Landguard Fort

The first fortifications at the mouth of the Orwell, then known as Langer Fort, were raised in 1540 as a modest arrangement of earthworks and a blockhouse. It was James I who, from 1621, ordered a proper square fort built with a bulwark at each corner.

In 1667 a Dutch force of 2,000 men under Michiel de Ruyter landed on Felixstowe beach and advanced on the fort. Nathaniel Darrel's garrison of 400 musketeers of the Duke of York & Albany's Maritime Regiment, the first Royal Marines, together with 100 artillerymen serving 54 cannon, repulsed the assault.

For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the garrison's births and deaths were recorded as belonging to Essex rather than Suffolk. A new battery went up in 1717, and in 1745 work began on an entirely new fort on an adjoining site, laid out to a pentagonal bastioned trace; further batteries followed in the 1750s and 1780s. Around 1755 the artist Thomas Gainsborough, then a little-known painter living at Ipswich, was commissioned by his friend Philip Thicknesse, the fort's lieutenant governor, to paint two landscapes for the Governor's Quarters; both were later ruined by the fort's damp, though an engraving of one survives. General Lord Cornwallis, commander-in-chief of the Eastern District, inspected Landguard in 1801 amid recurring army concern over the fort's readiness during the Napoleonic Wars, and after 1804 its ammunition stores were moved across to Harwich for safety. Around this time four soldiers of the poorly disciplined garrison died, probably of alcohol poisoning, after drinking gin taken from a captured smugglers' boat.

The fort's biggest transformation came in the 1870s, when the interior barracks were rebuilt in keep-like form and the river frontage was refaced with a new casemated battery covered by an unusual caponier with a quarter-sphere bombproof nose; several open bastions were enclosed and a mock ravelin block was built to house a submarine-mining unit. In the Second World War, Landguard served as a launch site for Operation Outward, which sent free-flying hydrogen balloons trailing incendiaries or steel wires towards Germany between 1942 and 1944, and it housed the headquarters for the coast artillery defending Harwich Harbour, a naval port war signal station and a remote-control station for the harbour's minefields, with radar added for the guns' fire control in 1944. That year, in what was probably a false alarm, the Landguard guns opened fire on suspected German midget-submarine raiders at the harbour entrance. The Army left the fort in 1957.

Landguard has since been structurally consolidated and retains its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bastioned works alongside twentieth-century concrete gun emplacements and wartime control rooms. It is a Grade I listed building and a scheduled monument, held in the guardianship of the charity English Heritage and open to the public.