Priddy’s Hard, located in Gosport, Hampshire, was once the site of a bustling British naval ordnance depot. Built in the 1750s as an earth rampart to defend Portsmouth Harbor, the depot supplied the Royal Navy with armaments and munitions, housed officers, and serviced warships. When the depot closed in 1988, Explosion! Museum of Naval Firepower was established on its site to tell the story of weapons and explosives, from gunpowder to nuclear.
Upon arriving at the museum, a visitor finds several notable exhibits displayed within the outdoor grounds. The most recent is the Sea Dart missile launcher, which towers above other less-modern naval armaments, such as the QF 4.5-inch Mark V and the 4.7-inch Mark IXB gun. The Royal Navy used that surface-to-air missile launcher operationally in the Persian Gulf and during the 2011 Libyan intervention before replacing it with the Sea Viper system on Type 45 destroyers.
A 1/24-scale model of HMS Victory is displayed behind the museum’s entrance door. An adjacent room showcases a training variant of the Red Beard, Britain’s first tactical nuclear weapon, which the Royal Navy developed as a relatively smaller lightweight free-fall bomb for the Fleet Air Arm.
The museum has ten exhibition rooms stacked to the rafters with naval armaments and munitions from various eras. The rooms are organized along a criss-cross of connecting corridors.
Visitors first pass through the aptly named Locker Room, which includes a variety of depot workers’ lockers displaying artifacts such as footballs, beer mugs, hats, and more, recalling the “lighter” history of the depot.
The second and third rooms document the early origins of naval firepower. The Age of Fighting Sail room covers the history of gunpowder and cannon and includes a replica gunpowder storage magazine. The Designer’s Workshop has a few displays full of smaller naval guns and houses pistols, rifles, machine guns, and shells such as the Lancaster MK1 submachine gun, MK 1 signal pistol, Mark 2 shell, and a 4-inch high-explosive round.
In the original Grand Magazine, the Priddy’s Hard story is retold with an exciting audio-visual show. Along both sides of the magazine’s entrance walls are galleries of photos taken of the depot throughout the years.
When cordite replaced gunpowder, boxes replaced barrels as the standard storage containers for ammunition. The museum’s Modern Explosives room is full of munition containers for primers, QF cartridges, fuzes, and small arms ammunition, with touchscreens that provide further details on the display.
Mines also have been a part of the Royal Navy’s arsenal, and a mine depot was located north of Priddy’s Hard at Frater, where mines were filled, repaired, and stored. The collection in the museum’s sixth room consists of buoyant, ground (those laid on the seabed), and limpet mines, including the MK 5, MK 1 and Mark 17 buoyant and ground mines. Touchscreens in the room play audio accounts from the mines’ designers, makers, suppliers, users, and targets.
For me, the highlight of the museum is the Big Guns room, the seventh and largest room in the museum, which houses deck guns from Royal Navy warships. There is an assortment of 3- to 5.25-inch guns on display in the center, and an assortment of antiaircraft, high explosive, and armor-piercing shells, which devastated ships and planes, is at the front.
The final few rooms showcase more modern naval weapons, with galleries dedicated to antisubmarine mortars, torpedoes, and nuclear bombs/missiles. The Torpedo Room houses an intriguing collection of torpedoes from various eras, with touchscreen audio narratives to provide further details for the Sting Ray, Tigerfish, Neger, and Mark 11.
The museum’s tenth room houses a formidable array of missiles and nuclear armaments that became prevalent during the Cold War. Guided missiles ensured the decline of the big naval guns that once dominated the decks of surface-fleet warships. The Exocet missile, which ravaged HMS Sheffield in the Falklands, is among the non-nuclear missiles displayed here. The room includes a Polaris nuclear missile cone and its ReB transportation component, as well as a WE 177 atomic bomb, which was a thermonuclear weapon delivered by fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters.
With an extensive collection of naval armaments and munitions—housed within historic 18th century armaments depot buildings—the Museum of Naval Firepower is a fabulous destination in its own right, as well as a fitting complement to other local sites, such as the Royal Naval Museum in nearby Portsmouth. If visiting during the summer, a water bus runs between the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, Gunwharf Key, and the museum.
Explosion! Museum of Naval Firepower
Heritage Way, Priddy’s Hard, Gosport Hampshire PO12 4LE United Kingdom www.explosion.org.uk
Hours:
The museum hours are 1000 to 1600 weekends only from November to March, and 1000 to 1700both weekdays and weekends from April to October.
Admission:
Adults: £12Children (5 to 16): £7Seniors (60+) and Students: £10.80
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