The earliest depot for military stores was the Tower of London, headquarters of the Ordnance Office, which for many centuries sufficed to hold the country's central stocks of artillery, gunpowder, small arms and ammunition albeit in unsatisfactory circumstances. The Tower continued to be used for storage into the 19th century, but in 1671 the Board of Ordnance acquired a parcel of land at Woolwich which soon supplanted the Tower to become the Board's main ordnance storage depot; manufacture as well as storage of guns and ammunition took place on the site, which was later named the Royal Arsenal. In 1760 the Royal Gunpowder Magazine was established at Purfleet, replacing the Tower as Britain's central repository of gunpowder. In 1808 a modern purpose-built depot was constructed at Weedon, alongside the Grand Union Canal, to serve as a safe repository for guns and ammunition; and in 1813 a new Grand Storehouse was opened in the Royal Arsenal, containing multiple warehouses for all kinds of military stores. When Woolwich Dockyard closed in 1869, the entire dockyard site was taken over by the War Office to become a vast ordnance stores complex, annexed (and linked by rail) to the ordnance stores in the Royal Arsenal; large stocks of barrack stores, harnesses, accoutrements and other general stores were transferred to Woolwich Dockyard from the Tower at this time. At the same time the Military Store Department moved its headquarters from the Tower to the Red Fort at Woolwich (which had originally been built as the infirmary for the adjacent Royal Marine Barracks, linked to the nearby Dockyard); as Red Barracks, it would continue to serve as the regimental Depot, headquarters and home of the ordnance corps for the next fifty years. Finally, by about 1887, large stocks of small arms were moved from the Tower of London to Weedon, leaving the Tower to serve as a repository of ancient arms and armour and as a small Ordnance centre for troops in London.