paper describes and discusses the changing form of the English land fortress over a period of nearly 50 years from 1870.1 Although the fortresses at Portsmouth, Plymouth and elsewhere, whose construction had been authorized under the Royal Commission on the Defence of the United Kingdom (1859) were practically complete by 1870, the ensuing several decades formed one of the most important periods in the history of English land fortification. During that time the concept of the land fortress, both in its strategic rôle and tactical use, was constantly re-appraised by military planners. This paper seeks to show how continuous progress in the effectiveness of weapons forced the assumptions which had guided the fortress designers of the 1860s to be questioned, modified and then finally completely overturned in favour of a new fortress system. The new ideas manifested themselves in the formation of the Chatham fortress from 1875 and reached their full expression in the London Defences of the 1890s, which very largely substituted field works for permanent forts as the main line of defence. By this date, all the British land fortresses were being gradually brought into a rough tactical uniformity. After a short decline from 1906, the English land fortress re-asserted itself in the First World War. This develops the theme first explored by the writer in his paper ‘The Later Nineteenth Century Land Defences of Chatham’, in Post Medieval Archaeology, 10 (1976), 104–117. See also J. R. E. Hamilton-Baillie, ‘The Fixed Fortifications of the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries Illustrated by the Defences of Chatham’, in the Royal Engineers journal, LXXXVIII (March 1974), 2–14. The Royal Commission land defences at Portsmouth were covered in A. D. Saunders, ‘Hampshire Coastal Defence since the Introduction of Artillery’, in Archaeological journal, CXXIII(1966), 136–71

Archaeology · Face (sociological concept · Fortification · Social science · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Australian History and Society · History

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