Qualla: HMNB Devonport

HMNB Devonport: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lewis Clarke, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 30 December 1690, the Admiralty signed a contract for a single stone dry dock to be built on the Hamoaze, a stretch of the River Tamar in the parish of Stoke Damerel. The man designing it, Edmund Dummer, had spent that summer walking the West Country looking for suitable ground. The dock he built would be one of the earliest stepped docks in the world: stronger foundations, easier access beneath the hulls, a two-section gate instead of the labour-intensive three-section design then standard. From that one contract grew the largest naval base in Western Europe, the only place in Britain that can refit and refuel a nuclear submarine, and a 320-year working dockyard whose oldest surviving building is the wall of the officers' terrace Dummer raised between 1692 and 1696.

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Image: Lewis Clarke | CC BY-SA 2.0

HMNB Devonport: Dummer's Innovation

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Canada. Department of National Defence, Public domain. What Dummer designed in 1690 was meant to be one dock. The King asked for it to be larger, suitable for first-rate ships of the line. The Navy demanded a basin to protect the dock entrance. By July 1692 the Admiralty had resolved that a full Royal Navy Dockyard should rise around...

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Image: Canada. Department of National Defence | Public domain

HMNB Devonport: The Great Rebuilding and the Steam Yard

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. In the 1760s, Devonport, then still called Plymouth Dock, underwent what historians call the Great Rebuilding. Five slipways, four dry docks, and a basin took shape in a configuration still recognisable today. Slip No. 1, built in 1774 and covered with an 1814 timber superstructu...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

HMNB Devonport: Blitz, Nuclear, and the Refit Capital

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit N Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Second World War devastated Devonport. By the end of 1942, 85 percent of the South Yard's buildings had been damaged or destroyed. The Officers' Terrace, the storehouses, the sail lofts, all reduced to rubble. The yard worked on through it. In 1993 Devonport was designated th...

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Image: N Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0

HMNB Devonport: The Submarines That Will Not Leave

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. There is a less comfortable inheritance. Thirteen out-of-service nuclear submarines were stored at Devonport in 2018, awaiting decommissioning that the Ministry of Defence had repeatedly put off because of cost. In 2019 the National Audit Office reported the cost of laid-up stora...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

HMNB Devonport: Guzz, and the Tiddy Oggies

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pierre-Charles Canot / John Cleveley the Elder / After Thomas Milton, CC0. Sailors and marines still call the place Guzz. Nobody quite agrees why. One theory traces it to *guzzle*, an affectionate nod to the West Country tradition of cream teas. Another suggests it came from the Hindi word *guz*, meaning a yard of 36 inches, picked up by Victorian sailo...

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Image: Pierre-Charles Canot / John Cleveley the Elder / After Thomas Milton | CC0