HMS Nelson: The Barracks That Waited Seventy-One Years for Its Famous Name

Replacing the Hulks

The site that became HMS Nelson began as Anglesey Barracks, an army establishment built in 1847 within one of Portsea's old defensive bastions, part of which survives today as a listed building within the modern base.

The Admiralty bought the site from the War Office in 1899 specifically to build proper shore accommodation for Portsmouth's sailors, finally replacing the long-standing and thoroughly unglamorous practice of housing men aboard decommissioned hulks moored in the dockyard.

Designed by Colonel Sir Henry Pilkington, the Admiralty's Superintendent Civil Engineer, construction began in October 1899, and on 30 September 1903, with what one account describes as no ceremony at all, some four thousand officers and ratings simply marched out of the dockyard hulks and into their new quarters for good.

Seventy-One Years as HMS Victory

It is worth correcting a commonly repeated assumption here. The new barracks were commissioned in 1903 not as HMS Nelson but as HMS Victory, and they kept that name for the best part of three quarters of a century.

It was only on 1 August 1974 that the establishment was finally renamed HMS Nelson, specifically to avoid confusion with the actual HMS Victory, Nelson's preserved Trafalgar flagship, which sits nearby in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard and continues to serve, remarkably, as the official flagship of the Second Sea Lord to this day.

Rather than being named directly after Nelson from the outset, this barracks essentially borrowed his flagship's name for decades before finally taking the admiral's own name as its own, a small but interesting piece of naming history that most casual accounts get the wrong way round.

Bombs on the Parade Ground

As Portsmouth's principal manning depot through both World Wars, the barracks housed men awaiting posting to ships or whose vessels were in refit, and the Second World War brought the fighting directly to its own perimeter.

The barracks' chapel, a former parish church brought inside the walls in 1906, was destroyed by bombing during the war, and the establishment's Georgian-era detention quarters, a naval prison dating back to around 1834, also sustained bomb damage, with parts later rebuilt.

Personnel were dispersed to other barracks nearby during the worst of the bombing, and air raid shelters were dug beneath the parade ground itself, a stark contrast to the parade-ground ceremony the site is more usually associated with today.

A Wardroom Fit for an Admiral

The base's Wardroom, completed in 1903 and listed today for its architectural significance, remains the site's undoubted centrepiece, its entrance hall decorated with paintings of the Glorious First of June and the Battle of Copenhagen, its staircase carved with images of HMS Victory through the ages, and, in a rather charming detail, panelling, doors and fittings salvaged from the Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert when she was decommissioned in the early 1950s.

Three separate staircases at the entrance observe strict naval etiquette, with junior officers using one, lieutenant commanders another, and commanders and above reserving the grandest, central staircase for themselves, a small architectural echo of the rank structure the whole base was built to house.

Supporting the Base Today

HMS Nelson today provides the naval barracks supporting HMNB Portsmouth and is also home to the Royal Marines School of Music, though it is worth noting that the wider Navy Command Headquarters function, sometimes assumed to sit at Nelson given its administrative importance, is actually based instead at HMS Excellent on nearby Whale Island.

A 2016 defence estate review floated the possibility of disposing of the historic Wardroom by 2021, a proposal that was subsequently deferred, leaving this handsome, if slightly confusingly named, corner of Portsmouth still very much in active naval service.