RAF Ibsley - Watch station a potential des res?

[OneHungLow]

RAF Ibsley

Its walls are made of crumbling concrete and covered in graffiti, its windows shattered or stolen, and the landscape it was built to oversee has long since been dug up and carted away.

But this derelict shell in a corner of rural Hampshire, once a wartime RAF watching station, is so rare and important that it must urgently be saved, according to building conservation campaigners.

The Landmark Trust, which rescues at-risk historic buildings, has launched an appeal to save the ruined watch office at the long-forgotten site of what was once RAF Ibsley, close to the New Forest. Hastily built from pre-cast concrete in the darkest days of 1941 and overlooking three runways, the airbase played a crucial role in RAF and US air force missions across the Channel.

Similar watch stations were thrown up across the country, but rarely with the innovative combination of concrete promenade and huge Crittall windows at the “special” Ibsley site, according to Caroline Stanford, the trust’s historian. The Ibsley building is now thought to be unique of its type; more than 80 years on, it is astonishing that it has survived at all, she says.

The base even witnessed some wartime movie-star glamour when Leslie Howard, fresh from appearing in Gone with the Wind, cast David Niven to star alongside him in 1941 in the patriotic Spitfire movie The First of The Few, which was filmed at RAF Ibsley.

The trust, already custodian to more than 200 historic properties across the UK and overseas, had been consciously looking out for wartime buildings in peril when it was directed to Ibsley by airfield researchers. It was delighted to find a building that, regardless of its fraught history and derelict current condition, still had its own beauty, said Stanford.

“It’s got an almost modernist feel to it, to me. You know, whoever designed it may have been churning things out in the watch office, but you feel they had a good eye. As we see it today, it looks pretty miserable and defaced. But our vision is that we can bring it back to that wonderful, light-filled space again.”

The building itself may be unique, but it is what now surrounds it that could prove critical in its salvation. After the war, Ibsley’s runways fell into disrepair and were eventually dug up for gravel; the pits that were left have since filled up as a network of small lakes, and been colonised by lush grass and woodland.

It’s quiet, beautiful and, crucially, a lovely place where one might want to take a holiday. As with its other properties, the trust wants to rent out the renovated watch station as a four-bedroom holiday house (complete with a resident population of bats that cannot be moved from one of the rooms).

“Finding a financially viable future for our buildings is at the heart of what Landmark does,” said Stanford, though community open days will ensure it is not only accessible to paying guests.

The trust has a lot of money to find first. Early donations and a sizeable grant mean it has already raised more than half of the £3.1m it expects the renovation to cost; that still leaves a target of £1.3m to be found.

It’s an awful lot of money for one small building, but Stanford said it was more important than ever to preserve the rare and fragile ruins still standing from the second world war.

“From a national point of view, it’s incumbent on all of us to remember our past and learn the lessons for the future,” she said. “I think everybody has a connection with world war two, through their fathers, their grandfathers, their great-uncles, or their mothers and grandmothers who kept the home fires burning – we all have some kind of connection.

“And that makes this recent past in many ways more resonant than the airy-fairy Elizabethan age, however wonderful the [buildings from that period] are.”

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/202 ... e-building

[CharlieOneSix]

Just south of Ibsley are Blashford Lakes. Now a nature reserve, back in the early 60s they were just flooded gravel pits from the quarrying that went on there. At certain times of the year a fairly rare species could be spotted - a group of Fleet Air Arm student pilots on a survival course sitting forlornly in their one man dinghies overnight. I remember one poor soul in our group who had a slow puncture in his dinghy - not a happy man.

About 8 miles south of Ibsley is the village of Sopley and the nearby wartime RAF Sopley, an early radar station. It later became a civilian Air Traffic radar station which I believe is long closed. I was a member of Bournemouth Air Training Corps and we visited there soon after it opened in the late 50s. My memory is vague but I seem to remember going underground to visit the facility.

[OneHungLow]

[OneHungLow]

About 8 miles south of Ibsley is the village of Sopley and the nearby wartime RAF Sopley, an early radar station. It later became a civilian Air Traffic radar station which I believe is long closed. I was a member of Bournemouth Air Training Corps and we visited there soon after it opened in the late 50s. My memory is vague but I seem to remember going underground to visit the facility.

https://nfknowledge.org/contributions/s ... 1:1|40:1:1

RAF SOPLEY

During the summer of 1940 one deficiency in Britain’s early warning radar (Chain Home) was identified, in that the Chain Home stations provided a curtain of radar surveillance out from the coast but no overland cover. In addition, interceptions were achieved by placing allied fighter formations in visual contact with incoming enemy formations. What was required was cover over the land and the ability to accurately position fighters in very close proximity to an enemy aircraft by day or by night.

A new radar system, the Type 8, was developed by scientists at the Telecommunications Research Establishment located at Worth Matravers in Dorset, and that system was hosted on modified mobile army gunnery radar equipment and vehicles. The modification was carried out by the Air Defence Experimental Establishment located on the edge if Christchurch Airfield then in Hampshire. The ADEE included within its structure the Army Radar Unit. The new radar system was called Ground Controlled Interception or GCI, could be located inland and provided surveillance through 360 degrees, albeit the radar aerials were rotated round manually using a system of chains, gears and pedals. The first prototype was tested in late 1940 at Durrington near Worthing, successfully carrying out practice interceptions. The success of the prototype led to an order for six operational mobile GCI systems, three to be built at the ADEE and three at the RAE. The first unit rolled out of the gates of ADEE on Christmas Day 1940 and rolled just six miles up the road to a field on the outskirts of the village of Sopley in the Avon Valley. The new RAF Sopley was soon operational using the callsign Starlight. The station was truly mobile. The generators, transmitters and receivers were mounted in trucks, the operations room was in a wheeled Brockhurst trailer, even the aerials were mounted on wheeled chassis. The transmitter and receiver each had its own generator and aerial. The aerials were operated in a master and slave relationship using internal indicators that allowed the slave rotating team to synchronise their aerial’s direction and rate of rotation with the master aerial. Because of its proximity to both TRE and ADEE, Sopley tended to be used as the GCI development unit.

During the second world war, RAF Sopley underwent three phases of development (it continued in use post war as a GCI, fighter interception and air traffic control radar unit until 1974). The first wartime phase was the mobile station described, able to move in a matter of hours. This radar had a range of about 80 miles (130 Kms). In addition to its main primary radar system it had a limited height finding capability and an IFF (Interrogation friend or foe) interrogation system. A ground station could ask a transceiver (transponder) in an aircraft to transmit a code which was already known to the ground station, thus identifying the aircraft as friendly when the code was received one the ground. The first radar had just one control position and could therefore carry out just one interception at a time. It was however accurate enough that a single intercepting aircraft could be “vectored” to within a mile or so (2km) of its target.

In its second phase of development, Sopley became a transportable station, moveable within a few days not hours. A wooden operations room was built partly recessed into the ground and the radar aerial rotation was now powered and mounted on a wooden gantry. The new operations room now supported two controllers carrying out simultaneous interceptions.

Finally the station entered its third and final wartime stage, as a permanent station. A new large concrete and brick operations block was built, with a recessed operations floor. New radars were introduced; a Type 7 surveillance radar and a mobile type 11 radar for standby use. In addition new height finding radars appeared around the edge of the radar compound. Multiple simultaneous interceptions could be supported and co-ordination with local anti-aircraft units and searchlights units could be achieved through resident liaison officers within the operations room.

Much of Sopley’s work was with allied night fighters, with British, Commonwealth and American squadrons some of whom were based close by at RAF Hurn. RAF Sopley was visited by many allied VIPs during the war, including the King who first visited night fighter squadrons at RAF Middle Wallop and who then travelled on to Starlight to see the night fighter/GCI operation that night.

[Rossian]

Only because I'm curious you understand - is there a substantive difference between a "watch tower" and a "control tower" or is it a matter of USAAF terminology (and they were the first occupants).

The Ancient Mariner