Historically Dense

 

Here's an interesting photo I came across on the interwebs the other day, it's a drone shot of Portsmouth dockyard and it packs a serious historical punch. 

On the left hand side in the egg shaped building is the Mary Rose (1511) the flagship of good old Henry VIII that sank in the Solent in 1545. Then, alongside that is HMS Victory (1765), Nelson's flag ship that took part in the battle of Trafalgar whose quarterdeck is where that famous Admiral finally bit the bullet in 1805. On the far right hand side of the picture is HMS Warrior (1860) a Victorian steam powered, iron clad warship. Then in the foreground we have one of the latest additions to the fleet, HMS Queen Elizabeth (2017) a modern aircraft carrier that absolutely dwarfs all of the other ships and which can be loaded up with up to 72 fighter jet aircraft, a floating airport, garrison and town that has a capacity for 1600 people. 

Another interesting feature in the picture is the two long thin buildings in the top half, they are the rope houses where, back in the day, ropes were manufactured. Clearly when ships like Victory were in their prime the Navy needed a ton of rope (Victory needed 31 miles of the stuff!) Along with rope the ships also needed huge numbers of  pulley blocks with which to haul sails up and down using that rope, and in the square building next to the ropewalk was established one of the first automated production line processes in the world in order to meet that demand (and you thought it was Henry Ford's idea).

You could say an extremely historically dense set of buildings and objects.