What next?

49 The Ural at RAF Broadwell wiith the Control Tower in the 49

In the time you’ve been reading this, another WWII airfield has been demolished for housing, built over for an industrial estate or just knocked down for hardcore on a farm track somewhere.

And perhaps that’s OK. These were never intended as permanent structures, land is scarce and it’s surprising they’ve lasted this long.

Perhaps it’s not unreasonable to just let nature, the need for foundations and farm tracks take their course.

But it’s the casual way they’re going - quietly, unsung and in a few careless puffs of demolition dust - that bothers me. There are so few markers to the past, so few still living who can tell what they remember.

There are too many stories in the massproduced, red, London brick, too many hopes and individual lives bound in the mortar, to let them go quietly.

But preserving them as theme parks would be even worse. Imagine the irony as Health and Safety flap about stringing yellow warning barriers across a ‘trip hazard’ where men carried guns, jumped from planes and went to war. There are groups campaigning for memorials at airfields, and I’m delighted. But for me, that’s not the whole story. I believe these special places need interpretation, understanding and knowledge.

Memorials have a knack of distancing the past from the present too much. They layer on too much certainty, order and teleology to a time that was uncertain, chaotic and fluid.

So that’s really why I’ve written this - as a very small way and a very poor attempt to join a few fragments of the past to the present.

Perhaps the only certainly is that, whatever we do, our history is slowly crumbling. If it interests you, go and see these places, soon.

Mark McArthur-Christie

August 2012

50