HM Fort Roughs

I have been saving this fort for a special occasion*, so here it is. Today's fort is a WW2 British sea fort. It was constructed in the Thames, christened H.M. Sea Fort Roughs, and deployed (sank) on a sandbar in the English Channel in 1943.
*Karen Casgrain's 26th birthday. Happy birthday Karen!

The fort was never designed to withstand a naval assault; it was strictly an antiaircraft gun platform. Its mission was to pick off German bombers trying to mine the Essex sea lane. The big tubes that support it are hollow; each has seven floors' worth of big cylindrical rooms for quarters, stores, generators, and at the very bottom, the magazines. Since it was a sea fort, it was manned by 250 Royal Navy sailors. (Sailors in a fort! It's like ducks manning a bathtub!). The platform on top of the fort was for the guns and radio. Fort Roughs was actually one of four such forts built. Check out the installation (controlled scuttling) process by clicking on the picture below!

After the war was over, the Navy abandoned the forts. Since they were huge, concrete, and had already been sunk, there wasn't much the elements could do to it (although one did blow over in a storm in 1997). After the war, the sea forts became very popular with pirate radio broadcasters seeking to circumvent British bandwidth licensing fees. Major Patrick Roy Bates, R.A. (ret.), seen below, started squatting at Fort Roughs in 1966. In 1967 he realized that he was in international waters, and he subsequently declared the fort an independent sovereign nation: the Principality of Sealand.

Although Sealand never got much diplomatic recognition from any more traditional countries, neither did His Royal Highness Prince Roy get evicted; turns out no one really cared what some nutjob did on an old fort out in the ocean. The Royal Navy did try to kick him out in 1968 but he wisely shot at the swabbies and got himself arrested (when in doubt, always get arrested!). A British court dismissed the charges and ruled that Sealand (and, by extension, its population) was in international waters and thus not under British rule nor subject to British law.  This effectively relinquished all claim, leaving Sealand de jure independent.

Prince Roy got serious, wrote up a constitution and issued passports, coins and stamps. Pretty soon he attracted settlers, who were mostly excited at the prospect of being able to mail letters from one side of the fort to their friends on the other side of the fort. A fair number of people ended up as Sealand citizens, most of whom are dual-citizen expats living outside of Sealand. Every so often, Sealand sends teams to compete in various international sporting events. They have a very good marathon runner they are attempting to get into the Olympics.
Let's see, what else... a German-Sealandian citizen tried to stage a coup de main in the late 70's - very exciting, mercenaries, lots of shooting, helicopter assaults, etc. The coup failed, and the ringleader (previously the Prime Minister of Sealand and thus a traitor rather than a POW) was imprisoned at the fort until he paid a hefty fine. The German government decided this sounded a lot like one of their nationals being held for ransom by criminals, and there was a bit of a hostage situation for a while. Lately, Prince Roy rules in absentia from a nursing home in Spain, while his son and heir apparent Prince Michael governs as regent. Sealand was successfully monetized in 2000, when a company named Havenco began operating a cryptographic data haven in the fort - pirate radio's modern descendant. The idea is that paranoid people can securely store their data there and government spooks cannot look at it.

Elephant in the room; some of the encrypted data in the Sealand servers almost certainly is child porn. By the same logic, however, some of it almost certainly is not. So that's comforting.

Currently, they are also working on an online casino business.

Sealand is not too easy to visit. It is about 7 miles from the English coast, in the middle of the North Sea, so you're gonna need a boat or a helicopter or something. Because of the nature of the highly-sensitive encrypted data they are sitting on, Sealand's border patrol (teenager with a rifle) is very security-conscious and won't let random people in off the street (ocean); try writing ahead of time and asking nicely (Bureau of Internal Affairs, SEALAND 1001, Sealand Post Bag, IP11 9SZ, UK). This is a good fort to bring a sweater to because the North Sea is cold as bejesus and the dickens combined.