I Spent a Weekend in Portsmouth - Here’s Everything Worth Doing

Welcome to Portsmouth, the UK's only island city. Nettled on Portsea Island, many people pass through here simply to get to the continent because lots of ferries depart from here. However, if you scratch beneath the surface, you'll find there's lots to discover, including plenty of history. In this travel guide, we're going to be discovering the best of Portsmouth, including top attractions and hidden gems. We'll even learn about the birth of the Navy. During World War II, Portsmouth was heavily bombed and it's estimated that up to 20% of the homes were either completely destroyed or severely damaged. Now, one of the only historic quarters left in the city is the area we're standing in right now. It's full of cobbled lanes, historic pubs, and it's pretty lovely to wander around. It's hard to imagine today because this is a really family-friendly area with lots of people out with their dogs, with their kids, out as couples. But this was an area of debauchery, full of brothels, and not incredibly safe. In fact, Portsmouth Point was actually outside the old city walls of Portsmouth and was often referred to as Spice Island. Today, there are three pubs, but once upon a time, there were 40 taverns here. One of the most dominant features of Portsmouth skyline is the Spinnaker Tower. This reaches around 170 meters into the sky and on a clear day, you can see up to 23 miles away, including onto the nearby Isle of Wight. It was constructed in the early 2000s and sits in the middle of Gunnwolf Quays, which is predominantly now a shopping complex. As well as being the birthplace of some pretty famous people, including Charles Dickens and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, it's also the birthplace of a very famous institution, the Navy. Now we are going to head to a very special museum to learn more. Hello, I'm Alexandra Hildreth. I'm Head of Research at the Mary Rose Trust. I happen to have been a diver in 1979 as one of the 500 volunteers and was asked to stay on then and haven't left ever since. Can you tell us briefly what the Mary Rose is for someone who's never heard of it before? The Mary Rose was one of the two of the first ships that Henry actually had built when he came to the throne in 1509. And by 1510, he'd already ordered two ships to be built. One was the Mary Rose and the other was the Peter Pomegranates. The Mary Rose sailed for over 35 years and sank just two years before the king died. So it was almost like the birth of a ship, the reign of a king, you know, they run in parallel. He went aboard with Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor in 1522. And in fact, the day before sinking, where the fleet were in Portsmouth Harbour, he'd actually just had a sort of a meeting with all the captains on the biggest ship, which was then the Henry Grassadier. And he then presented the captain of the Mary Rose and said that, you know, you're my second in command. He had a very personal affiliation with the Mary Rose and you get this odd thing to say my gallant men or my fair ship. So we know that he had a fondness for it. The Mary Rose was paid out of his own personal purse. They were the king's ships that were mothballed and were cargo vessels or trading vessels that in time of war would have extra castles put on top so that you could have fisticuffs and hand-to-hand warfare. Henry VIII was the first one to actually keep the paid for when the war ended. Instead of decommissioning them, they were actually put into dockyards. So that is the beginning of the Navy as we know it. So we're now in one of the upper galleries of the Mary Rose where we've got a very nice model of the Mary Rose ship. The bow is here. So we're missing everything from the foremast really forward on the starboard side that's broken off and that's broken off in antiquity possibly at the time of the sinking. You have to think that this ship is now an old ship and she began by being when we're hand-to-hand combat and people boarding and fighting etc was more undertaken but it still was the last resort. So you had this anti-boarding netting which you put up in battle and sadly that is what made the up to 300 of the 500 men who we know were on board drown in the Mary Rose and which is why our museum is dedicated to them and why we have some of their skeletal material in order to study and to create faces so you can look into the face of a man who was on the Mary Rose in 1545. There are a number of theories about why the ship sank. The French undoubtedly just say they sank her with gunfire. The idea of French gunfire maybe not being responsible entirely for sinking it only but we know that that's one thing that is definitely a possibility because they're within range and because you can see it happening and because you know the French why would they necessarily lie? Perhaps the ship as she was sailing was compromised because she got water in the ballast which is pebble ballast beach pallet like that and if that gets wet and it moves over it is going to go through the whole ship because there weren't dividers along the length of the ship. When we found the ship completely surprised to us she was facing back into Portsmouth Harbour. One eyewitness account and it's a Flemish person who's on the Mary Rose here we get our first mention of a foreigner on the Mary Rose the ship fired the guns from one side of the ship and was turning to bring the guns on the other side to bear so having fired them she was turning and as she turned she dipped her sails onto the water water entered through the gun ports and sank her. There's another phrase that the captain Sir George Crewe is supposed to say I have the sort of knaves I cannot rule suggesting that there might be unruliness within the crew. A lot of them suggest a sudden gust of wind and towards evening which is when it's supposed to have happened you often get a gust of wind from the north in this area anyway. One thing that we can validate is that she was sailing with gunport lids on both sides open as well and so if she's slightly low in the water that could be gathering a little bit every time she goes forward. What do you think as an expert is the most likely thing that happened? I think the ship was compromised there is a theory that she fought the night before so if you've got holes at near water level then overnight that would fill in. I do think the gust of wind comes into a lot of things and we know that she had to turn and we know that the gunport lids were open so all those together it's a classic incident pitch you know a number of different things and and you lose a ship and nearly 500 men. How was the Mary Rose preserved for so long? She went over on this side she rolled over she's 12 meters wide the seabed at the moment is 12 meters so it's not a huge titanic thing. The ship is lying and therefore the tide goes that way for so many hours and it goes that way for so many hours and when it meets an obstacle anything that's in solution in that anything like silt for example is encouraged to drop that the gunports are all open so very early on with every time the tides cross and go over it there's a chance that things were dropped in. A lot of that sediment is very very fine and it means that it's got good preservative qualities when it lands on things and to excavate it you can cut it and you can get a face of it so it's not falling it's not slumping it's just that beautiful butter feeling. We're in the reserve collection or secondary collection of the Mary Rose and so these are some of the 250 longbows listed for the ship. We're very lucky we've got an inventory which is like an archaeologist tick list when you're diving. They're U longbows. If I were to use it I'd put it down here putting it carefully on my leather boot not on the floor and bend the tips back and that would bend and because this is the heartwood the dense wood you can take the stress of it so it's a perfect spring but it's in natural wood and these were imported in huge amounts through Venice because we'd run out of ewe. This idea that English ewe in the churches was used for all our longbows by 1545 they weren't enough and so we were importing it. The great thing about the Mary Rose in particular the weapon system and of course you've got to remember Henry was fighting wars and so he was putting as much money into arms as much as he could as well as importing them so there was a huge development in gunnery techniques. We have other things like the first and the only earliest evidence of cast iron guns being made in England and if you look at that it's designed to be hooked over a rail so that when you fire it you have a wooden stock there you light the touch hole with a slow match having muzzle loaded powder and shot in there and it's this dice and the spread of this shot was unbelievable so anybody in the way would have been really torn apart literally torn apart. I don't know if you can pick it up on the camera but there's a cast line here so it's made like shot this is really experimental stuff but that gives you a stress fracture and the fact it's rectangular as well it's just the wrong thing for a gun but you know those are some of the wonderful things that that were done in this in this in the reign of Henry VIII and that we have and that nobody in the world so far I mean maybe somebody will see this and say I've seen one somewhere but I doubt it. So because all of these weapons were found on the Mary Rose on the day it sank all of these things were being used concurrently during battle? When the first divers in modern times which is 1836 found the site they thought because they were finding raw iron guns as well as bronze guns that they got to the bottom of the ship and that the iron guns were ballast because surely they would be obsolete. But why did they still have longbows then if they had this amazing capability over here? These were much much faster these also didn't need gunpowder which stored on a ship you know would often go bad. She's a really wonderful transitional ship it's like half medieval half modern and the beginning of the navy and then by the time she sinks there's a big naval board and there are all sorts of departments with key personnel. Every object has multiple stories and multiple rabbit holes that you need to go down to try and sort them out. So things that we have a plenty for example are these ballot knives so you have to imagine that there's a blade that comes down to here and we found I think it's 69 or 70 or something of these things. So these mundane objects because they're made of wood so you know we think of them as not being that important but they're actually some of the most important objects because they're the everyday things that don't survive unless they're in waterlogged conditions. But what's interesting is they're all turned but these ones some of them have got absolutely amazing decoration on them carved by the person as maybe it was you know their sign their insignia. Don't use my bowl. Don't use my bowl and these were their distribution so the archaeological distribution was all over the ship and sometimes they were even tucked between the frames of the ship so somebody had put it there we even had a sword in the belt that obviously been taken off and stuck down between the frames in particular we've got in near the galley we call it the cook's stool but it's basically where you chop things up and that's just full of knives and you think that looks just like my breadboard. Yeah exactly. It is like holding hands with the past. It's things like that which are just so ordinary but they're just so extraordinary when you look at that what do you think? A knit comb? Oh it actually is. It is actually a knit comb well it's both a comb that's for styling so that's for combing the hair and that's for knits and there are tales in particular maybe 30 years later of sailors throwing themselves off the ships because they've got the knits are so bad they're just horrible. You can see this is different from everything in here because it's been wrapped in a very thick pink polythene bag if you like. It's actually like one in a necklace of these beads we should have many many maybe 10 rows and they it was all roped up so if pulled on one rope it sort of rolled up the mast pulling the yardarm up and then you know hoisting sails but what's unique about this one is it's gone from the seabed to the stars because it's been to the international space station and back. Oh my gosh I'm touching something that's been to space. You've got to say I'm touching something from the Mary Rose. That too. So did we always know the location of the Mary Rose on the seabed? Well it was discovered in the 19th century by pioneering divers and they literally made the diving equipment they were wearing who were clearing another wreck from the harbour. Fishermen had snagged their nets on something else a bit further away and asked the divers to go and check it and they went down and found a few bits of old wood and then nearby they found a bronze gun and without a doubt from that moment on they knew that it could only be one ship but then the position was lost and it was sort of forgotten about until Alexander McKee in the 60s. McKee who was a naval historian decided that he would look for historic wrecks and so on and he would look for the Mary Rose because it would have been like the jewel in the crown the oldest ship and so he began searching. The position wasn't known so a huge area was searched looking for things and then there were a number of of clues that came about if you like. In 1968 a company from America was over in England demonstrating their newfangled sub-bottom profilers and they found an anomaly in the seabed. It was actually pioneering work in underwater archaeology by using that in order to look for it and they came across something hard at about four metres depth below seabed. A year later they recovered in the arms of a dredge this iron gun. The moment it was seen it was realised that it was a Tudor gun. In 1979 the Mary Rose Trust was formed to completely excavate the ship so to prepare it for the lift first of all we had to empty it of all the objects and that was done between 79 and about July 82. Having emptied the ship of all the objects we also took the decks apart. The middle of May 82 having thought we brought up all the collapsed galley bricks a complete galley was found with like 2,000 bricks so various things slowed us down during it. Of course you have that's like so much work. Yeah it was. Margaret the archaeological director is being interviewed saying well she was ours then and now she belongs to everybody and that's that's true and that's the way it should be but what it was for a lot of people and some people took quite a few years to get over it we were raising the Mary Rose there was nothing else that happened I don't know any pop songs I don't know any rich television programs and it's as though your meaning for living had been taken away you know when we were in the diving season you were on for two days then off to and then came back so it was this rota system which was very intense and the other thing that always impresses me is there's nothing as intense because you're by yourself in a small area with nothing but you in the sound of the air with nothing to distract you and I don't think I've ever felt that in anything else since so it's um a wonderful thing to be a part of. Although it might not look like it today Portsmouth's Cathedral often referred to as Cathedral of the Sea dates all the way back to the 12th century though much of what you see now was actually a 20th century renovation it only became a cathedral in the 1920s and today it's this beautiful blend of old meets new we can't film inside right now because they have a lovely choral even song going on which is very nice to listen to but means that we can't film. Because of all of the naval history here there's a very strong connection to Horatio Nelson and this is actually where he departed from to head to the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Now he's commemorated right here in Portsmouth with a statue just behind me. Founded in the 13th century the Royal Garrison Church has seen plenty of uses over its time. It was originally constructed at the behest of the Bishop of Winchester in order to act as a hostel and hospital for pilgrims. During the Reformation it was actually used as an ammunition storage and by the time of Elizabeth I it had been partially converted into the governor of Portsmouth's house. During the Second World War it was bombed and today the bombed out church remains as a reminder of that war. It's pretty peaceful here and is usually open to the public. Currently it is closed because there aren't enough volunteers at English Heritage today but we can still admire the exterior. There have been fortifications in and around Portsea Island since at least the Roman times and by the 19th century Portsmouth was actually one of the most fortified cities in the world. Today a number of those fortifications remain including some of the city walls. You can still walk along long stretches of the historic city walls and I particularly loved strolling around at golden hour when we were greeted with fantastic views of the Solent. One of the most important historical sites of interest is just a short drive from Portsmouth city centre. This is South Sea Castle. This strategic fortification was constructed by Henry VIII in the 16th century and was part of a larger program to protect against invasion from France. It was only ever attacked once in its history and this was close to a century after it had been built in 1642 when troops supporting parliament aimed to take control of the castle and town. There are also a number of gems in the area surrounding Portsmouth and so today we're going to be exploring some of the best. We also have great weather for it. Good afternoon, I'm Alan. I'm a tour guide at the Hovercraft Museum. In fact the only hovercraft museum in the world. It's quite a fascinating place. I am a bit biased but there is fun for all to have here. What's the definition of a hovercraft? Two main craft. One a hovercraft is totally amphibious, will go over the water, over land, over bogs and another slightly different craft, cushion craft, internally draft. You've got no external making supposedly more efficient, making them also quite quiet crafts. How long ago was the museum established? It started in 1988 at Eastley, the other side of Southsea. Moved here in 1998. And how many hovercraft do you have? We have 40 large craft and about 300 small model craft. And something I've really enjoyed is that you can actually go inside them. That's what it's all about. Here we have Cockrell's prototype. Not just a copy, this is it. He was a Marconi employee prior to the Second World War and then during the Second World War was responsible for aircraft radio navigation systems and aircraft radars. After the war started on his prototype hovercraft. At the time virtually top secret. Built at Cowes and it wasn't until June 1959 when he invited Army, Navy, Air Force and a lot of press to come and see his craft. Weirdly Army, Navy, Air Force hadn't the vision. They just couldn't see it. Fortunately also at the opening ceremony were Westland Helicopters Limited and they eventually with Saunders Rowe joined together to form the British Hovercraft Corporation. There is the original SRN4 Mark 1, Mark 2. But there's the final version the Mark 3 which you're on now. Princess Anne, she held the speed crossing record. Very well documented in September 1995. Fully loaded. It must have been ideal conditions. Flat as a pancake. Wind behind. She made the crossing in 22 minutes. All the way to France. That is 65 miles an hour over water. That is going some. Why did the hovercraft stop in the year 2000? There's half a dozen reasons. Channel Tunnel opening in 1996. Gulf Wars going on. Fuel prices were horrendous. This drinks 5,000 litres an hour. But also they are modified aircraft engines. After every trip they basically had to be washed down. New craft coming into service. The catamarans and trimarans. But they couldn't go out in a Force 4. These went out in a Force 7. Not recommended. Sick bags were basically compulsory. But they were still quick and that's what hovercraft were all about. The final nail in the coffin was duty-free allowance. The booze cruise. You came down to Dover or Ramsgate in your car, van or lorry depending on how thirsty you were. The cost of tobacco products and spirits on board were far cheaper than what you could get in the French or Belgian supermarkets. They couldn't beat them for wine. So once you got to the other side you got off and went to the French or Belgian supermarket filled up with wine. Leaving enough space for your duty-free allowance on the way back. This is our first military craft. The BH7 taken over by the Navy in 1970. We now go on board. Believe it or not where you're standing there is room for 150 troops. Its main job was to get the troops and their transport very quickly from A to B. They very very rarely used to sleep on board this craft. The one time they did, 1972, when they visited the Arctic Circle. They hovered up there under its own steam and they were away for three and a half months. They fitted 18 bunk beds on the car deck. If you have a look in the galley, poke your head through the square there and you'll see a 1970s microwave. So they had all the comforts of home. Right we're now in the G-type seaplane hangar. They're the only two left in the world. These two craft built for the James Bond film Die Another Day. My favourite in the museum is this one. Doesn't look a great deal does it? Until I point out this was built in 1973 by 14, 15 and 16 year old school children. What a brilliant project to get them working on machinery, science, physics, you name it. What's one thing you want people to know about hovercrafts? There is a future and hopefully we will see the hydrogen craft. And so the future of hovercraft isn't just for small passengers, it might be for a lot of users. Very much so, we're fingers crossed that's what will happen. Founded in the 13th century, though no one is quite sure of the exact date, Titchfield Abbey operated as such for around three centuries. It never became particularly influential or wealthy but the people who lived here were amazing at scholarship and they had a great library. All of this of course changed with the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII in the Tudor period. After the building was closed in 1537, it was converted into a Tudor mansion by Thomas Riosley, who also happened to be a patron of William Shakespeare. Now the whole area lies in ruin and you can visit for free, though there is a small charge for the car park. It's particularly beautiful on a sunny day such as today. We can actually go in and have a wander around the ruins, so let's go and do that. We know that after its transformation into a mansion, a number of royals came to visit, including Charles I, Elizabeth I and Edward VII. It's even believed that some of Shakespeare's plays were performed here for the very first time. It then was passed through several generations but eventually fell out of favour in lieu of other houses and by 1781 it had been completely abandoned. Part of it was actually demolished in order to be reused for other building projects such as Cairns Hall nearby, and in the 20th century the site was purchased by the British government for the people of the UK. Now it's under the care of English Heritage and one of the coolest things you can see here are medieval tiles and these were originally created by pressing a wooden stamp into wet clay. Now the reason that we still have them and they still survived is because when the abbey was converted into a mansion house, they were completely covered over by a courtyard and were only rediscovered in 1923. Today they're one of the finest preserved examples of medieval tiling in the south of England. Thank you so much for watching and don't forget to like and subscribe for more travel content. See you next time!