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This page
was updated on
07.11.2009
Did you know?
Jan 2008
The Car
Showroom at the southern end of Cornaway Lane was once
the barn and hayloft on Little Wicor Farm. It was build
about 1870. Little Wicor Farm belonged to Bertie Sanders
Jan 2008
The large shed
on land at the bottom of Cranleigh Road (near the
recreation ground) is on the site of Wicor Farm. In
recent years it stored vintage hovercraft. It is now the
home of Portsmouth Corporation Vintage buses which can
be seen driving through Cornaway Lane on a Sunday.
29th November 2007
The following article has been written for the Society by Andrew Brookes.
A short history of Horsea Island
Horsea was originally two islands, Great and Little Horsea, until the advent of the 1880s wonder weapon, the torpedo, inspired the Royal Navy to join them and create a testing lake in the middle. Convict labour was used to excavate chalk and marl from Paulsgrove Pit, the army even obliging by building a light railway to transport the material about the site. The original lake, opened1889, was 800 yards long. Although extended to over a 1000 yards in 1905, it soon became obsolete as improvements in torpedo design radically increased the weapon's range to far beyond the limitations of Horsea.
In 1909, the island began an additional role as the site of one of the Navy's three high-power shore wireless stations, a role it kept until the 1960s. The masts dismantled, the island then became home to the Navy's firefighting school instead. Steel buildings would be drenched in kerosene, ignited, and hapless matelots ordered in to extinguish the flames. This activity too was not to last long, and the school removed to a new, environmentally-friendly gas-fired establishment on Whale Island at the beginning of the new millennium. Today, Horsea's role is reduced to diver training, and even that is now under review.
