Royal Clarence Yard

Royal Clarence Yard in Gosport, Hampshire, England was established in 1828 as one of the Royal Navy's two principal, purpose-built, provincial victualling establishments (the other being Royal William Yard in Plymouth, Devon), both of which worked in tandem with the central victualling establishment in Deptford. It was designed by George Ledwell Taylor, Civil Architect to the Navy Board and named after the then Duke of Clarence (later William IV, King of England). A naval brewing establishment had previously operated on the site (at Weevil, to the north of Gosport on the west shore of Portsmouth Harbour), which the Victualling Commissioners purchased in the mid-18th century.

Queen Victoria regularly used the Royal Clarence Yard as her disembarkation point for the short journey across the Solent to her house at Osborne in the Isle of Wight, travelling from Gosport Station on the single track line extension which had been opened in 1844 principally for this purpose.

By the 20th century, the yard had expanded to cover 50 acres (20 ha) of land. Between the establishment of the Yard and its eventual decommissioning in the early 1990s, Royal Clarence Yard supplied provisions to the Royal Navy in all the major conflicts of this period.

In 1995, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) declared just over 40 acres (16 ha) of the Royal Clarence Yard to be surplus to requirements, and released it to Gosport Borough Council. Berkeley Homes bid for the land in 1998 and was granted planning permission for a mixed use development in 2001. The south-eastern part of the Yard (of just over 9 acres (3.6 ha)), which includes the Oil and Pipelines Agency access to the Gosport Oil Fuel Depot, was retained by the MoD for operational reasons. In 2014, the Defence Infrastructure Organisation announced plans to release most of the rest of the retained land at Royal Clarence Yard to Gosport Borough Council.