Stokes Bay Lines

The Stokes Bay Lines were part of the great Victorian fortification of Portsmouth Harbour under Lord Palmerston.

The Lines consisted of a ditch with a protecting rampart that ran from the Browndown Batteries in the west to the glacis of Fort Monckton in the east.

[2] When the Stokes Bay Lines were completed by 1870 the peninsula of Gosport was effectively secured against attack from the west thereby protecting Portsmouth with its harbour and dockyard.

A portion of it remains to the south of the road with much of the concrete revetments and parapets still visible in the gardens of the chalets.

In 1933 the parade of the site became a caravan park and in 1939 the Council moved their records from the town hall to the Battery for safe storage.

In 1982 Gosport Council converted the casemates and magazines of no.2 battery into a nuclear bunker (Civil Defence Command Post) at a cost of £30,000.

When this idea was abandoned the battery was left vacant until a local volunteer group opened the east facing casemates in 1994 as a Summer Exhibition Centre.

In 2011 Gosport Borough Council agreed the use of the casemates as a small museum by the Historical Diving Society.

From 1950 the ditch of the Stokes Bay Lines was filled because of complaints from residents of mosquitoes and stagnant water.

[6] The site of Battery 5 has been used by the Royal Naval Physiological Laboratory and then as Qinetiq Dive Test Centre.