Gosport's old Rum Store gets a £22m rooftop makeover

For decades, the old Royal Navy Rum Store has sat empty on Gosport's waterfront, a Grade II listed shell with a name that does half the work for you. Built around 1796 by a private brewery to hold the rum rations for sailors at Portsmouth Naval Base, it spent its working life storing alcohol, beer and dry goods like sugar. A bomb damaged it in 1940, taking out the second floor, and it was finally decommissioned in 1991. Now, a £22 million transformation is turning it into something you can actually visit.

The project is owned by UK Docks and led by Pritchard Architecture, with director Giles Pritchard at the helm. Enabling works — wall cleaning and ground treatment — wrapped up in May, which is when the more visible construction could finally get going. Final planning permission came from Gosport Borough Council in September 2025, and the ambition is to create nearly 7,000 square metres of mixed-use employment space, aimed mostly at maritime businesses like yacht brokers and naval architects, with units for retail and leisure alongside. The centrepiece is the one most people will care about: a rooftop bar and restaurant with views across Portsmouth Harbour, plus a rooftop terrace. Behind the scenes, that means rebuilding the lost second storey, new floors, stairs and a lift, plus electricity, drainage and a solar array, with specialist repairs to the historic fabric throughout.

The money behind it is worth knowing, because it's what made the difference. In 2023, Gosport Borough Council was awarded £11 million from the government's Local Regeneration Fund, and that gave UK Docks the confidence to match-fund the rest. The council expects it to create up to 200 jobs and add something like £11 million a year to the local economy. Ben Mason, business development director at UK Docks, and Giles Pritchard have called it the 'jewel in the crown of Gosport', while council leader Peter Chegwyn has spoken about a 'new commercial and leisure destination' that reconnects the town with its historic waterfront.

The Rum Store is only one part of the picture. The wider Victoria Quay site covers 3.7 hectares within the Royal Clarence Yard Retained Area, and in 2019 UK Docks bought 5.7 acres of it from the Ministry of Defence to build a high-tech maritime services centre, complete with a 75-tonne travelling crane, a 50-tonne boat transporter, a 55-tonne mobile crane, more than 150 metres of deep-water wharf and over three acres of hard standing. Next door at Weevil Lane, UK Docks Marine Services is adding a new boat maintenance and repair centre — a boat shed that will increase covered workspace by about 1,400 square metres, designed by HGP Architects and set to finish by the end of 2027, following £84 million in Royal Navy contracts for small boat maintenance.

It's all part of the 'Reconnecting Historic Gosport Waterfront' programme, which comes from a planning document adopted back in 2018. Getting there is easy enough: the A32 joins the M27 at Junction 11, and the nearest train station is Portsmouth Harbour, a four-minute ferry ride away that runs every 7.5 minutes at peak times. For now, the Rum Store is still very much a building site, but the rooftop bar is the part worth keeping an eye on.