The Royal Navy’s old shipbuilding yard on the Medway - Tudor in origin, closed in 1984 and kept as a working museum - and the home of the Ropery, the last working naval ropeyard in Britain.
Ships have been built and fitted on the Medway at Chatham since Tudor times - the Navy was using the river in Henry VIII’s reign, and a proper yard was laid out here by about 1570. For three centuries this was one of the places England built its fleet: HMS Victory, Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, was launched from Chatham in 1765, and the yard went on through the age of sail into iron, steam and, at the very end, submarines - the last warship it built, the submarine Ocelot, was launched here in 1962. On 31 March 1984 the Royal Navy closed the dockyard after more than four hundred years. The oldest heart of it was saved by the Chatham Historic Dockyard Trust, which keeps it now as a working museum, among the most complete dockyards of the age of sail anywhere in the world.
For the archive, the dockyard matters above all for one building inside it: the Ropery, a quarter-mile ropewalk where naval cordage has been made for over four hundred years and is still made today, by hand, by Master Ropemakers. Rope is the thing that rigged every ship in these dry docks - the reason a seafaring nation could go to sea at all - and Chatham is the last original naval ropeyard still working.
The archive spent a morning here in autumn 2026. The yard itself is in the journal entry A Morning at the Dockyard; the Ropery, its history and its machines, and the two ropemakers who carry the craft - the master David Cheer and his apprentice Rob Lane-Shaw - are in A Morning at the Ropery.
Makers David Cheer is the master ropemaker at the Ropery in Chatham Historic Dockyard, the last working naval ropeyard in Britain. He came for a three-month job twenty-seven years ago and never left: after a year he decided rope-making was the only thing he wanted to do, and he has been the master here ever since. He makes every kind of rope the works still sells - from heavy cordage to dog leads and climbing line - splices and knots by hand, and keeps, among much else, what he says is the only length of sealskin rope left in England.
Makers Apprentice Rob Lane-Shaw is the apprentice ropemaker at the Ropery in Chatham Historic Dockyard, about three years into the trade under the master David Cheer. He makes and splices rope by hand on the quarter-mile walk, and - because the Ropery is a self-sustaining museum that nobody funds - he also takes the visitors round, which means he can both make the rope and explain it. He is one of the few people learning the craft young enough to carry it on.
