The Mary Rose will be the last great ship salvaged from British waters, Historic England has said, as visitors will explore shipwrecks using virtual reality instead.

Mark Dunkley, chief maritime archaeologist at Historic England, said the agency was working on allowing visitors to explore shipwrecks using VR headsets because it was too expensive and labour-intensive to bring them up from the deep.

There are thought to be more than 40,000 shipwrecks around the British coast, but very few of them have been identified and explored by archaeologists.

The Mary Rose, Henry VIII's beloved warship which sank in 1545 in the Solent, was salvaged in 1982 and remains the largest major recovery project of its kind ever undertaken in the world.

Last year a new visitor centre and museum in Portsmouth was finally completed to house the wreck.

But speaking as it announced that two more wrecks had been listed by the Government, Historic England says it's likely to remain one of a kind.

Mark Dunkley, chief maritime archaeologist at Historic England, said: "It's a change in policy to be more pragmatic about what we can really do.

"With the Mary Rose, that came up when I was still in short trousers in the 1980s and the process has only just finished, with the new museum being completed last year.