Originally Posted by
DaveReidUK
Fair enough. It may be that the latter had closed by the time I was let loose on real aircraft in what was then the "East Hangar" in 1972.
Was the Hatton Cross Club upstairs on the first floor, adjoining the restaurant (with its wonderful view of the roundabout and Barclays Bank
), or was there a separate space downstairs on the ground floor?
Still seems a bit odd, BEA having two social clubs at opposite ends of Viscount Way, less than half a mile apart.
The Hatton Cross Club was indeed the one upstairs at the Hatton Cross roundabout. Downstairs, at various times was the IT department, Staff travel offices and around the back was the BA Clubs Gardening society that used to sell things like bags of compost!. The Hatton Cross Club lasted until the building was torn down sometime in the late 1990s early 2000s from memory. By that time the Runway canteen and the small club adjoining that had already gone. Basically after all the office staff left the base and went to Waterside, there was a gradual winding down of the all the facilities on the base, as it was "only" Engineering staff left. We saw the closure of all the shops on base [in TBA] The banks and Bureau de Change and ATM all went. We lost the BA Ambulance and Fire service and then all the clubs and all the canteens apart from the one in TBJ/K were closed down. Facilities only started to suddenly re-appear after flight and cabin crew training were relocated from Cranebank to the Engineering base. Even now there is no canteen service at night, weekends or outside normal office hours for the Engineers on base...
As a final note the Barclays' Bank at Hatton Cross also closed a couple of years back, probably to do with the fact BA no longer uses Barclay's as it's bank, it uses Deutsche Bank. The Old Barclay's at Hatton Cross which has stood empty for a couple of years now, is allegedly going to be yet another hotel.