Portsmouth through the 19th century is a very large subject, so we've split this period into more than one section, each with its own separate browser page to make it easier for our readers to digest it!
In addition, this section (and earlier ones) will eventually include links to more detailed pages on many of the aspects and people involved in our local history.

Yes, this was going to be a very busy century for Portsmouth, as it was for the rest of the world, with developments and innovations, inventions and invasions and a hundred years that would see a re-shaped Europe and millions of miles of previously unexplored territories opened up to modern civilisation.

So let's take an overall view of what we might find, were we able to time travel and go back to 1801 and travel around Portsea Island - not that travelling around the area would have been altogether easy.

For a start, outside of Old Portsmouth and the new suburb of Portsea, apart from a few farms, there was little else except a lot of mud, a lot of marshland and roads that would have turned a Colas surveyor white overnight!

To give an idea, the area we now know as Southsea Common was known as the Little Morass, with an area called the Great Morass nearer to Southsea Castle.

Successive generations hadn't made any attempts to drain either of these areas, possibly because they had no use for the extra land, but also, quite likely, because having such a gloopy, waterlogged barrier in such a position actually added to the defence of Southsea Castle.

A small area had been dry enough to use for assembling military forces, but the remainder was only drained eventually when the War Office finally recognised that a much larger area of dry space would be much more practicable.

Great Salterns had been a salt marsh for thousands of years and takes its name from the salt extracting works that were opened up at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the area began to be drained. Previously, extracting salt from the sea water had been a cottage industry that had provided (just) a living for a small number of locals.

What we now know as the Eastern Road was still under water - some of it not just at high tide. This eastern strip of Portsmouth was not reclaimed until the 1920s and 30s, when it was realised that one of Britain's most important defence assets had only one road access and that a single bomb could cut off Portsea Island by land for weeks, perhaps even months!

The Eastern Road addressed this problem and further areas on the eastern side of Portsea Island have been reclaimed since the 1930s, using municipal rubbish, chalk and clay, among other things.

On the other side of Portsea Island, north of the dockyard, where we now have houses galore in Stamshaw and Tipner, it was a similar situation; at high tide, the sea claimed much of the land, whilst at low tide it was just a mess of horrible, thick mud, but that would begin to change, from around the middle of the nineteenth century onwards.

In the centre of the island, there was an older version of St Mary's Church and a cluster of houses, making up a small village that had expanded slightly from the original Froddington village, but was still only a glorified hamlet.

The present St Mary's Church building is possibly the fourth, or even fifth structure on this site, where recent excavations uncovered Saxon foundations, which strongly suggest that there was a church here as early as 850AD, since when the ground has been built up somewhat, presumably as a precaution against flooding, in an area of the island that is at or slightly below sea level, even today!

Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Charles Dickens were both baptised in the church that stood here before the 1880s building, whilst this site's editor was baptised in the present church, back in 1950!

He also attended Sunday School at St Wilfred's Church, in George Street, which along with St Faith's Curch and St Mary's itself, makes up the Parish of St Mary's, Portsea.

The present St Mary's church building has been described frequently and by many experts, as the finest Victorian building in Portsmouth, and it's not hard to see why. The tower dominates the skyline and is clearly visible from the top of Portsdown Hill.

But let's go back to the beginning of the nineteenth century and talk briefly about Southsea and Milton - the former we have touched upon, but the latter hasn't had a mention so far.

Southsea Lodge is the first known dwelling to have been built in Southsea, some time around 1750, but little else happened there before the end of the eighteenth century, as much of the land in the area was owned by the Carter family.

However, the third John Carter, knighted by William III in 1773 and nine times Lord Mayor of Portsmouth, eventually sold several acres to Thomas Croxton, not long before his (Carter's) death in 1808. Croxton then began selling the land in smaller parcels, to local speculators.

In 1809, the development of the area began in earnest, the first houses being in Hambrook Row, but very soon smaller dwellings were being built for skilled workers, in what are nicknamed the "mineral" streets, ie Gold Street, Silver Street, Copper Street, etcetera.

Initially, this new development was called Croxton Town, after Thomas Croxton, but it wasn't long before the name was changed to Southsea, after the castle, but there is still an electoral ward named in memory of Croxton.

In the late 1820s and 1830s, some slightly more "middle class" houses began appearing in the area we know as Landport Terrace and Hampshire Terrace, but until about 1835, this new suburb remained surprisingly small.

Meanwhile, of course, another suburb had begun growing, this one most definitely working class; back in 1820 some small houses had been built on a patch of land, west of Green Road, belonging to a Mr Somers and the area was named Somerstown, in his honour.

Another area, around Rivers Street was also developed; initially it was called Allenstown presumably after a Mr Allen, who owned most of the land originally, but the name did not survive, as Allenstown was swallowed up by the rapidly expanding Somerstown.

[Curiously, we haven't, so far at least, been able to find any detailed histories on either Mr Somers, Mr Allen, or even Thomas Croxton, but we continue with our researches. If you have any further information on any or all of these men, we would love to hear from you.]

Milton, meanwhile, had slowly evolved into a small and self contained village, set fairly well away from any other emerging developments on Portsea Island, unlike the original little village of Buckland, which was quickly swallowed up in the middle of the century.

Another area we haven't mentioned so far is North End; centuries earlier, in the Middle Ages, there was a tiny village named King's Tun, meaning "King's Estate" at the the end of where Kingston Crescent now stands. It was a tiny little hamlet and (at this stage) we don't know much about it at all, but in the sixteenth century some houses were built at the north end of Kingston.

The name North End of Kingston was first recorded in 1699 and this eventually became contracted to just North End, but it was not a very significant development until the nineteenth century, when all the open space around the original buildings proved too tempting for developers to resist.

From the middle of the previous century, better off people, including naval officers, had been building private houses in the North End area, but it was in the nineteenth century that developments in industrial and maritime technology influenced the spread of greater numbers of buildings even further north and eventually across into Stamshaw.

It's generally thought that Stamshaw got its name from the word "stam", which meant a post driven into the ground to indicate a boundary marker and that "shaw" was merely an old way of spelling shore.

Meanwhile, the nearby pond at Reed Mere would give its name to Rudmore, but there was still the problem of flooding and full-time marshlands, which afflicted most of this area at the time.

We'll jump forward a few years here, even though this first section is supposed to deal with the early part of the century, just to tie up the loose ends and to explain just how the town was able to eventually spread across a previously inhospitable and impractical stretch of land.

After the launching of HMS Warrior in 1860 and her completion the following year, all the earlier wooden hulled ships of the line were rendered hopelessly obsolete and a programme began to build more iron hulled vessels.

These drew a deeper draught that their wooden predecessors and, as the fleet grew, more and deeper channels and moorings were required in the harbour. Had this been only a few years earlier, this could have resulted in problems for Portsmouth's future as a naval base, but technology had leapt forward.

Now there were more powerful steam engines available, engines which could not only power vessels, but also power mechanical shovels and eventually chains of dredging buckets, which made relatively light work of the sticky clay that lay beneath the waters of Portsmouth Harbour.

Shifting tides and currents were constantly eroding the chalk all around the area, which meant that it was impossible to clear out all the clay once and for all; instead, it became an ongoing routine and that made for a whole lot of the sticky clay requiring disposal.

The answer, as we now know, was to dump it all around the North End, Stamshaw and eventually Tipner areas - the pond at Rudmore eventually went the same way - building up the ground level, so that eventually even the highest tides did not produce serious flooding.

Of course, that wet clay was initially not a stable base upon which to build, but nobody was in a particular hurry initially and the ground was left to settle for several decades, by which time it had become firm enough to support foundations.

Anybody who, like me, lives anywhere in the Stamshaw or North End area knows only too well just how hard that harbour clay can become, especially if they are keen on gardening; scrape away just a few inches of the topsoil and try getting a garden trowel into what lies beneath. Many a garden tool has met an early end in this fashion!

But we allowed ourselves to jump forward in time only briefly and now we should go back to the earlier part of the eighteenth century and take a slightly more detailed look at certain aspects of Portsmouth life up until Queen Victoria came to the throne.

Click the link below to read on in Part Two ...