Dockyard Wall Victory Gate And Dockyard Wall

Victory Gate and Dockyard Wall

The dockyard entrance and perimeter wall at HM Naval Base Portsmouth, constructed between 1704 and 1712, with the gate widened in 1949 and the wall subject to twentieth-century repairs.

The wall is built of red brick with some blue headers in English bond. It is slightly battered and has pilaster buttresses at regular intervals with oversailing offset heads rising into oversailing ridged triangular-sectioned brick coping. The wall varies in height from approximately four metres to approximately seven metres. At the taller sections, narrower pilasters rise from the buttresses into the coping. At various points the wall is incorporated into buildings constructed against it. At the former Royal Naval Academy on Queen Street, the wall matches the Academy itself, being of grey brick in header bond. Having returned along Admiralty Road, there is a former entrance to the Academy, now blocked, with a stone sill, plinth blocks and impost blocks carrying a round arch of bright red bricks. At Bonfire Corner, the date "1711" is picked out in blue headers and is visible above pavement level. Two stones carved with fouled anchors are also present. The wall has several twentieth-century interruptions before ending at building no. 1/138, the former gatehouse to Marlborough Gate, which originally stood at this point.

Along the stretch towards Marlborough Row, at building no. 2/121 (formerly stables), a lower spur wall encloses the former stable yard and was later heightened. At the yard entrance are square brick piers with ashlar capstones and cannon barrels reused as bollards. Running from this yard wall, another low section continues along the north side of the garden of Spithead House in Long Row, featuring a gateway and a later addition (probably 1930s) with flat ashlar coping.

The main dockyard entrance, Victory Gate, comprises two large ashlar piers with moulded plinths, arrises and cornices, topped with golden ball-on-cushion finials. At the base of each pier is a late nineteenth-century cast-iron bollard in the form of an imitation inverted cannon barrel with a cannon ball in the muzzle. The gate itself is panelled with iron spikes. On each side of the gate in the wall is a similar pedestrian gate set in a segmental-arched opening. Above the right-hand gate, the coping of the wall is interrupted by a semicircular pediment framing a royal cipher and crown above an oval datestone in architrave. The inscription reads: "This wall was begun the 4th June and finished ye 13th December 1711".

The wall generally follows the line of Sir Bernard de Gomme's earth-rampart town defences, which were constructed from 1665 onwards and which the wall subsequently replaced as the yard perimeter. The gate forms part of a group with the contemporary Porter's Lodge and represents the earliest entrance to a naval yard.