Twenty Performances of The Maunsell Forts
1st August 2002
John McCabe was inspired to write this piece after a boat trip around three of the Thames Estuary forts. The Maunsell Sea Forts are military defence structures from the Second World War, designed and built under the supervision of Guy Maunsell. There were three in Liverpool Bay, not far from Hilbre Island and now no longer extant, and five in the Thames Estuary between the North Kent and Essex coasts. Of these last, one was dismantled in the early 1960s, but the other four still stand, buffeted by the sea and the winds, as a reminder both of great engineering inventiveness and of the grim circumstances which necessitated the use of that skill.
