Portsmouth Block Mills

The Portsmouth Block Mills form part of the Portsmouth Dockyard at Portsmouth, Hampshire, England, and were built during the Napoleonic Wars to supply the British Royal Navy with pulley blocks. They started the age of mass-production using all-metal machine tools and are regarded as one of the seminal buildings of the British Industrial Revolution. They are also the site of the first stationary steam engines used by the Admiralty.

Printed references

• The English Heritage reports and other documentation may be consulted as they become available in the National Monuments Record at Swindon, Wiltshire. http://accessibility.english-heritage.org.uk/Default.asp?WCI=Node&WCE=146
• Gilbert, K. R. The Portsmouth Block-making Machinery, London, 1965
• Cooper, C. C. 'The Production Line at Portsmouth Block Mill', in Industrial Archaeology Review VI, 1982, 28-44
• Cooper, C. C. 'The Portsmouth System of Manufacture', Technology and Culture, 25, 1984, 182-225
• Coad, Jonathan, The Royal Dockyards 1690-1850, Aldershot, 1989
• Coad, Jonathan, The Portsmouth Block Mills : Bentham, Brunel and the start of the Royal Navy's Industrial Revolution, 2005,ISBN 1873592876
• Wilkin, Susan, The application of emerging new technologies by Portsmouth Dockyard, 1790-1815, The Open University PhD Thesis, 1999. (Copies available from the British Thesis service of the British Library)
• Cantrell, J. and Cookson, G. eds. Henry Maudslay and the Pioneers of the Machine Age, Stroud, 2002