Plymouth Dock In 1690 the Admiralty gave a contract to Robert Waters from Portsmouth to build a stone dock at Point Froward on the east bank of the
Hamoaze at the mouth of the
River Tamar. Plymouth Dock, as Devonport was originally called, began around 1700 as a small settlement to house workers employed on the new naval base that was being built around Waters' dock. By 1733 its population had grown to around 3,000, and by 1801 it was already larger than both the nearby towns of Plymouth and Stonehouse together.
Devonport By 1811 the population of Plymouth Dock was just over 30,000 and the residents resented the fact that its name made it sound like an adjunct of Plymouth. In 1823 a petition to King George IV requested the town should be renamed, and suggested "Devonport". The king agreed to the change of name, which took effect on 1 January 1824. To celebrate, the town built
Devonport Column next to the recently completed
guildhall; both were designed by
John Foulston. In July 1849, the first outbreaks in what became a
cholera epidemic arose on
Union Street which connected Plymouth to Devonport, and were initially attributed to blockage of several house drains during construction of a new
Millbay railway station. Devonport became a
county borough under the
Local Government Act 1888. In 1914 the county borough of Devonport was abolished, when it and the neighbouring
urban district of
East Stonehouse were absorbed into the county borough of Plymouth. On 1 April 1974 the parish was abolished and merged with Plymouth. At the 1951 census (the last before the abolition of the parish), Devonport had a population of 72,738.
Dockyard defences In the mid-eighteenth century a defensive earthwork was constructed around the town and dockyard. Within these dockyard '
lines', six square barracks were built between in 1758–63 to accommodate the garrison of troops required to man the defences. A series of
redoubts were also constructed, forward of the lines, in the 1770s, including that at Mount Pleasant (of which there are substantial remains). In the early nineteenth century, the dockyard lines were strengthened with stone ramparts and armed with guns, and the adjacent ditches were deepened. These defences became largely redundant with the building of a series of
Palmerston Forts around Plymouth in the second half of the nineteenth century. Much of the open land forming the
glacis beyond the lines became Devonport Park in the late 1850s. Three of the six small barracks were replaced in 1854–6 by the sizeable
Raglan Infantry Barracks, designed by Captain
Francis Fowke (who later designed the
Albert Hall); today only its gatehouse remains (and that in a derelict state), the rest having been demolished in the 1970s.
Mount Wise The high ground south of the town is called Mount Wise. Enclosed within the town ramparts, it was given its own redoubt in the 1770s, with eight guns and two mortars protecting the coastal approach to the dockyard. In earlier times, a
gun wharf had been established on the quayside here to the south-east; the gun wharf was removed (and re-established at Morice Yard alongside the Dockyard) in 1724, but the area remained dominated by the armed forces up until the present century. From the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth century both the
military Governor and
naval Commander-in-Chief of Plymouth were accommodated in large houses on Mount Wise (in
Government House and
Admiralty House respectively). In 1805 a
Royal Laboratory (an outpost of the
Woolwich Arsenal) was established just north-west of the redoubt;
small-arms ammunition and explosives were manufactured here, until the compound was converted into barracks accommodation (Mount Wise Barracks) in the 1830s. ==21st-century Devonport==