Seven Victorian tunnel-like magazines were built on the Benfleet waterfront near Jotmans in the late part of the 19th Century. They would have been used for the storage of explosives by barges possibly on the way to London or nearby explosives factories (where is now Wat Tyler Country Park and Coryton Refinery). The Benfleet Community…
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Purfleet Heritage & Military Centre is a museum set up inside Magazine No.5 from the Royal Magazine of Gunpowder. This MOD magazine (which means an explosives and ammunition store) was contracted in 1759, consisting of five buildings, plus a proof house for testing the explosive. Four of the magasines, which would have held up to…
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Ferro-Concrete barges were used to keep artificial ‘Mulberry Harbours’ afloat used by the allies in D-Day as checkpoints in the English Channel. One was thought to have drifted off of the broken Mulberry harbour that lies out in the Thames opposite Shoebury/Southend. Using our Time Tool below, you can see then and now photos of…
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The area north-east of Sutton Road Cemetery and Temple Farm Industrial Estate in Southend is home to numerous pillboxes, and once there was probably even more. Whilst these pillboxes are too far east to be a part of the GHQ line of defence along England’s eastern coast, they were probably instead built to protect the…
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Grain Dummy Battery, originally known as Grain Battery, was built shortly before Grain Fort, completed in 1865 to support two nearby forts; Grain Fort and Grain Wing Battery. Following the usual design for batteries, it consisted of several gun emplacements with magazines below. Unlike other forts, it’s likely that this one was out of service…
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Photographs above are from HadleighHistory.org.uk in an article written by local author and Historian Robert Hallman The oldest house in Benfleet as it has been known was formerly a ‘poorhouse’, which we would interpret as a government-funded structure that would support those in poverty and provide them with housing. Whilst ‘poorhouses’ include the treacherous workhouses…
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Great Wakering Old School was built in 1876. It is now a community centre and pre-school. In both the fore and rear courts of the school are two unsuspecting structures with an important history. They served most probably as air-raid shelters to defend the school pupils and staff from air-raids and bombs. Whilst the rear…
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The small woodland of Mundon Furze is the last surviving area of ancient woodland on the vast and desolate Dengie Peninsula. Nearby is a copse of ‘petrified’ trees appearing out of the marshland mist like a landscape from a horror film. Their past is completely mysterious. The dead oak trees are not actually petrified or…
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TN9 Hadleigh at Sandpit Hill was one of several heavy anti-aircraft batteries in the area – such as TN7 Furtherwick and TN8 Northwick on Canvey, and also TN10 Vange. They would’ve been used for defence in the Second World War to shoot down enemy bombers and fighters during the Blitz. It also would have been a defence…
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The Saxon chapel of St. Peter-on-the-Wall built in this extremely isolated marshland position on the Dengie peninsula nature reserve is the nineteenth oldest building surviving in England. It was built around 660-662 AD on the site of the third-century Roman ‘Saxon’ shore fort called Othona, used by the Romans for coastal defence against coastal or…
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