HMS Victory has opened her hold and grand magazine to public inspection for the first time.

Second Sea Lord Vice Admiral Sir James Burnell-Nugent opened the sections of his flagship, describing it as “the culmination of a great journey since 1922”, when restoration started in earnest on the ship.

The opening marks the completion of an ongoing restoration project on the fleet’s longest serving warship, of which 90 per cent is now open for viewing.

Local craftsmen from Portsmouth have recently completed extensive work on the two areas, the hold and the grand magazine.

The hold is a large area beneath the orlop deck – the deck on which Nelson died – which would have held the ship’s supplies at sea for up to six months at a time. Vast amounts of stores were required to keep her 850 crew operational.

A viewing platform has been erected for visitors in the hold, which has been partially filled with shingle ballast and barrels to provide a sense of what it would have been like in Nelson’s time.

The lighting is but a few small lanterns suspended from the beams that create a murky abyss, again giving an impression of how it was in the time of the Napoleonic wars.

Peter Goodwin, the curator of HMS Victory, who designed the display, described how the ballast shingle, after long periods at sea, would have become a serious health hazard due to a lack of ventilation in the tightly-packed space.

He told of another ship of the time in which a carpenter and his mate died, overcome by the fumes from the ballast of rat faeces, leaking tar and damp.

The renovated pump housing has been cross-sectioned to show the interior, encasing the foot of one of Victory’s masts.

The pumps saved Victory from sinking after Trafalgar in 1805 – records showed that she was taking on one foot of water an hour as a result of damage in the battle.

The grand magazine, which took Peter more than two years to research and design, is a large compartment comprising three rooms at the bow of the ship that contained enough gunpowder to cause massive damage within a three-mile radius.

The risk of a catastrophic explosion is demonstrated by the spectacular demise of the French flagship L’Orient at the Battle of the Nile, when her main magazines blew up, stopping the battle for several minutes as shocked sailors watched the swift and dramatic end of a massive vessel and her crew.

The Royal Navy was ruthlessly efficient in ensuring that there were no explosions on board.

The walls were lined with copper to prevent rats from gnawing through the walls and carrying gunpowder to other parts of the ship, while walls and decks also contained layers to prevent damp from ruining the powder.

The six people working in the powder room wore felt slippers to prevent any sparks that could ignite the powder, and renovation has been carried out in such a way that the layers of material that made up the walls are clearly visible to visitors.

Sailors dressed in authentic costume were on hand to show how the grand magazine might have operated in Nelson’s day.

When asked if he would have liked to have served in Victory in its heyday, the Second Sea Lord replied:” Yes – as an admiral.”

He added that life on board did not seem too far removed from his days at boarding school.

The ship’s Commanding Officer, Lt Cdr Frank Nowosielski, said he hoped the number of visitors would reach 500,000 by the bicentenary of Trafalgar 2005.