The Royal Navy spent a dozen years surveying the reef, identifying a channel (originally called Hurd's Channel after then-Lieutenant Thomas Hannaford Hurd, the officer who had located it, but now referred to as The Narrows) suitable for ships-of-the-line to enter the Northern Lagoon, the Great Sound, and Hamilton Harbour before establishing a base at Bermuda in 1795.

Although the Admiralty began buying and leasing land at Bermuda's West End, on the Great Sound, for the eventual construction of the Royal Naval Dockyard, the lack of development and infrastructure there meant the Navy used St. George's as its base pending the construction of the dockyard on Ireland Island.

The first proper fort was built on the site in the 1790s, but this was replaced with the current fort; the Western Redoubt (originally intended to be named ‘’Fort William’’) was built on another hilltop on the northern side of the town, between Government Hill (from which Government House had moved to Mount Langton in Pembroke Parish with the move of the Parliament of Bermuda and the colonial capital from St. George's Town to the then Town of Hamilton in 1815) and Barrack Hill, the site of the Royal Barracks of St. George's Garrison.

Fort George was not one of those re-armed with modern muzzle loading rifles at the end of the Nineteenth Century.

All Admiralty and War Office, including St. George's Garrison, land was transferred to the colonial government in 1958.

[9] The fort is square shaped, and the gunfloor originally had emplacements for four guns, one on each side behind an earthwork glacis.