latest Report – Bembridge Fort Trust – summer 2026

As the long hot summer finally draws to a close the Bembridge Fort
team have been simply blown away with the progress and the support
this summer.
Our ‘hidden’ underground main gun powder magazine Theatre has
exceeded all expectations with yet another jazz club sold out to capacity
on Sunday night and we recently gave a young performer a chance in
front of the big lights and she sold 45 tickets which was fantastic.
This summer’s historic full site tours have exceeded all expectations –
we have been pleased to welcome over 400 visitors on Wednesdays
and Saturdays which are just coming to an end – having bought on board
and trained professional tour guides. This innovation along with the
comprehensive (and for me as an old person somewhat baffling) social
media and PR campaign has been hugely successful in raising our
profile and the existence of our hidden Fort. (I still wonder how some of
our regular Facebook updates and even one that I did totally shattered
before the open day can get over 50,000 views) – but thank you
everyone for their support
We’ve also run four incredibly successful Sundowner evenings with free
entry to the Fort – we offered various food trucks – the last night was
Vietnamese and Cypriot food. The bar was open and it was great to see
over 130 people come each night come along to enjoy the fantastic
weather, the sunset, the view over the bay along with being able to see
the great progress to the building – while listening to some really good,
(what I understand is termed), cool vibe music. Of course the bar takings
and the concessionaire donations all go to the bottom line to keep this
amazing building moving forward.
On the actual construction side progress has been steady. All the
carpentry is now complete with the last internal windows either faithfully
restored or replaced, all just back from glazing.
A bit of a curveball has been as the Fort dried out – especially this
summer – we have had some appreciable cracking and we finally had to
condemn the half of the corridor floor to the rear of the officers’ quarters
where the joists had literally crumbled. We now believe that this was
actually all a pre-World War II installation (c 1936) but it has been
replaced like for like reusing as many of the original boards as possible –

2

sadly nothing interesting under the floorboards apart from some 1930s
milk bottles.
All the first and a good deal of the second fix electrics are now complete
within the offices. We’ve just recently received a large number of
reclaimed wall lights which fit in well with a military theme and indeed a
local paint shop has painted some 1930s reclaimed large aluminium
lights in the wartime colours for the military and the RAF for the rooms
they once occupied. Just a nice touch to celebrate over 100 years of
military service.
To date we have managed to complete most of the exterior painting and
are preparing to move inside once the brick walls are sealed, floors
sanded and the skirting boards fitted. The final plans for the
replacements staircase are complete and bricks to replace the lost
Victorian arches are now on site. Bizarrely the poor weather might delay
the start of this….
We will have within the next few days four more replica expense
Magazine doors with original glass ‘bulls eye’ Victorian panes installed.
Now the rain has come and the original water tanks are filling we hope to
turf the Navy lawn around the original flag pole reinstated to its 1940s
location.
Further steps will be getting all the electrics live and at least six of the
eight officers’ quarters will come online for community use. We are then
looking now to hold a workshop and exhibition on 7th November – more
of this will follow – but this brings to a conclusion one of our Heritage
Lottery funded programs.
We also hope to be unveiling some Blue Plaques which we are proud
and privileged to be hosting – one for the WRNS – the ‘WREN’s’
(Women’s Royal Navy Service) who did amazing work under fire
operating submarine loop detection systems, harbour defence acoustic
systems and indeed the remote minefields along with telephone
exchanges, radios and tele-printers. The second plaque is to
commemorate the extreme sacrifice of the pilots who lost their lives
above the Fort and crashed either on the Downs or in the bay below the
Fort. In the same vein we will also be hosting a drumhead service for an
army regiment next year – all this of course all donated free of charge by
the Trust

3

Beyond all this we have some amazing plans for 2027 but I think the
team need a little time to recover. We are also pleased to announce that
Associated British Ports are extending their lease with us as we host
their automatic identification system for shipping in the channel, which is
a key part of safety at sea and a nice communication link all the way
back to the Palmerston era.
Looking toward to next year we have further funding bids about to be
submitted/already submitted – hoping to be able to fund bringing back
into use, researching, interpreting and commemorating some of the
World War II buildings for future generations. Part of this will hopefully
include some archaeological works under a section 42 approval where
we will hope to be able to look at cross-section of the fort in front of one
of the original caponiers and indeed try and understand how the World
War II radar engineers lived in the dry ditch.
I’m going to be doing a Palmerston Fort Group/ Fortification Study Group
webinar on 16th October about the Fort and our journey to get it back to
life – which I intend to make a game of three halves, history, the works
and the perils and pitfalls of running a fort….
In closing we would like to thanks the two groups who gave us further
generous awards of £20,000 and £30,000 which along with all the
fundraising means we can now make a significant dent in the original
estimated £1.4 million needed to completely restore the fort …..which
madly we all signed up for.

Best wishes from the whole team.

Tim Wander.