Portsmouth history students launch interactive trails for Southsea Castle

By Fiona McCall on May 14, 2026 in Learning in Focus, Uncategorized

UOP History students studying the second-year Working with the Past module have launched an interactive trail for Southsea Castle, which was built for Henry VIII in the then fashionable trace italienne style of angled star-shaped fort, examples of which you can find all across Europe. Click here to read a post about how the Castle was captured by the parliamentarians at the start of the English Civil War from its drunken royalist commander!

Southsea Castle

The trail follows the launch of a student-written trail for Portsmouth Cathedral last year. Each of the students – Ben Whiteman, Charlie Wilkinson, Madi East and Magdalena Djakovic – worked on a different part of the structure: the keep, the courtyard and the ramparts. Click here to link to an online version of the trail, and below to read each student’s blog piece where about their work:

Madi East (the keep)

Ben Whiteman (rampart, land side)

Magdalena Djaković (rampart, ocean side)

Charlie Wilkinson (the courtyard)

Madi East has already written a piece on an Elizabethan clerical scandal for our history blog, which you can read here.

If you are interested in Portsmouth’s fortifications, read Callum Ireland’s blog on the work of Sir Bernard de Gomme.