Mary Rose

The Mary Rose is the hull of a warship of Henry VIII, raised from the seabed of the Solent after more than four centuries. She was built at Portsmouth from 1510, launched in 1511 and served for over thirty years as one of the largest ships of the Tudor navy, one of the first purpose-built sailing warships able to fire heavy guns through lidded gunports. On 19 July 1545, leading an attack on a French invasion fleet off Spithead, she heeled over, water poured through the open gunports and she sank within sight of the shore. Most of the men who managed to climb up from below were trapped under the anti-boarding netting stretched over the open decks and went down with her; the cause of the disaster is still debated.

Silt covered the starboard side, preserving about a third of the hull and everything that lay in it. The wreck was found again in 1971 and, after years of underwater excavation led by the archaeologist Margaret Rule, lifted on 11 October 1982, one of the most complex salvage operations in the history of maritime archaeology. For decades the timbers were sprayed with water and then a polyethylene glycol solution; drying began in 2013, and in 2016 the protective enclosure came down and the ship could be seen dry for the first time since 1545.

The museum that now encloses her, designed by Wilkinson Eyre with Perkins+Will and opened in 2013, is built directly over the dry dock, and shows most of the recovered objects in context with the hull itself, so the finds are seen beside the timbers of the ship they came from. More than 26,000 finds were raised: bronze and iron guns, 172 longbows and thousands of arrows, the barber-surgeon's chest with his instruments, fiddles and pipes, games, clothing, combs and the personal belongings of the crew. The bones of 179 people were found, and faces of several crewmen have been reconstructed. The skeleton of Hatch, the young terrier-cross kept aboard to catch rats, is displayed too.

Getting there

The Mary Rose Museum is inside Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, about 1 km from the centre of Portsmouth, alongside HMS Victory and HMS Warrior. Southampton Airport (SOU) is about 24 km away.