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.

What They Were Marching Out Of

The hulks deserve describing, because the phrase makes them sound quaint and they were not. When a wooden warship became too old to fight, the Navy did not break her up if she still floated. It moored her in the harbour, took out the guns, and housed people in her.

A sailor between ships therefore lived below decks in a hull that had been built in the reign of William IV: no proper heating, no ventilation to speak of, headroom of about five feet in places, hammocks slung at fourteen inches apart, condensation running down the ship's side in winter and sanitation that does not bear thinking about. Tuberculosis and respiratory disease went through these ships steadily and nobody was much surprised.

The men who marched out on 30 September 1903 were walking from that into a purpose-built barracks with heating, drainage, dining halls and a hospital, and the account that says it was done with no ceremony at all is entirely believable. Nobody needed a band. They needed to be somewhere dry.

It was not just Portsmouth. The Navy did the same thing at Devonport and at Chatham within a few years either side, and HMS Drake is the Devonport half of the same story, down to having spent decades under a different name before getting the one it has now.

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.

There is a further twist which makes the confusion even more understandable. For those seventy-one years there were two HMS Victorys in Portsmouth at once, a few hundred yards apart: a barracks of several thousand men, and HMS Victory herself, in dry dock, being restored. Letters, drafting orders and pay records all said HMS Victory, and the reader had to work out from context whether the writer meant a Georgian first-rate or a set of Edwardian accommodation blocks.

The renaming in 1974 sorted that out, and it is worth noting what it did not do. It did not name the barracks after the battleship. HMS Nelson (28) was long gone by then, having been scrapped in 1949. The barracks took the admiral, not the ship, which is why the name has no pennant number attached to it and never had.

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.

The reason it was hit so hard is a matter of geography. A manning depot has to sit next to the dockyard it serves, and HMNB Portsmouth was one of the most heavily bombed targets in Britain. There was no possibility of moving several thousand men somewhere safer without moving them away from the ships they were waiting to join, so the compromise was dispersal at night, shelters under the parade ground, and accepting that the barracks would be damaged.

Losing the chapel is the detail that tends to stay with people. It had been a parish church, brought inside the walls in 1906, which means the Navy took a building the town had been worshipping in and then had it destroyed on their behalf.

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.

The Royal Yacht panelling has a date attached to it that is worth knowing. Victoria and Albert was the third royal yacht of that name, launched in 1899, and by the early 1950s she was worn out and was broken up. Rather than let the fittings go, the Navy took the panelling, doors and joinery out of her and put them into the Wardroom at Portsmouth.

So officers at Nelson eat their dinner surrounded by the interior of a Victorian royal yacht, under paintings of the Glorious First of June and Copenhagen, having come up one of three staircases according to their rank. The Royal Navy does not throw very much away.

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.

Why the School of Music Is in Portsmouth

The School of Music is there for a reason that deserves stating rather than passing over. It used to be at Deal in Kent, and on the morning of 22 September 1989 the IRA detonated a bomb in the barracks there. Eleven Royal Marines bandsmen were killed and twenty-two people were seriously injured. Most of the dead were very young men whose job was to play music.

About a week later the surviving bandsmen marched through Deal, and they left gaps in the ranks where the eleven would have been. There is not much to add to that.

Deal Barracks closed and the school moved to Portsmouth in April 1996. So the Royal Marines Band Service, which provides the music for every state occasion the Navy takes part in, has trained at HMS Nelson for thirty years because of a bomb in Kent, and that is worth knowing the next time a Royal Marines band goes past.

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.

It is a strange kind of survival. Everything the barracks was originally for has changed: there is no longer a fleet of several hundred ships to man, no drafting depot in the old sense, and the accommodation blocks that once held four thousand men hold a fraction of that. What has kept the place alive is that Portsmouth is still a working naval base and the people who work in it have to live, eat and be trained somewhere.

The Wardroom is the part most at risk, and it is the part that could not be replaced. A listed building full of a broken-up royal yacht, with three staircases sorted by rank, is not the sort of thing anybody would build again, and the 2016 proposal to dispose of it by 2021 was deferred rather than abandoned.

This is a live article which will be updated when more information is available.
Last checked for updates: 24 October 2026