14 bizarre facts about Portsmouth you might not know

On February 22 1956, Pompey's Fratton Park hosted the first ever league match in the UK to be played under floodlights.
Newcastle won the match 2-0 thanks to goals from Bill Curry and Vic Keeble.

The map of Britain is thought to date back to around 1360 and shows 600 towns and cities.
Portsmouth is named as ‘Portis Mouth’ and has the image of a single red-bricked-roofed building thought to be related to nearby Fareham.

The manor is Portsmouth’s oldest recorded building and was mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086.
The first mention of Wymering Manor was jotted down in 1042 when it was owned by King Edward the Confessor.

The development of the IBM site on reclaimed land at North Harbour between 1967 and 1982 resulted in the largest office building in the UK at the time.

Author HG Wells worked in Portsmouth as an apprentice between 1881 and 1883 and admitted to despising the city.
He is said to have described it as 'he most unhappy, hopeless period of my life'.

There are said to be at least seven other cities with the same name, all in the United States.
Portland, Ohio, New Hampshire, Iowa, Michigan, Virginia, Rhode Island and an abandoned fishing village in North Carolina all have their own Portsmouth.

For those who have seen the recent film adaptation, the song Look Down was sung there.

It is 9,366 miles from Portsmouth to Uluru, the massive sandstone rock in central Australia which used to be known as Ayers Rock.
It was named after Sir Henry Ayers who was born in Portsea in 1821, the son of a dockyard worker, and who was the Premier of South Australia five times.

The first centrefold to display full-frontal nudity in a magazine is believed to have been Portsmouth-born Marilyn Cole, who also has the distinction of becoming the only British model to be Playboy’s Playmate of the Year.

The actress is the great-great-granddaughter of John Bonham Carter, MP for Portsmouth from 1816 to 1838.

Jack the Painter, one of several names given to an arsonist, has been described as the first modern terrorist.
He planted an incendiary device in the dockyard rope house in 1776 (171 years after Guy Fawkes’s Gunpowder Plot) and was hanged from the highest gibbet in Britain, 65 feet above the dockyard gates.

The oak used in the underwater planking came from Poland and East Prussia and is two feet thick at the waterline.

Portsmouth Harbour processes 100 per cent of the UK’s Jersey potatoes, 70 per cent of the UK’s bananas and 100 per cent of the UK’s Moroccan citrus fruits.

The former Prime Minister was left injured after a gale blew in a window of the Queen’s Room, Portsea, and shards of glass sliced through his neck.