Anybody recognise this...?
It is in Portsmouth... been there since 1954 apparently...
When I was a kid, my Mum told me (and my sister) that it was an escape tower for teaching people how to escape from submarines... Of course we believed her...
We saw it quite often as we used to go to the IoW for our holidays. As you can imagine, Mum was boringly repetitive....
When we got older, my sister and I used to joke about how ridiculous it would be to build such a thing above ground and how naïve we were to have believed her silly stories all those years ago! Clearly, whatever it was, it wasn't used for teaching people how to escape from a submarine - it had
windows in it FFS!
When we went down to see me Dad's boat the other week we went past it again on the ferry - how we laughed about Mum's story -
a submarine escape tower! So, we looked it up on the Intermong to see what it really was... to lay those silly old stories to rest...
It is
The Royal Navy Submarine Escape Training Facility at Fort blockhouse, Gosport.
Sorry Mum...