Pictorial history of the development of St Helier Harbour

An aerial view of St Helier Harbour in 2006, by which time it was dominated by leisure craft, with only the outer sections in the top centre of the photograph serving commercial vessels

Despite its enormous importance to Jersey over the past 300 years, very little has been written about the history of St Helier Harbour. As far as we know no books have been written on the subject, other than Structures in Concrete, a technical volume covering the building of Corbiere Lighthouse and the abortive attempt to dramatically expand the size of St Helier Harbour in the 1870s.

There have been a number of books on the ships which have operated to and from the harbour, but none on the harbour itself.

It is difficult even to put together a timeline of the Harbour's development because the information required is scattered among a variety of source documents in a variety of places.

Jerripedia's own history of the harbour, started in 2010, draws together the best of the available brief published histories, and is already probably the most comprehensive account of the harbour's development, but in an attempt to build on what is already there, we are using a selection of the best images from our Harbour picture gallery to paint this pictorial history of the harbour.

We are dividing it into three sections:

• The period up to 1850, by which time the basic structure of the harbour as it would remain for over a century, had been completed
• 1850 to 1973, during which the boundaries of the harbour remained unchanged, despite grandiose plans to expand it, and most work was concentrated on changes inside those boundaries to enable more and large vessels to be handled
• 1973 to the present day, when the size of the harbour increased dramatically, and the area within the old boundaries became less and less important, certainly as far as commercial shipping is concerned

We will complete all three sections as time permits, and have started with the one in the middle!