Deptford Dockyard

51°29′11″N 0°01′39″W / 51.4865°N 0.0276°W / 51.4865; -0.0276

HM Dockyard, Deptford
Deptford, NW Kent
The yard in its heyday. The launch of the 80-gun HMS Cambridge from the Great Dock in 1755, depicted by John Cleveley the Elder. In the foreground a first rate warship rides at anchor, while another warship nears completion on the slipway in the centre background.
Coordinates	51°29′11″N 0°1′39″W / 51.48639°N 0.02750°W / 51.48639; -0.02750
Site information
Operator	Royal Navy
Controlled by	The Navy Board (until 1832); the Admiralty (1832–1869).
Other site facilities	The Victualling Yard and Transport Board office.
Site history
In use	1513–1869

Deptford Dockyard was an important naval dockyard and base at Deptford on the River Thames, operated by the Royal Navy from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It built and maintained warships for 350 years, and many significant events and ships have been associated with it.

Founded by Henry VIII in 1513, the dockyard was the most significant royal dockyard of the Tudor period and remained one of the principal naval yards for three hundred years. Important new technological and organisational developments were trialled here, and Deptford came to be associated with the great mariners of the time, including Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh. The yard expanded rapidly throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, encompassing a large area and serving for a time as the headquarters of naval administration, and the associated Victualling Yard became the Victualling Board's main depot. Tsar Peter the Great visited the yard officially incognito in 1698 to learn shipbuilding techniques. Reaching its zenith in the eighteenth century, it built and refitted exploration ships used by Cook, Vancouver and Bligh, and warships which fought under Nelson.

The dockyard declined in importance after the Napoleonic Wars. Its location upriver on the Thames made access difficult, and the shallow narrow river hampered navigation of the large new warships. The dockyard was largely inactive in the 1830s, but was re-established as a shipbuilding yard in the 1840s. The navy finally closed the dockyard in 1869. While the adjacent victualling yard, that had been established in the 1740s, continued in use until the 1960s, the land used by the dockyard was sold; the area (known as Convoys Wharf) is currently being redeveloped for housing, commercial, leisure and other purposes.^[1]

Archaeological excavations took place at the dockyard in 2010–12.^[2][3]