Keyham, Plymouth
suburb in Plymouth, Devon, England, UK
Keyham is a Victorian-built area of Plymouth in the English county of Devon. It was built to provide dense cheap housing just outside the wall of HM Dockyard Devonport for the thousands of civilian workmen.
History
1900s: Early History
In the early-19th century, Devonport Dockyard was smaller than now; it was enlarged mid-century by Keyham Steam Yard - Keyham at that period was a suburb of Devonport itself. Keyham Steam Yard was one of the locations for the first trials of the Fairbairn patent crane.
The development of housing was so rapid that HMS Hotspur, later renamed HMS Monmouth, was provided as a chapel ship for Roman Catholic services until the Roman Catholic Church of Our Most Holy Redeemer was built in 1901. That church was destroyed by fire following a bombing raid in 1941 and it was rebuilt in 1954.
2021: Plymouth Shooting
On 12 August 2021, a mass shooting occurred in the area, where a gunman, identified as 22-year-old Jake Davison, killed five people and injured two others, before killing himself. His motive remains undetermined, although his online activity made multiple references to the incel subculture. An inquest jury found the 5 people were "unlawfully killed" due to a "catastrophic failure" by Devon and Cornwall Police.
2024: WWII Bomb
On Tuesday 20 February 2024, a 500kg bomb was discovered in a back garden in Keyham.
“Keyham, Plymouth” enters the record as suburb in Plymouth, Devon, England, UK. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Keyham, Plymouth and suburb can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6398283. Authority coordinates are 50.386, -4.176. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1901, 1941, 1954 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “Keyham, Plymouth” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.