To walk the streets of Gosport is to walk steeped in history. Walking past the railway station, no longer in use for the railway, housing stylish flats and conference rooms for hire. This is from where Queen Victoria Queen Victoria and her Prince Albert continued their journey to their home of relaxation at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.
In 1901 it saw her last departure back to London after her death. Many years, indeed centuries before then Gosport had played its role in the Civil War, being a royalist out post, it was coupled in with the Seine of Portsmouth. What is now the Falklands Gardens was turned into a firing platform from which to bombard Portsmouth.
Later, feeding the paranoid fear of invasion saw the construction of a line of forts, nearly all of which remain today, admittedly in various states of dilapidation from almost pristine to barely just a mound of earth.
I’ve talked in recent posts of Gosport’s extraordinary role in the preparations for, and the run up to D-Day, of which evidence of the real efforts still remain.
I have by no means exhausted the stories that can be told of this town. Much remains to be explored.
Bills Posts 