SouthseaScene

LCT 7074 to be focal point of The National Museum of the Royal Navy’s affiliate Portsmouth’s D-Day Museum thanks to £4.7m from The National Lottery For the first time ever an original Landing Craft Tank (LCT) will be on display at the D-Day Museum in Portsmouth. This has been made possible thanks to an investment of nearly £5m from The National Lottery and has been planned to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the landings in two years’ time. The D-Day Museum is an affiliate of The National Museum of the Royal Navy which is managing the project. Due to reopen in 2018 following a complete refurbishment, the D-Day Museum offers a much more in-depth narrative on the events that took place in ‘Operation Overlord’ on 6 June 1944 and looks specifically at the Royal Navy and how its crews coped on that day. Over 800 LCTs with the capacity to carry 10 tanks or equivalent armoured vehicles were involved in ‘Operation Neptune’, the naval element of ‘Overlord’. The largest amphi...

The board of The National Museum of the Royal Navy has agreed unanimously to keep the Yomper statue where it is on Eastney seafront. The resounding “yes” followed a year-long public consultation which gathered over 3000 responses from across the country. The Yomper, sculpted by Philip Jackson, has become a very popular feature of the Eastney seafront. It dominates the entrance to the Royal Marines Museum and was originally commissioned as a marker for the museum, the galleries of which are now closed to visitors. It was unveiled by Lady Margaret Thatcher on 8 July 1992 on the 10th anniversary of the Falklands conflict.  Following the award of a £13.85 million grant in May 2016 from the Heritage Lottery Fund to create the country’s newest national collection at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, it was announced that a new Royal Marines Museum would open in the historic dockyard. It was feared this would prompt the removal of the statue from its current location to the...