Isle of Portland
The Isle of Portland is a tied island, long by wide, in the English Channel. The southern tip, Portland Bill, lies south of the resort of Weymouth, forming the southernmost point of the county of Dorset, England. A barrier beach called Chesil Beach joins Portland with mainland England. The A354 road passes down the Portland end of the beach and then over the Fleet Lagoon by bridge to the mainland. The population of Portland is 13,417.
Portland is a central part of the Jurassic Coast, a World Heritage Site on the Dorset and east Devon coast, important for its geology and landforms. Portland stone, a limestone famous for its use in British and world architecture, including St Paul's Cathedral and the United Nations Headquarters, continues to be quarried here.
Portland Harbour, in between Portland and Weymouth, is one of the largest man-made harbours in the world. The harbour was made by the building of stone breakwaters between 1848 and 1905. From its inception it was a Royal Navy base, and played prominent roles during the First and Second World Wars; ships of the Royal Navy and NATO countries worked up and exercised in its waters until 1995. The harbour is now a civilian port and popular recreation area, and was used for the 2012 Olympic Games.
The name Portland is used for one of the British Sea Areas, and is the namesake of several cities, such as Portland, Victoria, and Portland, Maine, which in turn inspired the name of Portland, Oregon. The name is also used for a street in Kowloon, Hong Kong, and a parish in Jamaica.
History
Portland has been inhabited since at least the Mesolithic period —there is archaeological evidence of Mesolithic inhabitants at the Culverwell Mesolithic Site, near Portland Bill, and of habitation since then. The Romans occupied Portland, reputedly calling it Vindelis.Although the beginning of the Viking Age in England is dated to their raid in 793, when they destroyed the abbey on Lindisfarne, their first documented landing occurred in Portland four years earlier, in 789, as recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Three lost Viking ships from Hordaland landed at Portland Bill. The king's reeve tried to collect taxes from them, but they killed him and sailed on.
A castle on the site of the present Rufus Castle, standing over Church Ope Cove, may have been built for William II of England soon after the conquest of England by his father William the Conqueror. None of that castle remains; the existing castle probably dates from the 15th century.
Image:Uk dor portcastle.JPG|thumb|left|325px|Portland Castle was built to defend Portland in the 16th century.
In 1539 King Henry VIII ordered the construction of Portland Castle for defence against attacks by the French; the castle cost £4,964. It is one of the best preserved castles from this period, and is opened to the public by the custodians English Heritage.
In the 17th century, chief architect and Surveyor-General to James I, Inigo Jones, surveyed the area and introduced the local Portland stone to London, using it in his Banqueting House, Whitehall, and for repairs on Old St Paul's Cathedral. His successor, Sir Christopher Wren, an architect and the Member of Parliament for nearby Weymouth, used six million tons of white Portland limestone to rebuild destroyed parts of the capital after the Great Fire of London of 1666. Well-known buildings in the capital, including St Paul's Cathedral and the eastern front of Buckingham Palace feature the stone. After the First World War, a quarry was opened by The Crown Estate to provide stone for the Cenotaph in Whitehall and half a million gravestones for war cemeteries, and after the Second World War hundreds of thousands of gravestones were hewn for soldiers who had fallen on the Western Front. Portland cement has nothing to do with Portland; it was so named due to its similar colour to Portland stone when mixed with lime and sand.
There have been railways in Portland since the early 19th century. The Merchant's Railway was the earliest—it opened in 1826 and ran from the quarries at the north of Tophill to a pier at Castletown, from where the Portland stone was shipped around the country. The Weymouth and Portland Railway was laid in 1865, and ran from a station in Melcombe Regis, across the Fleet and along the low isthmus behind Chesil Beach to a station at Victoria Square in Chiswell. At the end of the 19th century the line was extended to the top of the island as the Easton and Church Ope Railway, running through Castletown and ascending the cliffs at East Weares, to loop back north to a station in Easton. The line closed to passengers in 1952, and the final goods train ran in April 1965.
The Royal National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck stationed a lifeboat at Portland in 1826, which was withdrawn in 1851. Coastal flooding has affected Portland's residents and transport for centuries—the only way off the island by land is along the causeway in the lee of Chesil Beach. At times of extreme floods this road link is cut by floods. The low-lying village of Chiswell used to flood on average every 5 years. Chesil Beach occasionally faces severe storms and massive waves, which have a fetch across the Atlantic Ocean. Following two severe flood events in the 1970s, Weymouth and Portland Borough Council and Wessex Water decided to investigate the structure of the beach, and coastal management schemes that could be built to protect Chiswell and the beach road. In the 1980s it was agreed that a scheme to provide storm protection with a 20% annual exceedance probability to reduce flood depth and duration in more severe storms. Hard engineering techniques were employed in the scheme, including a gabion running to the north of Chiswell, an extended sea wall in Chesil Cove, and a culvert running from inside the beach, underneath the beach road and into Portland Harbour, to divert flood water away from low-lying areas.
Image:uk dor portharbour.JPG|thumb|right|Portland Harbour was home to the Royal Navy. Their former barracks are in the foreground.
At the start of the First World War, HMS Hood was sunk in the passage between the southern breakwaters to protect the harbour from torpedo and submarine attack. Portland Harbour was formed by the construction of breakwaters, but before that the natural anchorage had hosted ships of the Royal Navy for more than 500 years. It was "the home of the Asdics," a centre for Admiralty research into asdic submarine detection and underwater weapons from 1917 to 1998; the shore base HMS Serepta was renamed HMS Osprey in 1927. During the Second World War Portland was the target of 48 air raids and a total of 532 bombs, although most warships had moved north as Portland was within enemy striking range across the Channel. Mulberry Harbour Phoenix Units can be seen at Black Barge beach, near Portland Castle. Portland was a major embarkation point for Allied forces on D-Day in 1944. Early helicopters were stationed at Portland in 1946–1948, and in 1959 a shallow tidal flat, The Mere, was infilled, and sports fields taken to form a heliport. The station was formally commissioned as HMS Osprey, which then became the largest and busiest military helicopter station in Europe. The base was gradually improved with additional landing areas and one of England's shortest runways, at.
The naval base closed after the end of the Cold War in 1995, and the Royal Naval Air Station closed in 1999, although the runway remained in use for Her Majesty's Coastguard Search and Rescue flights as MRCC Portland until 2014. MRCC Portland's area of responsibility extended midway across the English Channel, and from Start Point in Devon to the Dorset/Hampshire border, covering an area of around. The 12 Search and Rescue teams in the Portland area dealt with almost 1000 incidents in 2005. Portland lends its name to one of the BBC's Shipping Forecast regions.
There are still two prisons on Portland: HMP The Verne, which until 1949 was a Victorian military fortress, and a Young Offenders' Institution on the Grove clifftop. This was the original prison built for convicts who quarried stone for the Portland Breakwaters from 1848. For a few years until 2005 Britain's only prison ship, HMP The Weare, was berthed in the harbour.
Governance
There are two tiers of local government covering Portland, at parish and unitary authority level: Portland Town Council and Dorset Council. The town council is based at the Portland Community Venue, a converted school in Fortuneswell.Since the 2019 structural changes to local government, Portland is in the Dorset unitary authority, administered by Dorset Council. The whole island forms Portland ward which is one of the 52 wards and elects three members to the council.
Portland is an ancient royal manor, and until the 19th century was a separate liberty, with certain judicial functions for the isle held separately from the rest of Dorset. The whole isle was also an ancient parish; the original parish church was St Andrew's at Church Ope Cove on the east side of the island, which was replaced by St George's Church in the eighteenth century after St Andrew's was damaged by landslips. The isle was gradually divided into smaller ecclesiastical parishes, but remained a single civil parish.
The parish was made a local government district in 1867, governed by an elected local board. Such districts were reconstituted as urban districts in 1894. In 1933/1934, Portland Urban District Council built itself a new headquarters at 3 Fortuneswell.
Portland Urban District was abolished in 1974 under the Local Government Act 1972 to become part of the borough of Weymouth and Portland. A successor parish was created for the former urban district, with its council taking the name Portland Town Council. The town council continued to be based at the old urban district council's building at Fortuneswell until 2016.
In 2019, the borough of Weymouth and Portland was abolished when Dorset moved to a unitary authority structure of local government.
Portland forms part of the South Dorset parliamentary constituency, created in 1885. The constituency elects one Member of Parliament; the current MP is Lloyd Hatton.
Weymouth and Portland have been twinned with the town of Holzwickede in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany since 1986, and the French town of Louviers, in the department of Eure in Normandy, since 1959. The borough and nearby Chickerell have been a Fairtrade Zone since 2007.