The battery was built to contain a single Armstrong 100-ton gun: a 450 mm rifled muzzle-loading (RML) gun made by Elswick Ordnance Company, the armaments division of the British manufacturing company Armstrong Whitworth.

By arming both Gibraltar and Malta, the British were seeking to ensure the vital route to India through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, which had opened to traffic in 1869.

The low profile of the battery and the deeply buried machinery rooms and magazines were intended to enable it to survive counterfire from capital warships.

Subsequent review of the battery's defences after its completion identified this as a weakness, and the stone revetting was removed from most of the emplacement and replaced with plain earthworks, presumably to better absorb the energy of incoming shellfire.

Because a single shell cost as much as the daily wage of 2,600 soldiers, practice firing was limited to one shot every 3 months.

[2] Eventually, the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza Hotel came to occupy part the site of the battery.

A restaurant was built, and this was later gutted to make space for outdoor and indoor pools and other hotel facilities.

[3][4] Despite this, the only restoration work done to date has been the demolition of the hotel structures built on the battery, and the removal of vegetation.