Monument record MBC47956 - Second World War Royal Air Force Sick Quarters Site No 15 (RAF Wescott)

A Second World War Royal Air Force Sick Quarters Site No 15 (RAF Wescott) is visible on historic aerial photographs and was mapped as part of the Aylesbury Vale Aerial Investigation and Mapping project (EBC18604). Located in a field E of Ashendon Road and just N of Gypsy Bottom woods, centred at SP 71944 15851, aerial photographs taken in 1943 show that the camp at that time comprised a sentry box (RAF picket post) at the entrance to the site that led to a large ‘h’ shaped sick quarters building, an ambulance garage and mortuary, a disinfector house, sergeants and airmens barracks, ablution block and latrines, along with an earth covered air raid shelter, all accessed by a road and linked by a network of linear paths, surrounded on 3 sides by a security fence. Between 1943 and 1947, a small roofless rectangular building with blast wall (an M&E plinth or standby set house?) is constructed and the barrack building expands in size with a further building and connecting corridor added. All the camp buildings and structures remain extant in 1952, when it appears the site may be inhabited (possibly by post-war ex-servicemen’s ‘squatter’ families?), as there appear to be vegetable beds all around the site. By 1961, the site has been abandoned and all of the buildings and structures have been demolished, except the road system, ambulance garage/mortuary, the formerly open-roofed building, which now has a roof added and the earth-covered air raid shelter. Concrete building platforms remain visible at that time. By 1999, all the remaining buildings have been demolished. except the roadway. On aerial photographs taken in 2023, the access road survives, and it is likely that the concrete building platforms of the former buildings also survive under the increasingly dense secondary vegetation as they were still visible in 2020 (1-9).