Thomas Slade and the design system

Thomas Slade was a central figure in late eighteenth-century Royal Navy architecture, responsible for HMS Victory and a much wider body of first rates, second rates, third rates, and frigates. Slade advanced through Woolwich, Plymouth, Chatham, and Deptford before George Anson appointed him Surveyor of the Navy in 1755. Master shipwrights and the Surveyor held the technical authority to halt questionable work and the responsibility for what their dockyards produced. Nicholas Rodger judged Slade the greatest British naval architect of his century, although the later designers had inherited a framework already well adapted to worldwide Royal Navy service. Later Ardent-class ships were ordered from Slade's design as much as eleven years after his death because it continued to fit the Navy's needs.