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Repair work to the scheduled late-eighteenth-century timber-framed Wheelwright's Shop at Chatham dockyard, grant aided by EH revealed that beneath multiple layers of boarding, the floor was supported on massive reused ships timbers from the hull of a vessel that must have been broken up in the yard. A survey to record the building was commissioned from the Oxford Archaeological Unit, and the St Andrews Institute for Maritime Studies provided specialist advice and recording. Detailed examination of each timber is revealing a wealth of information about the construction and use of a the ship, and also the process of its dismantling. The timbers appear to be from a large warship of the mid-eighteenth-century, a period when British naval supremacy was established, and it is hoped that the actual ship can be identified using the results of this work in conjunction with dendrochronological analysis and documentary research; this might resolve why so many timbers were carefully laid out under the floor of a working building (far more than were necessary for structural reasons). The occurrence of such timbers is rare; recorded examples are normally built into the handful of surviving ships, reused in buildings, or are submerged wrecks. The Chatham timbers present a unique opportunity to increase understanding of the sailing ships of this period, which was critical to our history as a nation and their further study, conservation and display are now under consideration.