British frigate opens fire off UK coast

Royal Navy frigate HMS Portland has carried out live firing with her 4.5 inch main gun during training off the South Coast of England.

The Type 23 frigate reported the gunnery serial on social media, posting: “Every day is a good day for a bit of naval gunnery. 4.5 engage!” The firing came at the end of what the ship described as a “great week at sea off the South Coast.”

Every day is a good day for a bit of naval gunnery. 4.5 engage! pic.twitter.com/N9XoPMMDjk

— HMS Portland (@HMSPortland) July 13, 2026

Now, let’s be honest with ourselves here, for those scoffing at this article. This is a minor event, and a very routine one. Warships fire their guns in training all the time, and some readers may, as I said, scoff at reporting it at all. But I think it’s worth doing precisely because of that.

At a time when much of the coverage of the Royal Navy, including our own, focuses on hulls being retired, availability problems and gapped capabilities, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the fleet is still at sea, still conducting the unglamorous training serials that keep a warship ready to fight. A frigate putting rounds downrange off the South Coast is not a headline event, but it is really the bread and butter of a navy that intends to remain a fighting force, and that is worth reporting.

The 4.5 inch Mk 8 gun is capable of engaging surface targets and providing naval gunfire support to forces ashore. Keeping crews current on the weapon requires regular live practice that cannot be fully replicated in simulators, and gunnery serials of this kind exercise the gun crew, the operations room, damage control teams and the whole choreography of a ship closed up at action stations.

Portland herself is one of the Royal Navy’s specialist anti-submarine frigates, based at HMNB Devonport in Plymouth and equipped with the Sonar 2087 towed array. Commissioned in 2001 and taken through a life extension refit between 2018 and 2021, she has taken on greater significance as the Type 23 force shrinks, with HMS Richmond and HMS Iron Duke formally retired only this week. In December 2024 she became the second Royal Navy ship fitted with the Naval Strike Missile, the interim replacement for Harpoon, adding a modern anti-ship and land attack punch alongside her Sea Ceptor air defence missiles, torpedo tubes and embarked Wildcat or Merlin helicopter.

In May, the ship’s company paused to mark the presentation of Wider Service and General Service Medals to crew members for their service on operations, a reminder that the ship has been busy beyond the training areas. With the anti-submarine Type 23s carrying the load until the Type 26s arrive from the late 2020s, weeks like Portland’s, unremarkable as they may seem, are exactly what keeping a frigate force credible looks like.