Portsmouth enrols 23,000 students and is ranked among the world's best modern universities. Portsmouth is also the birthplace of author Charles Dickens and engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The Romans built Portus Adurni, a fort, at nearby Portchester in the late third century. The city's Old English name "Portesmuða" is derived from "port", meaning a haven, and "muða", the mouth of a large river or estuary. The "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" has a warrior called Port and his two sons killing a noble Briton in Portsmouth in 501. Winston Churchill, in his "A History of the English-Speaking Peoples", says that Port was a pirate
Portsmouth air raids which destroyed 6625 houses and severely damaged 6549 of them. The air raids caused 930 deaths and wounded almost 3000 people, many of them in the dockyard and military establishments. On the night of the city's heaviest raid on 10 January 1941, the Luftwaffe dropped 140 tonnes of high explosive bombs, killing 171 people and leaving 3000 homeless. Many of the city's houses were damaged and areas of Landport and Old Portsmouth destroyed, with the future site of Gunwharf Quays being razed to the ground. On the same night, the Guildhall was hit by an incendiary bomb which