During the Anglo-Dutch wars of the 1650s and 1660s Britain was not always able to defend its shores successfully, and in 1667 the Dutch ships arrived at the Medway, troops were landed and three of Britain's largest ships were burnt as they lay at anchor. In response, Tilbury Fort was built to prevent another such attack on the Thames estuary; Portsmouth became an enclosed fortified town and, at Plymouth, an imposing citadel was erected on Plymouth Hoe.

Even the rise of Britain to become the world's foremost naval power in the eighteenth century did not remove the need for coastal defences. Despite the defensive installations created by the state, isolated communities needed to make some provision for their safety. For example, the piratical Barbary corsairs ravaged the south-west coast until the late eighteenth century, destroying hamlets and taking their inhabitants to be sold as slaves in North Africa. It was, nevertheless, fear of invasion from continental powers (from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, France, and in the twentieth century, Germany), that occasioned the major defensive fortifications built in the modern period. There was always the possibility that the sea, the Royal Navy and more recently the RAF might not be able to prevent an invasion force getting through and attempting a landing. In response to such an eventuality our coasts are dotted with the lookouts and defensive installations which successive generations built to meet threats that, in the end, never came.

In 1794 the English, with great difficulty, took a small fort at Cape Mortella on Corsica. It was no great fortress but rather a small defensive emplacement capable of giving some protection to soldiers while they fired upon invaders but the British government was impressed and in 1804, when Napoleon threatened to invade, a building programme of similar forts on the south coast was begun. They were designed to mount one gun and be garrisoned by an officer and 24 men and 103 of them were erected in East Anglia, Kent and Sussex. Amongst surviving examples are those at Folkestone, Sandgate and Dymchurch.

Worsening relations between Britain and France in the mid-nineteenth century led to extensive fortifications being ordered by Lord Palmerston's government. "Palmerston forts" were built to defend the Thames and the premier naval ports. Some of these fortifications were actually erected in shallow water and Grain Tower Battery in the Medway is perhaps the most spectacular.

Britain was clearly most vulnerable to an invasion across the channel and it is the south coast which has many of the most considerable fortifications, but the danger that Ireland might fall to an invader made it necessary to install defences on the west coast too. Meanwhile, the whole of the east coast also presented tempting places for invading forces. Improvements to the speed and armaments of warships increased the need for fortifications along the entire coastline. From the late nineteenth century Scottish ports and harbours became significant naval bases which needed static gun placements, a need which increased as Germany rather than France emerged as Britain's main opponent from the early twentieth century. In 1879 three forts were built on Inchkeith Island in the Firth of Forth together with a gun battery on the Fife shore; these defences were to be further improved in both the First and Second World Wars. Scapa Flow, a great natural harbour in the Orkney Islands, became a major naval base at the beginning of the First World War, providing a natural harbour seemingly difficult for submarines to penetrate. However, the sinking of the Royal Oak in 1939 by a German U-boat proved that this wasn't the case and led to a massive programme to block the paths for submarines by booms, causeways, blockships and submarine nets.

Both World Wars saw a massive investment in coastal fortifications. Changes in military technology, particularly the coming of air warfare increased the problems that had faced the defenders of Britain's shores since Roman times but did not fundamentally change them. Early warnings of attack, fortification to resist attack and communications to summon reinforcements remained the essence. It is, nevertheless, astonishing that only a few decades saw, successively, the sound mirrors of Dungeness in 1929, the first radar stations of 1938 and, after the Second World War, RAF Fylingdales, to give early warning of a nuclear attack.

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