The following quotation, from Portsmouth-born journalist, author, and polemicist, Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) neatly summarises the city’s unique importance in naval history as well as providing a pleasing evocation of post-war life in this military city:

Portsmouth. The true home port of the Royal Navy, and nicknamed ‘Pompey’ (as is its soccer team) by those locals for whom no other town will do. It is one of the world’s most astonishing natural harbors, rivalling even Valletta in the way that it commands the Channel approaches to the Atlantic and the North Sea, and it looms over the French coast while sheltering in the lee of the Isle of Wight, which the conquering Romans once named Vectis. The last place that Horatio Nelson set foot on dry land, and to this moment the home of his flagship the Victory. The birthplace of Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle. Here I drew my first squalling breath on 13 April 1949, and here my male ancestors embarked time and again to slip down the channel and do the King’s enemies a bit of no good […]

I don’t quite remember how old I was before I met anybody who wasn’t concerned with the Navy, or at least with some branch of the armed forces of which ours was always ‘The Senior Service.’ I was christened on a submarine, urinating freely as the reverend made me the first Hitchens to eschew baptism and Judaism and become a member of the more middle-class Church of England. I came to understand the difference between a destroyer and a cruiser and a corvette, and could tell someone’s rank by the number of gold rings worn on the sleeve.

If you have any comments, corrections, or suggestions in relation to the map please contact Dr Mark Frost, English Department, University of Portsmouth: mark.frost@port.ac.uk