Everything about Poole's history comes back to the harbour: large, sheltered, shallow, and in the right place.
Before the town
The Iron Age Poole Logboat, hollowed from a single oak and recovered from the harbour mud, is in Poole Museum. It shows the harbour in use long before there was a town on it.
The medieval port
Poole grew from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as Wareham's access to the sea silted up. Wool, wine and later cloth moved through it.
The Newfoundland century
From the seventeenth century Poole merchants worked the Newfoundland cod fisheries, carrying supplies west and salt fish on to southern Europe. The money came back as the Georgian houses still standing in the Old Town, the Guildhall among them.
Smuggling
Eighteenth-century Dorset ran on smuggling, and Poole's place in it includes the 1747 raid on the town's Custom House, one of the more notorious episodes of the trade.
Pottery and the modern town
Poole Pottery carried the town's name worldwide through the twentieth century. The port still works, the RNLI is headquartered here, and the harbour still decides what the town is.
Walk it on the Cockle Trail: see history and culture.