Qualla: Maunsell Forts

Maunsell Forts: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David P Howard, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 2 September 1967, Paddy Roy Bates climbed onto a derelict naval gun platform eleven kilometres off the Suffolk coast and declared himself the sovereign of a country. The platform was Roughs Tower, a 1942 reinforced-concrete fortification that had stood with one hundred Royal Navy gunners aboard during the Blitz and then been abandoned for twenty years. The country was the Principality of Sealand. Bates had a flag, a constitution coming, and a story about how a British court had declined to extend its jurisdiction over him, which he took as recognition. Six decades later his descendants still issue passports and aristocratic titles from the same two concrete legs. They are not alone on the Maunsell Forts. A whole subculture of pirate radio stations, artists, micronationalists, and conservation eccentrics has grown up around these seven strange installations, all because of one Royal Engineers civil engineer named Guy Maunsell.

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Image: David P Howard | CC BY-SA 2.0

Maunsell Forts: Towers to Stop the Bombers

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nick Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. Guy Maunsell was a British civil engineer who specialised in concrete and the sea. In 1941 the Admiralty asked him for a way to extend air defence further out into the Thames Estuary, where the Luftwaffe was using the river as a navigation landmark to find London and to lay mines...

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Image: Nick Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0

Maunsell Forts: Active Service

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit James Hume Jam 90s, CC BY-SA 3.0. The forts fought a real war. Their guns claimed twenty-two enemy aircraft and around thirty V-1 flying bombs over the course of the conflict, and tracked countless minelaying raids. On the night of 22 January 1945, Tongue Sands Fort picked up fifteen German E-boats on radar off t...

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Image: James Hume Jam 90s | CC BY-SA 3.0

Maunsell Forts: Pirate Radio Era

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ashley Dace, CC BY-SA 2.0. Then the 1960s arrived and Britain wanted pop music the BBC was not willing to play. The forts were offshore, structurally sound, and big enough to mount radio antennas. In 1964 Screaming Lord Sutch installed Radio Sutch in one of the Shivering Sands towers. He got bored quickly ...

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Image: Ashley Dace | CC BY-SA 2.0

Maunsell Forts: Sealand

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ryan Lackey, CC BY 2.0. Paddy Roy Bates lost his Radio Essex transmitter when Knock John was found to lie within British territorial waters. On 2 September 1967 he occupied Roughs Tower instead, which sat eleven kilometres offshore in what was then international water. When the authorities arrested his ...

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Image: Ryan Lackey | CC BY 2.0

Maunsell Forts: Aesthetic of Decay

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geof Sheppard, CC BY-SA 3.0. The remaining forts are wearing out. Tongue Sands collapsed in storms during the night of 21 February 1996. Red Sands was inspected in 2021 and found to be in such poor condition that six of the seven towers had severe structural defects, with elements already in the sea. A campa...

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Image: Geof Sheppard | CC BY-SA 3.0