Monument record MBC44885 - A Second World War Royal Air Force camp, Silverstone

A Second World War Royal Air Force camp is visible on historic aerial photographs and was mapped as part of the North Buckinghamshire Aerial Investigation and Mapping project (EBC18304). Located at Henhood Farm and centred at SP 66554 42202, Site 2 (Instructional) was one of 10 satellite camps for military personnel serving at adjacent RAF Silverstone, an operational wartime military airfield. Aerial photographs taken in spring 1942 show the airfield under construction at that time and the camp had yet to be created. By 1943 the airfield was operational. Instructional Site 2 comprised a large instructional building, gunnery and crew procedure centre, 2 link trainers, a turret instructional building, a bombing teacher building, a wireless telegraphy operational instruction centre, an astro instruction hut, 2 celestial navigation trainer plant rooms, latrines, 2 brick and earth-bermed blast shelters, an emergency water supply tank, 3 circular water tanks and a mechanical & electrical (M&E) plinth, which acted as an electrical transformer/junction box. A long single building that contained both a shadowgraph trainer and post office building sat about 200 metres to the east of the main camp buildings, adjacent Dadford Road and with a separate access road to it. The instructional site had a system of connected paths and access roads. Aerial photographs taken in 1963 suggest that most of the camp’s buildings remain intact, though the astro instruction hut, turret instructional building and 2 other support buildings having been demolished. By 1973 the W/T operational instruction centre has been demolished to be replaced by an electricity substation. By 1991 the main instructional buildings have been demolished to make way for large new buildings attached onto the back of the old gunnery procedure centre. The remaining buildings remained upstanding in 1995, though the roof of the turret instructional building is in a partly ruinous state. By 2004, the site has been entirely cleared of the old farm buildings and almost all the remaining wartime buildings and structures have been demolished and a large tarmac car park constructed on the site. On aerial photographs taken in 2019, the only building that remains extant is the shadowgraph trainer and post office building. However, ground photographs taken in April 2022 suggest that this building has now been demolished (1-12).