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Urbexing at Abandoned RAF Bases - Simon Baylis LRPS
As someone who enjoys visiting and photographing some of the more dilapidated corners of the UK, especially those that have attracted street artists, I was excited to find two accessible Royal Air Force (RAF) stations that have long been abandoned. Much of my spare time over the last few years has been spent between the two.
RAF Collyweston, three miles southwest of Stamford in Lincolnshire, was originally built in 1917 as a satellite station of nearby RAF Wittering. First named as No. 5 Training Depot Station, it was renamed RAF Collyweston following the formation of the RAF in April 1918.
Throughout the second world war a number of different units were stationed there. These included 133 Squadron, which was one of the famous Eagle Squadrons formed from American volunteers, and No. 1426 Enemy Aircraft Flight (nicknamed the Rafwaffe) which used captured German aircraft to give allied crews a chance to brush up their recognition skills and spot enemy weaknesses. RAF Collyweston was also used later to accommodate prisoners of war. In 1955 an Explosives Storage Area was built as a munitions storage site for neighbouring RAF Wittering and RAF (USAF) Lakenheath. It mainly stored bombs and rockets, and there seems to be no foundation to rumours of it being used for nuclear weapons. The site was decommissioned and abandoned in 1996, and today it is used for storing fireworks – which seems an appropriate change of use in view of its history.
Since the decommissioning, the site has been vandalised, stripped of all valuable metal scrap and is now open to the weather. It has also been used for illegal raves (reportedly up to 4,500 revellers attending one in April 2006).
More importantly Collyweston is also home to some amazing street art. Much of the best street art has been overlaid with graffiti and a lot is on deteriorating surfaces. I find the combination of the dilapidated buildings, whose purpose was war and the abstract beauty of the fading street art fascinating. I started urban exploration or ‘Urbex’ of the site in September 2000 and returned twenty times up until the site was made secure (and inaccessible) in July 2022.
I then started to visit the abandoned RAF Upwood site just north of Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire, most recently with my friend Ben Warburton. Although partially demolished, there are still numerous buildings on the site. Originally used by the RAF from 1916 until 1919, Upwood was reborn in 1935 as a bomber station before reverting to being a ground station. In the 1960s it became a USAF support base for nearby RAF Alconbury and subsequently housed a training college and hospital but was finally closed in 1995.
Like Collyweston, the buildings at Upwood have been damaged and vandalised, but they are also heavily covered in street art. Because I’m attracted to abstract images of dilapidation, I found both former RAF bases very satisfactory for my photography. So much so that I am currently basing an Associate Panel, in book format, on images taken at the Collyweston site.
For the technically minded, almost all of the 6,000 images I have captured of the two sites have been on a tripod, initially using Nikon then Sony cameras. Lenses used have been a standard 24-70 zoom and a macro. A number of images have been processed in stacking software to ensure good depth of field.
