In the flickering greyscale film, stern-faced men in overalls and cloth caps stream out of the gates. “You’d think this was Manchester or Bury or Middlesbrough,” remarks the man beside me in the museum. But the video is not of any of those places. I’m watching archive footage of Plymouth with a senior figure in the city council in its popular new arts museum, The Box.

The moment sums up something about the city’s current conjuncture. Once dominated by the dockyards and light industry, it was hit hard by the deindustrialisation of the 1980s, before recent decades saw it attempt the painful pivot from industrial doldrums to the kind of knowledge economy regeneration that has transformed the centres of northern cities like Manchester.

But in 2026, Britain’s Ocean City, as it calls itself, stands on the brink of what is likely to be a truly transformative period. While many of the commercial dockyards declined at the end of the 20th century, the Navy never left Plymouth, and HMNB Devonport in the west of the city remains the largest military shipyard in western Europe.

“Plymouth’s growth and boom periods have, whether we like it or not, been aligned with the military. And now we are going into another,” says Martin Ivatt, city-centre programme director at the city council and the man accompanying me around The Box. The port, which is the sole nuclear repair and refuelling facility for the Royal Navy, has been lined up for a £4.4bn investment from central government.

With this huge investment comes the need for a lot more homes and services to sustain the expected rise in jobs, as well as an opportunity to spread the economic benefits of Plymouth’s military significance outside the secure border of the naval base. To achieve this, the city council is embarking on a radical plan for a new town-scale development of 10,000 homes in the city centre, and has commissioned WSP with the support of Howells and Mae to deliver a vision for it.