Many of the buildings which survive today in Sheerness naval dockyard were completed to John Rennie’s design in 1823, although the town’s association with the navy goes back three centuries. For almost 140 years after the nineteenth-century docks expansion, the navy was, directly and indirectly, the major employer of local people, and a significant part of the local economy. When the navy left in 1960, Sheerness reinvented itself as a commercial port, and today it is one of the major centres for the import of foreign cars.
Tourism grew from the mid nineteenth century as a result of the introduction of passenger steamer services direct from London in the 1840s and the arrival of the railway in 1860.
Two contrasting faces of Sheerness: (right) the Esplanade and the Pier, with a twin-funnel paddle steamer tied up at the landing stage, and (below) a warship in the dockyard.