The Great Expansion The C19 saw the development of most of the Arsenal that we see today. Many of the domestic-scale buildings of earlier years were swept away in a series of grand and bold building campaigns. The demands of the army in the Napoleonic period for supplies of all kinds - muskets, cartridges, clothing, tents, equipment, roundshot - were vast, as they embarked on a significant land campaign for the first time in nearly a century. The Grand Storehouses (above), to a design attributed to James and Lewis Wyatt, were constructed between 1803 - 1813. The Arsenal's Ordnance Store Department grew to become The great central depot..of the Empire for the receipt, inspection, primary custody and first inspection of army stores.

The Crimean war brought another great phase of development; the Shot and Shell foundry, of which only the gatehouse now remains, was built in 1855 - 56, as was the Paper Cartridge Factory. Industrial improvements, in metallurgy, steam power, mechanisation and transport, drove the evolution of the Arsenal from the era of the craft workshop to that of the vast industrial plant. By the mid-C19, the Arsenal had expanded to cover 266 acres, with 200,000 sq ft of buildings.

Hephaestus (Vulcan) was the god of the forge and the subterranean fire, the master craftsman. In myth, he worked with the Cyclopes, giants with a single large eye in their foreheads, renowned for their skills in metalworking and weapon making. They made the thunderbolts for Zeus. This crest shows two of the Cyclops holding smith's tools, while over their heads a hand grasping a thunderbolt stands in an iron crown against the background of a fiery Sun. This was the very epitome of the C19 Arsenal.

In the Armstrong Gun Factory (1856 - 57) the furnaces blazed and the air shimmered in the heat of white-hot iron as the Arsenal's gun makers forged the vast Naval and coastal defence guns that symbolised the nation's might. Woolwich drew engineers and innovators from across the country, to work, to sell their inventions and to witness the technological developments. Marc Brunel, Joseph Bramah and Henry Maudslay had preceded William Armstrong; Bessemer visited to sell and test his steel, and Whitworth the idea of the polygon.

Nasmyth's vast steam hammers were installed, each one requiring a cast-iron anvil as tall as a man, and supported on a great multi-decker sandwich of iron plates and timber baulks. Legend has it that the instruments at Greenwich Observatory would be shaken by the ground shocks of the Vulcanic blows of the hammers.

Sir Joseph Paxton, too, had an influence here. For the sake of speed, iron-framed prefabricated structures were erected in 1853 to cover the courtyards of Laboratory Square, the Great Pile courtyards and the Engineer's buildings. Unlike the Crystal Palace, however, the iron members were decorated with the fruits of the Arsenal; grape, canister, roundshot, shell and cannon. In 1886 some 500 lathes were being operated in the Laboratory Square extension, earning it the contemporary description of the largest machine shop in the world.

The building that will house the Arsenal exhibition was constructed in the period to 1878, in the same way as above, and was used for the production of rifle cartridges. The photograph on the right dates from just after the end of the Boer War. The solid-drawn brass cartridge, for use in breech-loading rifles, and developed at the Arsenal by Colonel Boxer, was one of the most important factors in British imperial expansion.

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