It is housed in a brick building at the Admiralty's Experimental Establishment at Gosport.

The tank's engineer, Robert Froude was carrying on the work begun by his father, William Froude, who had worked with Isambard Kingdom Brunel on the Bristol & Exeter Railway. Froude snr had proved the feasibility of predicting hull perfomance using wax models in the mid nineteenth century and Brunel asked him to investigate his design for the Great Eastern (launched 1858).

For his early work, William Froude worked at full size but later theoretical investigation showed that a scale relationship existed that made model testing feasible. The Admiralty financed the building of a 250ft canal for him in Torquay where he began testing in 1873.

After his father did suddenly in 1879, Robert carried on with his work and supervised the building of the tank at Haslar. He designed the travelling carriage, which consists of two trusses made of 2in square hollow timber pieces. The elements in tension have strained wire running through them. The carriage runs on rails set at a fixed distance from the water level.