Originally Posted by
AirUK
Thanks Dave,
This thread did come up in my research, however as the information specifically regarding Basingstoke was rather thin on the ground and not the main subject, I thought creating a dedicated thread might yield more results - hopefully anyway!
Chevvron mentioned that he thought he saw the air strip marked on a chart somewhere between the M3 and A30, I don’t believe the M3 existed at that time, but perhaps he was referring to its modern day location.
UK.
The first stretch of the M3 from Bagshot (J3) to south west of Basingstoke opened in about '72 or '73, (I commuted along it every weekend between my home in Chesham, Bucks and the College of ATC at Bournemouth) with the bit northeast of J3 to Thorpe opening in about '74 or '75.
In the late '70s, due to a general shortage of RAF controllers, it was decided that ATC Farnborough would take over the task of Radar Approach Control, Radar Director and Approach Control for RAF Odiham thus allowing some controllers to be posted eslewhere leaving just tower (local) and talkdown (PAR) to be done from Odiham by RAF controllers. As Odiham had no radar, their mobile AR1 having been 'posted' to Malta in late '74, all they could provide from Odiham was procedural service using NDB and QGH approaches with communications in the adjacent low flying area on the same frequency.
To familiarise us with this task, we all visited Odiham ATC one by one and it was on my visit that I was shown the map of the RAF Low Flying Area in which Odiham helicopters operated, this being an OS 1:50,000 which was hand annotated to show each farmers field which was available for low level helicopter ops plus any other airfields in use and it was on this map where I saw the strip used by the AA depicted.
Popham and Roundwood Farm did not exist at this time, nor did Scotland Farm at Hook or Valentines Farm just off the Odiham bypass and the only other airfield (apart from Lasham) was Peter Cadbury's strip about 10nm south of Basingstoke at Preston Candover plus the helipad operated by Tommy Sopwith, (son of T.O.M. Sopwith) at Axford; there were other strips near Basingstoke but these were to the north of the town.
As far as I recall, the AA strip was situated in the area of Basingstoke known nowadays as the bit between Cliddesden and Beggarwood which has been completely built over since the '80s.