📍Britain Street, Portsea, Portsmouth PO1, UK
1806 – 1808“I was born in April 1806 in a small house in Portsea, Portsmouth, the only son of Marc Brunel, a French émigré engineer, and his English wife, Sophia Kingdom. My father was working for the Royal Navy in the dockyard, building machines to make pulley blocks for sailing ships — the first mass-production line in the world — and the yard, the ships and the clang of the harbour were my first world. He started me drawing at four, setting me to make accurate sketches of buildings, and I was learning Euclid at eight. I went to boarding school in Hove and then to France, where I was apprenticed to Abraham-Louis Breguet, the great watch and instrument maker. There were hard times too: my father's debts once landed him in a debtors' prison. At twenty I was working beside him on the Thames Tunnel, where I nearly drowned when the river broke in. Afterwards I built the Great Western Railway, the Clifton Suspension Bridge, and the SS Great Britain, which is now back in the Bristol dock where she was built.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today