HMS Victory

HMS Victory is still a commissioned warship of the Royal Navy, and has been for more than two centuries: she was first commissioned in 1778, making her the oldest naval vessel in commission anywhere. Since 2012 she has been the flagship of the First Sea Lord. She is also the ship on which Horatio Nelson was mortally wounded at Trafalgar, and walking her decks at Portsmouth is the closest anyone can come to the cramped, noisy world of a sailing navy at war.

She was ordered in 1758 and laid down the following year at Chatham, to a design by Sir Thomas Slade. Around 6,000 trees, nine in ten of them oak, went into her hull. Because the Seven Years' War was going Britain's way, there was no rush to finish her, and the frame stood seasoning for years before she was floated out in 1765 — a delay often credited with her longevity. She fought at Ushant, served in the Mediterranean in the 1790s and was at Cape St Vincent in 1797. On 21 October 1805, as Nelson's flagship, she broke the French and Spanish line at Trafalgar; a musket ball struck Nelson on the quarterdeck in the early afternoon and he died below decks a few hours later. The ship lost 57 killed and 102 wounded and had to be towed to Gibraltar. After decades as a harbour ship she was moved into a dry dock at Portsmouth in 1922, where she remains.

A visit takes you through the decks, from the quarterdeck where Nelson fell down to the gun decks and the dark spaces below, where he died. Her armament at Trafalgar was 104 guns on three decks, and a sense of how 850 men lived among them is the most vivid thing the ship offers. Between 2018 and 2021 the old steel cradle holding her in the dock was replaced by 134 adjustable steel props, and a walkway was opened that lets visitors look at the hull from underneath. The lower masts and upper rigging have been taken down for conservation, and a restoration programme that began in 2022 and is due to run to 2032 is replacing hull planking and fighting the wood-boring beetle; scaffolding with visitor walkways now wraps the ship, so what you see is a working shipyard as much as a museum.

The ship stands in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, part of the naval base open to the public, next to the museum of the Tudor warship Mary Rose.

Getting there

The dockyard is about 1 km from the centre of Portsmouth. Portsmouth Harbour railway station, which is also the terminal for the Gosport passenger ferry and Isle of Wight ferries, stands right beside it. The nearest airport is Southampton (SOU), about 24 km away.