22 minute read
01 - The Past
from on:Hullavington
by Dyson on:
Buildings have a life of their own which often outlives the architects who designed them
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Dyson started in a coach house in Bath, Britain’s answer to a San Francisco garage. Our first offices in Chicago were in the historic Montgomery Ward building, the former home of America’s oldest mail order catalogue business. We can be found in a former car factory in Shanghai's French Concession area, and in Canada's Manufacturer’s Building. Our newest space is no different. Hullavington already has a long and significant history but we want to make more. This isn’t just land - hidden beneath years of neglect and dereliction are stories which inspire us.
1066 - 2018 Timeline
1066
Hullavington estate belongs to Harold Godwinson, who is defeated by the Norman, William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings. This was the last time the British Isles were successfully invaded.
1084 - 1086
Hullavington, at that time known as 'Hunlavingtone', has a population of 200. The Hullavington estate passes to Ralph de Mortimer, one of King William’s courtiers. He donates the local church to the Benedictine Abbey of St. Victor in Caux, Rouen.
1201 - 1203
After just 100 years Hullavington, has once again changed its name and is known as ‘Hundlavinton’. The abbot of St. Victor builds a new water mill on Gauze brook which has tributaries running along the current borders of Hullavington airfield.
1292
Hullavington manor has two water mills primarily used to support animal husbandry including grazing 200 sheep and 24 oxen.
1377
By this time, both of the water mills are in a “feeble” condition and there is no further record of them, suggesting they were destroyed. The population is estimated to be 250 people.
1400s
Boundary markers are planted on each of the north-south edges of the parish which run parallel to the village’s main thoroughfare which is known simply as ‘The Street’. They are visible until 1989.
1443
Ownership of Hullavington manor passes from the abbot of St. Victor to King Henry VI. He in turn gives Eton College the exclusive use of Hullavington manor which they held until 1958.
1558
The local court orders all males between the ages of seven and 60 to practise archery on Sundays.
1583
Hullavington is at this time known as 'Hullonton'.
1630
An odd collection flowers referred to as "strange plantain" are discovered in the Old Rectory Garden.
1645
Hullavington is at this time known as 'Hull Lavington'
1690
A local man named Ayliffe Green leaves an endowment of £1-a-year to help look after the "poor children of Hullavington".
1703
A travelling menagerie of exotic animals arrives in neighbouring Malmesbury. A servant girl at the White Lion Inn, Hannah Twynnoy, is working at the tavern and goes to see the exhibition which, according to an account from the time, included a “very fierce tiger which she imprudently took pleasure in teasing, not-withstanding the repeated remonstrance of its keeper.” The enraged tiger escaped its cage and, as the plaque that commemorates the incident states: “sprang towards the unhappy girl, caught hold of her gown and tore her to pieces.” She was the first person in the to be killed by a Tiger in the UK.
1730
Although the town church has been called St. Mary Magdalene's since 1408, it is at this time dedicated to St. Mary the Virgin.
1801
The population of Hullavington parish reaches 395 people.
1819
The Star Inn and the Queen's Head pubs are first mentioned. The Queen’s head didn’t close until 1998 and the Star Inn still trades, but as the Hullavington Arms.
1832
A day school is opened in the town for six boys and six girls. A year later another school opens, this time for 20 boys and 19 girls, built on the east side of The Street.
1835
A workhouse, which has been in operation in Malmesbury since 1781, has 46 inmates in 1803. An economic downturn following the Napoleonic Wars is made worse by new agricultural technologies meaning that fewer people are employed on farms – Hullavington’s primary source of employment. By 1825 a new parish poorhouse is constructed to cope with overpopulation. By 1832 national poor relief spending reached £7 million per year, prompting the government to launch a Royal Commission investigation into solving rising poverty levels. A centralised Poor Law Commission was established, known as the “New Poor Law” which merged parishes into Poor Law Unions. In 1935 Hullavington joins Malmesbury's poor-law union.
1871 - 1872
Major works were required at the St. Mary the Virgin church which hadn't undergone major works since 1604. In 1861there was a major redesign of the church. The recently elected president of the Architectural Association and later vice-president of RIBA, Sir Arthur William Blomfield is commissioned for the job. He later designed the Royal College of Music’s red-brick building in South Kensington, London.
1891
There are a total of 543 people living in the village. The most common name in the town is Greenman, followed by Gough, Wicks, and Broom.
1902
At this time the average attendance at the village’s school reaches 114 boys and girls.
1903
In 1897 the first sod was cut for the London to South Wales railway line. By 1903 there was a train station, weighbridge and siding in the village. An influx of nearly 300 railway workers increased Hullavington’s population which later declined once the railways were built. By 1961, the railway station was closed to passengers. By 1965 the station was closed permanently, however, the rest of the line still operates today taking services from London Paddington to south Wales.
1937
In 1923 the R.A.F. had no more than 371 first-line aircraft. By 1934 they had 800 and 42 squadrons. When Hitler invaded Poland they could field 3,700 aircraft and 157 squadrons. Many of these fighting aeroplanes were moved away from coastal regions and into the centre of the British Isles, which had a lower risk of being bombed. One such site, opened in Hullavington, Wiltshire, in 1937 following a compulsory land purchase by the MoD. The newly created R.A.F. Hullavington opens and many of the village’s farms are demolished to clear the land required. The No. 9 Flying Training School moves there from R.A.F. Thornby. Unlike many airfields of the day, R.A.F. Hullavington was built in attractive Bath stone to blend in with its surroundings.
1939
A telephone exchange is built in Hullavington.
1940
On 14th August, a German air attack targets Hullavington airfield, killing seven and seriously injuring six airmen. One of the aircraft hangars is also damaged.
1942
The No. 2 Flying Training School's leaves Hullavington. The first American servicemen arrive for training in January. On 31 July the Advanced Flying Unit moves in.
1945
New houses are built at the north end of Hullavington village joining Newtown to the main part of the village.
1984
Michael Radford’s motion picture version of George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” brings production to RAF Hullavington. Filming for the infamous ‘Two Minutes Hate” scene takes place a hangar and over 200 local people appear as extras. The scene depicts a dystopian state-sponsored ceremony involving people venting their hatred towards the enemies of their totalitarian leader, Big Brother. In the words of the main character in the novel, Winston Smith: “The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.”
1992
R.A.F. Hullavington formally closes and the site is taken over by the British Army’s 9th Regiment Royal Logistic Corps. Their barracks, located on the eastern side of the former airfield, are renamed in 2003 to commemorate the Victoria Cross winner, Major John Buckley.
1993
Two Volunteer Gliding Squadron (VGS) schools; 621 VGS and 625 VGS, move to the airfield and flying resumes at the site. They fly using a Viking and a modified civilian Grob 103.
2001
A census records that the village’s population is 1,247 people, more than twice the number recorded during the 1950s.
2013
The two gliding schools based at Hullavington merge and become 621 VGS.
2016
The combined land that the MoD owns equates to roughly 1.8 percent of the UK. Following cuts to the Defence budgets, the MoD publishes it’s A Better Defence Estate report which found that over 50 percent of all their built assets were over 50 years old. The report lists Hullavington airfield as one of 91 national sites being "repurposed". The airfield is formally closed and the gliding school moves to R.A.F. Little Rissington.
2017
In March, Dyson purchases the 517-acre airfield in Hullavington. In September, Sir James Dyson announces that Dyson has been secretly developing an electric car which will be launched in 2020-21.
2018
By March, Dyson completes the purchase of further nearby land increasing the size of the new Hullavington site to 750 acres. Work begins on Hangar 85 in May. On 22nd June Hangar 86 is completed, and the team working on the Dyson electric vehicle officially move into their new home.
Malmesbury & the birth of aviation
Anglo-Saxon England led the world in science and technology, with Wiltshire as the epicentre of this innovation.
For example, the world’s first giant pipe organ was installed in Winchester cathedral in 950AD. The Bishop of Winchester, Aelfeg, made it so large that it required 400 pipes, 26 bellows and 70 men to operate it. It was the most complex machine of its time.
A less well-known, and on this occassion unsuccessful, feat of engineering took place in Malmesbury in 1010AD which forever tied the area to a spirit of experimentation and attempting the impossible.
William of Malmesbury was a respected historian and monk, writing in the 12th century AD. In his De gestis regum Anglorum, William describes the arrival of Halley’s comet. It was believed that the comet was an omen of the Norman invasion in 1066. Describing the reaction to the event, William writes:
“A comet, a star foretelling, they say, change in kingdoms, appeared trailing its long and fiery tail across the sky. Wherefore a certain monk of our monastery, Eilmer by name, bowed down with terror at the sight of the brilliant star, sagely cried ‘Thou art come! A cause of grief to many a mother art thou come; I have seen thee before but now I behold much more terrible, threatening to hurl destruction on this land.
“He was a man learned for those times, of ripe old age, and in his early youth had hazarded a deed of remarkable boldness. He had by some means, I scarcely know what, fastened wings to his hands and feet so that, mistaking fable for truth, he might fly like Daedalus, and, collecting the breeze on. The summit of a tower, he flew for more than the distance of a furlong. But, agitated by the violence of the wind and the swirling of air, as well as by awareness of his rashness, he fell, broke his legs, and was lame ever after. He himself used to say that the cause of his failure was his forgetting to put a tail on the back part.” This was the first recorded attempt at human-powered flight in Britain.
An historian's study claims that “Ailmer flew with rigid wings of considerable size, since they were attached to both his arms and legs. Probably they were intended to flap like those of a bird, but were hinged in such a way that they would not fold upward but would soar like a glider.”
Today, a stained glass window in Malmesbury abbey commemorates his 'flight'. While Eilmer failed, his attempt taught future aviators about problems which affect aviation such as drag, lift, and thrust.
It took until the 1880s for mankind to really fly. In 1891, a Prussian inventor named Otto Lilienthal, built his first wicker and cotton ‘Derwitzer’ glider. He made over 2,000 flights between 1891 and 1896. Like Eilmer, Lilienthal flew by throwing himself from the top of a tall tower.
Wilbur and Orville Wright said Lilienthal inspired their own heavier-than-air flight. Wilbur said that there had been many “feeble attempts to glide” spanning back hundreds of years, but “their failures were so complete that nothing of value resulted." Both Lilienthal and the Wright brothers forgot to add tails to the backs of their machines too.
WHERE TO BEGIN?
Hullavington revisited
By Jonathan Glancey
In 1923 Le Corbusier, the provocative Swiss-French architect, published Vers une Architecture, a polemic defining the house of the future as a “machine for living”. Iconoclastic page layouts lauded Greek temples and Gothic cathedrals in the same aesthetic breath as new French cars, giant American grain silos, ocean liners and biplanes.
This was the same year that Sir Reginald Blomfield, the very model of an Edwardian architect, saw his R.A.F. Memorial - a Portland stone pylon crowned with a bronze zodiacal orb from which a gilded eagle spread its wings ready for flight - unveiled on London’s Victoria Embankment.
British architects of Blomfield’s age thought little or nothing of Le Corbusier until four years later when Frederick Etchells, the Vorticist painter, translated Vers une Architecture into English. Cue outrage.
In a caustic review of the book, Sir Edwin Lutyens, the greatest British architect of his generation, wrote, “M Le Corbusier’s theme is that architecture of our time should have the qualities of the machine. Efficiency and mass production are the watchwords. Houses are to be like the products of Mr Woolworth’s shops - stamped out or cast in moulds and sold, I suppose in ratios of 3d and 6d. For such houses, Nature will provide a new humanity. Robots without eyes - for eyes that have no vision cannot be educated to see.”
As for Sir Reginald, he waited until 1934 before letting rip and unleashing his own book; Modernismus, a choleric rant against the world represented by Le Corbusier, the Bauhaus and “functionalist” design. The Spectator panned
Modernismus: even conservative thinkers, it appeared, found Blomfield too dismissive of modern life, while for Sir Edwin airplanes, automobiles and Atlantic liners were “excellent things in themselves” and, in design terms, “may well serve as tonics”.
Intriguingly, 1934 was the year that the R.A.F.’s tonic to the nation, an ambitious expansion programme took effect. With Germany free to re-arm, the young R.A.F. moved rapidly into action. In 1923, it could field no more than 371 first-line aircraft. In 1934, it had 800 such machines in 42 squadrons. By the time Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, it boasted 157 squadrons and 3,700 fighting aircraft.
Working under the auspices of the Air Ministry and with the Directorate of Works and Buildings, the R.A.F. invested in dozens of new aerodromes. One of the most expansive of these was Hullavington. What remains intriguing about their design is the way in which they brought together the architectural concerns of Blomfield and Lutyens, Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus.
14 JUNE 1937 R.A.F. HULLAVINGTON AIRFIELD'S RUNWAYS ARE OPENED
Ramsay MacDonald, prime minister of the National government of 1931-35, called on the Royal Fine Art Commission to supervise the design and planning of the new airfields. As these were major, technologically driven undertakings, there was concern about how they would fit into the British countryside and what image they should represent. Blomfield and Lutyens happened to be RFAC commissioners. Archibald Bulloch was appointed in October 1935 as Architectural Advisor to the Directorate of Works and Building. The 52-year old Scottish architect had worked around the world and, at home, designed both Neo-Georgian Post Offices and Telephone Exchanges - his best is in Bath - and electricity generating stations.
So, Hullavington, one of the largest of the new airfields built between 1934 and 1939 boasts Neo-Georgian domestic and administrative buildings arranged in a Beaux-Arts or Garden City plan and designed by Bulloch in the style of Lutyens and Blomfield, and hangars and technical buildings that were at the forefront of new design and construction technology. Here at Hullavington, the design circle was
squared: the new airfield would represent both modernity and tradition. The three-storey officers’ mess was clad in local limestone, its lobby and main hall lined in polished oak panelling. The aircraft hangars, two of which are being converted into Dyson offices and workshops by architects WilkinsonEyre were as up-to-the-minute as the design thinking of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, director of the Bauhaus.
Above and beyond architectural and planning concerns, it was speed that drove the design and construction of Hullavington. Speed encouraged innovative design and engineering that, today, makes the former RAF airfield an ideal site for Dyson. What remains so very exciting is that, although the airfield, opened in 1937, has been closed to flying since September 2016, its least obvious buildings are daring designs that link Hullavington to the Bauhaus and pre-war Modernism and invention in unexpected ways.
Around the perimeter of the airfield, for example, are late 1930s’ E-Type hangars. With their earth and turf roofs, these curved concrete buildings are truly discreet. Seen from the road, or from the air, they might be mistaken for Neolithic barrows, for which Wiltshire is famous. Think of the ancient earthworks around Avebury, from the low-lying to the spectacular like Silbury Hill, England’s echo of the pyramids of Ancient Egypt. Yet, where Silbury Hill is, as far as we know, a solid earthen mass, the doors of E-Type
hangars at Hullavington open to reveal quite spectacular spaces, free of columns, and shaped by ingenious concrete roof structures derived, in this case, from the work of Hugo Junkers, the German inventor and industrialist better known for the aircraft, including the Ju 87 Stuka dive bomber, mass produced in his name at Dessau.
A left-leaning pacifist, Junkers was one of the principal patrons of the Bauhaus. He played a key role in bringing the new design school to Dessau. Three years younger than Reginald Blomfield, Junkers was a successful inventor and maker of gas water heaters for bathrooms and fan heaters before turning to aircraft design. In 1915, he built the world’s first all-metal aircraft, the Junkers J.1. The material he employed was duralumin, an alloy of aluminium, copper, manganese and magnesium patented in 1909 by the German metallurgist Alfred Wilm. This was the material
12 DECEMBER 1915 MAIDEN FLIGHT OF HUGO JUNKERS' J.1 THE WORLD'S FIRST ALL-METAL AIRCRAFT
used to mass-produce the Supermarine Spitfires that shot down Junkers bombers in the Second World War. By this time, however, Junkers had been bullied to death by the Nazi government, while Wilm had long taken up farming.
In 1925, Junkers patented a steel development of the timber “Lamellandach”, or segmental roof, pre-fabricated structural system patented some years earlier by the German architect, engineer and town planner Friedrich “Fritz” Zollinger. Junkers’ net-like steel framework proved ideal for aircraft hangars. The first in Britain was built at Heston Air Park in 1930, in just five weeks, under licence by the Horseley Bridge & Engineering Company of Tipton, Staffs. Flight magazine described this as “hangar construction reduced to Mecanno simplicity”. The Horseley Bridge & Engineering Company sold its “Lamella” hangars on the strength not only of their innovative structure and speed of construction, but on that of “architectural beauty”, too.
The concrete E-Type hangars at Hullavington, with their roots in German design although employing a simplified construction system, stand testimony to both the evolving relationship between aviation technology and architecture and to the technology transfer between engineering concerns fated to represent opposing sides and irreconcilable political creeds in hugely destructive warfare. Kier & Co built the E-Type hangars in 1938. Eighty years later, the Kier Group is involved in the restoration of the two Dyson D-Type hangars. Steel framed Lamella hangars can be found at the former RAF Kemble airfield, Gloucestershire.
The D-Types, built primarily as aircraft storage units, are built of reinforced concrete columns supporting concrete bowstring ribs, or trusses, that form the roof. Their 15-bay walls are solid 14in thick reinforced concrete with large steel windows at their upper level. Doors consist of six steel leaves, opening into concrete door gantries projecting from each side of the buildings. The construction of these hangars had been developed in France where sophisticated concrete engineering informed not only new airfield buildings, notably at Montaudron Airfield near Toulouse, but also the work of Auguste and Gustave Perret, whose church of Notre-Dame du Raincy (1922-23) remains a masterpiece of concrete construction. Le Corbusier worked in the brothers’ Paris studio in 1908-9. In certain lights, the Type D’s look like temples.
When, though, Hullavington airfield opened in June 1937, its runways were grass and its first aircraft biplanes. The Hawker Harts of No 9 Flying Training School were, however, exceptional machines. Built by Vickers at Weybridge between 1931 and 1936, these were trainer versions of the light bomber Sydney Camm endowed with the performance and aerobatic dynamics of the latest fighters. Apprenticed as a carpenter in 1908 at the age of fifteen, by 1925 Camm was chief designer at Hawker. His later aircraft included the Typhoon, Tempest, Sea Fury, the pitch-perfect Hunter jet fighter and the Hawker-Siddeley P.1127/Kestrel FGA.1, progenitor of the VTOL Harrier jump jet, one of which, of course, stands outside the main entrance to Dyson’s Malmesbury campus.
If you had been able to visit Hullavington in its 1940s heyday, you would have been impressed and perhaps even overwhelmed by the sheer number and variety of RAF aircraft gathered here, from Mosquitoes, Spitfires and Lancasters to Douglas Bostons, North American Mitchells and GAL Hotspur troop-carrying gliders. Although squadrons based at Hullavington took part in the defence of Bath and Bristol, the airfield was built primarily for aircrew training, as well as the training of flight instructors, and for the storage of aircraft.
Perhaps the most famous wartime pilot trained here was Pilot Officer - later Group Captain - Leonard Cheshire VC, OM, DSO and Two Bars, DFC who was one of the two British observers on board the USAF B-29 bomber Big Stink when the atomic bomb Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki on 9th August 1945. Cheshire devoted the rest of his life to the care of people with disabilities. He may yet be canonised as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church.
9 AUGUST 1945 CPT. LEONARD CHESHIRE VC OBSERVES DROPPING "THE BOMB" ON NAGASAKI
Hullavington’s parish church is named after Mary Magdalene, a redeemed sinner who became a saint. In the 11th Century land here was held in the possession of Harold Godwinson, better known as Harold I, the last of the Anglo-Saxon kings. Harold was killed in 1066 during the last successful invasion of England. Hullavington airfield was built to stop an invasion by Nazi Germany. The fear of immanent invasion by this irredeemable state in September 1939 saw ten Bristol Blenheim bombers of 114 Squadron flying from their base at RAF Wyton, Cambridgeshire to Hullavington where they would be safe from attack by marauding Messerschmitts and Stukas. The presumed aerial assault never happened. The Blenheims returned home within a fortnight. James Dyson, one of the judges of the 2015 Freddie March Spirit of Aviation Trophy at the Goodwood Revival, chose a painstakingly restored Blenheim as the winner. He would rather like to see a Blenheim on the new Dyson Hullavington campus. And, if not a Blenheim, then a Spitfire.
From 1939, Hullavington was given over to many overlapping uses. It was a base for RAF storage and maintenance units. One of the many components stowed here was the Whittle gas-turbine engine, waiting to be dispatched to Canada for cold weather testing, that has pride of place today inside the main building of the Malmsebury campus. It is the oldest surviving working example of the Rolls-Royce Welland jet engine, a machine that helped change the very nature of aviation.
Volunteer RAF gliding squadrons and their engineless aircraft had their base here, as did squadrons in charge of air defence balloons. The last of these “blimps” flew over the airfield in March 1995. The Empire Central Flying School was at Hullavington, as was No 1 Air Navigation School, the Air Electronics School, the Parachute Heavy Drop Company of the Royal Ordnance Corps, the Parachute Packing Unit, squadrons of the RAF Regiment and the Defence Codification Data Centre, moved to Glasgow in 1986.
The airfield was the venue of the 1970 World Aerobatic Championship won by Igor Egorov of the Soviet Union flying a Yak-18PM single-seater, the aerobatic version of the Yakovlev trainer that Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, used for initial flight training. During 1963, Russian-speaking Iraqi pilots were trained at Hullavington. Model aircraft clubs have flown their miniature machines here, too.
As well as the home of the ingenious and brave, Hullavington has been the playpen of the foolish, too. In January 1993 and after drinking seventeen pints of beer, Senior Aircraftsman Douglas Bailey, 26, set fire to the parachute store in one of the Type D hangars causing £19m worth of damage. In 1703, according to a plaque attached to Hullavington church, and since lost, 33 year old Hannah Twynnoy, a servant at the White Lion Inn, where there happened to be a menagerie of exotic animals, “took pleasure in teasing, not withstanding the remonstrance of its keeper”, a fierce tiger. Managing to escape from its cage, the enraged cat “sprang towards the unhappy girl, caught hold of her gown and tore her to pieces.”
3 JANUARY 1993 DOUGLAS BAILEY, SENIOR AIRCRAFTSMAN SETS FIRE TO A PARACHUTE STORE
The graves of young men based at RAF Hullavington who died in training accidents during the Second World War can be found in dignified rows in the church of St Giles, Stanton St Quinton on the fringe of the airfield. Sir Reginald Blomfield and Sir Edwin Lutyens were two of the Principal Architects of the Imperial War Graves Commission. The graves they designed remain dignified. The major monuments they built - Blomfield’s Menin Gate at Ypres, the Thiepval Memorial overlooking the Somme by Lutyens - are profound designs by these grand anti-Moderns.
The R.A.F. ceased regular flying from Hullavington in 1965 and R.A.F. Hullavington was closed in March 1992. The Army took over. As Hullavington became home to 9 Theatre Logistic Regiment Royal Logistic Corps, English Heritage designated the entire former airfield a conservation area, stating that Hullavington “embodies, to a unique degree, the improved architectural quality associated with the post-1934 expansion of the RAF. Most of the buildings have survived and form a particularly coherent and well-ordered ensemble.”
Those parts of the former airfield still in use by the Army were renamed Buckley Barracks in 2003, after Conductor John Buckley of the Bengal Ordnance Department, awarded the VC for his heroic defence of the Delhi magazine during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. In November 2016 the Ministry of Defence announced that the site would close in 2029. Meanwhile, in February 2017 Dyson bought the 517-acre airfield site beyond the barracks and work began almost immediately on the renovation and remodelling of the D-Type hangars as the development of this new technology campus took off. This, however, did not happen at the flick of a switch as buying an MOD airfield is not an off-the-shelf deal. Far from it. James Dyson, who has driven past the airfield since the late Sixties had to persuade David Cameron’s government to let him buy Hullavington. In fact, there were two other possible contenders both in Wiltshire, Lyneham, closed in 2012, and Colerne where the
24 JUNE 2018 DYSON'S ELECTRIC VEHICLE ENGINEERING TEAM MOVE INTO H86
Air Training Corps, the Royal Signals and Bristol University Air Squadron retain a presence.
Even then, “Crichel Down” rules, established after a political scandal in 1954, require surplus government land acquired through compulsion to be offered back to former owners or their successors. Potential buyers must advertise their interest to ensure former landowners are informed. If the parties involved are unable to reach an agreement, a lengthy judicial review can follow. In the event, claims on Hullavington were settled, but it was not exactly, to borrow wartime RAF slang, a “piece of cake”.
The exciting thing is that Hullavington airfield is back in action as a place of innovative new technology, architecture and design as it was when it first opened in 1937. It is underpinned today by conservation, by a care for this Wiltshire landscape and a sense of the ways in which competing ideas of architects, designers and engineers of the past and from competing countries are somehow reconciled in Dyson’s future adventure open to global markets. The world came to Hullavington in the 1940s to thwart the Axis powers. Now it reaches out to the world again.
As to the future, the barracks, when they come up for sale, and the streetscape they occupy would make an ideal test bed for intelligent electric cars, machines navigating the ground while, in terms of design and engineering, reaching for the sky.
Aircraft heyday
THE EMPIRE CENTRAL FLYING SCHOOL (ECFS) WAS FORMED AT R.A.F. HULLAVINGTON ON THE 1ST APRIL 1942. BY NOVEMBER THE SQUADRON HAD OVER 1,000 PLANES.
01 — De Havilland, DH.98 Mosquito
Role: Fighter-bomber
First flight: 25th November 1940 Produced: 1940-1950 Number built: 7,781
02 — Hawker, Typhoon
Role: Fighter-bomber
First flight: 24th February 1940 Produced: 1941-1945 Number built: 3,317
03 — Supermarine, Spitfire
Role: Fighter/Reconnaissance
First flight: 5th March 1936 Produced: 1938-1948 Number built: 20,351
04 — Percival, Proctor
Role: Communications trainer
First flight: 8th October 1939 Produced: 1941-1945 Number built: 1,143
05 — Grumman, Avenger
Role: Torpedo Bomber
First flight: 7th August 1941 Produced: 1942-1960 Number built: 9,839
06 — Hawker, Hurricane
Role: Fighter
First flight: 6th November 1935 Produced: 1937-1944 Number built: 14,583
07 — Avro, Anson
Role: Multi-engined aircrew trainer
First flight: 24th March Produced: 1930s-1952 Number built: 11,020
08 — Airspeed, Oxford
Role: Training craft
First flight: 19th June 1937 Produced: 1937-1956 Number built: 8,586
09 — De Havilland, Tiger Moth
Role: Training craft
First flight: 26th October Produced: 1931-1944 Number built: 8,868
10 — Avro, Lancaster
Role: Heavy Bomber
First flight: 9th January 1941 Produced: 1942-1945 Number built: 7,377
11 — Miles, Magister
Role: Training craft
First flight: 20th March 1937 Produced: 1937-1941 Number built: 1,303
12 — Vickers, Wellington
Role: Medium Bomber/Anti-submarine aircraft
First flight: 15th June 1936 Produced: 1936-1945 Number built: 11,461 - 11,462
13 — Douglas, Boston
Role: Light Bomber
First flight: 23rd January 1939 Produced: 1939-1944 Number built: 7,478
14 — North American, Mitchell
Role: Medium Bomber
First flight: 19th August 1940 Produced: 1941-1979 Number built: 9,816
15 — Short, Stirling
Role: Heavy Bomber
First flight: 14th May 1939 Produced: 1939-1945 Number built: 2,371
16 — GAL, Hotspur glider
Role: Training Glider
First flight: 5th November 1940 Produced: 1940-1943 Number built: 1,015
