The Rampart Boat Building Works was started by George Alexander Desty just after the First World War on Vespasian Road in Bitterne Manor, near Southampton and stayed there until it moved to the huge yard of Maxim Marine in 1985. The Rampart Boat Building Works eventually merged with Victoria Marine, signalling the end of a long and highly successful boatbuilding career, and the Desty brothers left the business in the early 1990s to pursue other interests.

Year 1967 gentleman motoryacht
Builder Rampart Southampton
Designer Rampart on a previous Tewnties design
Loa 14.65 m
beam 3.50 m
Engines 2 X Perkins 115 hp
Diesel tanks 1000 lt.
Water tanks 1000 lt
Hull mahogany/iroko
Total refitting 2009 – 23
Interior 3 cabins 3 bathrooms, interior/ext cockpit, large galley, all Ralph Lauren textile.
Black water system
Boiler
Inverter
Paguro generator
Winter and summer tents

Polish flag

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"...in the Sixties in the UK, to build a motor yacht of almost 50 feet in anything other than wood was still well-nigh unthinkable. Rampart built well using the best of materials; their stylish boats lasted well and gained a strong reputation and following - one of a select few yards capable of satisfying the desires of successful men buying their dream ship..." 

Rampart History

Ramparts Revisited. (first published in Classic Boat Magazine of September 03. Words by Vanessa Bird. Pictures courtesy of the Desty family) Establishing a yard on a site that dries out at low water is hardly practical when your business is yachts, but George Desty was building motor boats – some of the finest ever made

The workers: Boatbuilders at the Rampart Boat Building Works in June 1959. They’re standing in front of Tamarack, a 32-footer (9.75m) that was launched that year for the chairman of Southern Newspapers, John Perkins. Two boats were built alongside each other in the main shed and space was very cramped. The boats were launched from this shed on greasy ways. Horace Desty (far left) took over the running of the yard with his sister Doris (far right) in 1946, following their father’s death. During the 1950s and ’60s the Rampart Boat Building Works was one of the best known motor yacht yards in England. It had a reputation for building sturdy, quality gentlemen’s motor boats that were traditional in style while being fast, well specified and having good seakeeping abilities. As the years passed, the company managed to remain competitive long after the arrival of GRP, building two or three motor cruisers a year until it was one of the last yards still building production wooden boats on the South Coast. The man behind the Rampart Boat Building Works was George Alexander Desty. Born in 1885 to a Sunderland shipwright, George served his apprenticeship at a small boatyard at Woolston on the River Itchen under his uncle, John West. He later joined Harland & Wolff Shipbuilders in Southampton before moving to the nearby yard of John I Thornycroft (see CB178/179). It was while working at Thornycroft’s that George started to build dinghies in his spare time, turning the front parlour of his house in Woolston into a workshop. Space was limited, and when an order arrived for a 10ft (3m) dinghy – a boat too big for the ‘workshop’ – George knocked out the room’s bay window and erected a corrugated iron structure in which to build bigger boats. Needless to say, George’s landlord was not amused and George and his wife, Mary, were asked to leave.