Plymouth audiotours

Plymouth has been launching ships into the unknown for five centuries. Sir Francis Drake was playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe in 1588 when the Spanish Armada was sighted, and he reputedly insisted on finishing the game before going to sea: the story may be embellished but the Hoe itself is exactly as Drake would have known it, a broad limestone cliff above the sound with uninterrupted views toward the Channel. The Pilgrim Fathers departed from the Barbican harbor in September 1620 on the Mayflower, and a stone plaque on the quayside marks Mayflower Steps where they boarded.

The Luftwaffe spent 59 raids trying to destroy Plymouth during the Second World War and came close to succeeding.

Ninety-five percent of houses in the city were damaged or destroyed by 1941. Architect Patrick Abercrombie was commissioned to rebuild the center and produced a modernist plan of wide boulevards and civic buildings that replaced the Victorian street network entirely. The result is a city center that feels unusually spacious for Britain, with Royal Parade and Armada Way as its spine, flanked by postwar civic architecture that historians are only now beginning to take seriously.