Welcome to my Portsdown Tunnels website. I have lived in Portsmouth UK all my
life, and have been interested in Portsdown and what lies underneath it since I was 8 years old. I was amazed to find that
this subject had virtually no other presence on the Internet - or
the Library - especially when you look at
what has been documented for other UK cities. (See my links
page). I am not an Archaeologist, but it seemed odd to me that more was
known about a Long Barrow from 2000BC than a World War II deep
tunnel shelter, hence PORTSDOWN TUNNELS was born. The website has now passed its
6th birthday at which point it contained over 560 photos, 140 pages and had received
over 229,510 hits.
Although this site is primarily concerned with underground Portsdown, it
also includes above ground sites and events which have tended to be overlooked
in the past, or which are poorly documented.
This is a one man show, I - Bob Hunt - do the lot, from research to web
authoring. The site's annual budget is £0.00 (pounds sterling). I work for the Ministry
of Defence as a Teacher, and live in Paulsgrove on the southern slopes of Portsdown,
Portsmouth, UK. more
details
Information sources
Some of the information
presented here is from memory, both mine and others, along with research at the Portsmouth City Records
Office, the Portsmouth Central Reference Library, and the PRO at
Kew. I have established many significant contacts through e-mail who have
provided tremendous help. I am a member of the Palmerston
Forts Society and Subterranea
Britannica .
Get in touch
If you have any comments,
contributions or questions, then please e-mail
me, even if it's just to give an opinion of this site. No matter how slim your contribution or experience of
Portsdown may seem, get in touch with me. What may seem irrelevant to you, could
be just the lead I'm looking for. All e-mails are guaranteed a reply, usually
within 48 hours.
The future
This website is updated
regularly, so come back now and again to check for new content. I try to produce
a major addition (see the table at the top of this page) several
times a year, whilst minor updates (see the button at the top of
this page) take place frequently.
About Portsdown
Portsdown
(locally referred to as 'The Hill') is located to the north of Portsmouth
UK. It is a chalk hill 390 feet (120 metres) high and runs from West to
East for 7 miles. Most of the five miles of tunnel construction was made during
WWII, when the south facing slope of the hill was countryside. Since then residential
housing has been built on a large part of it, forming the housing estates of Wymering and
Paulsgrove. See the site locations
and the about Portsdown pages for more details. There are numerous chalk pits on
the hill, all of them no longer
worked. The 2 major ones were at Paulsgrove and Wymering.
On top of Portsdown are 5 Victorian forts and a Redoubt, collectively known as
the Palmerston Forts. These are quite often featured in this website, either as landmarks
or as featured subjects. I have not included the communication and magazine
tunnels originally built under these forts, unless they have been used for some
other purpose at a later date. Details
of them are already well documented.
Also on top of Portsdown are several underground water reservoirs,
and although they have potentially interesting surface features, they are not
included in this website along with telecomm, gas, electricity
and water conduits unless they have some special significance.
About this site
This
website was constructed using Microsoft FrontPage 2000 and
is
designed to be viewed at a resolution of
800 x 600 or above,
