Report in today's Guardian (
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/st...309812,00.html):
Historic air industry site saved
Maev Kennedy, arts and heritage correspondent
Wednesday September 22, 2004
The Guardian
A £20m scheme was announced yesterday to restore a tatty collection of sheds which hold some of the most important aviation relics in the world.
Scientists, historians and conservationists have been fighting for decades to save the main structures of the former Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough in Hampshire, which was a secret world for almost a century until the site was sold by the Ministry of Defence in 1999, for a reputed £57m.
Work was done there at every stage of 20th century aviation, from giant airships to analysing the wreckage from the 1954 Comet crash, when the problem of metal fatigue at high speeds was first identified.
Samuel Cody flew Britain's first powered controlled aircraft there in 1908, and later there were tests on the Spitfires and Hurricanes which were to play a crucial role in the second world war, and on Frank Whittle's first jet engine.
Under plans announced yesterday by Slough Estates, backed by English Heritage, the campaign group Save and the Farnborough Air Sciences Trust, which includes many scientists who worked at Farnborough, the 10 hectare (25 acre) core of the site will be restored and reused.
The most spectacular structure, the 120 metre (400ft) concrete wind tunnel, with its beautiful nine metre diameter mahogany blades, may have a new life as a theatre and cafe.
The original development proposals for a business park on the site would have involved flattening most of the buildings.
The breakthrough came last year, when many of the structures were listed, some for the second time.
Before the site was sold several were de-listed, a move denounced by conservationists as a scandalous attempt to make it more attractive to developers.
The most spectacular aspect of the new scheme will be a new public park with the extraordinary hangar frame re-erected as a feature.
It resembles a garden pergola, but on the scale of a row of office blocks, and was originally designed to be covered in canvas and used to park airships.