Foxwarren

Thanks CW…will try to visit at the end of the month.

rgds baz

The sale of surplus items will be at the existing site in Redhill Road. Details are on the the bus museum web site.

The site at Brooklands is slowly being cleared, hampered by the concrete from old buildings dumped there, and a lot of scrap metal. I am reliably informed that some of the metal will be from Wellington jigs!

Thanks …but I was really wondering if possible to visit the old museum building before closure,on the website it mentions a sale sometime late november…is it at the old building ??

rgds baz

Due to open July ’11 I believe.

When is the bus museum moving ?

rgds baz

The bus museum is indeed moving to Brooklands, but to a new building.

The existing and old Vickers hanger will be scrap!

There were two buildings in Hangers in Redhill Road, known as Foxwarren 45 and 46. 45 being the current bus museum with 46 further down the road.

Foxwarren

I believe the hanger at Foxwarren which is now the home the Cobham Bus Museum is being moved to Brooklands Museum plus the buses!

I remember seeing the V1000 fuselage in its jig at Wisley just after cancellation when I was placed there for a month or so during my apprenticeship. Never got to Foxwarren though.
The B2 Valiant was there at the same time, & it was at the same time that the Swift (? or was it the Scimitar) overran the end of the runway. Memory fading!
Keith

Vickers Armstrongs Foxwarren Factory,Surrey

Foxwarren was a dispersal factory from Weybridge which was used for experimental work – an example of which was the construction of the V1000 jet transport. This was cancelled before completion, when the main airframe components(fuselage,wings and tail) had been built. Cancellation would have been around mid 1955.
As a Vickers Engineering apprentice from 1953 to 1957 I spent 3 months working in Foxwarren on the V1000, as part of rotation through all departments.
The director of experimental work was Barnes Wallis.
All aircraft built at Foxwarren were prototypes or experimental,and were moved by road for final assembly to Weybridge or Wisley – there was no airfield.

Foxwarren

This was a WW2 dispersed production site for Vickers-Armstrongs at Brooklands – in fact there were three separate facilities there one of which had a hangar where prototypes such as the 432 ‘Tin Mossie’ and Windsor were first built and assembled but as there was no airfield there, these were then dismanlted and taken by road first to Farnborough and later Wisley after that airfield opened.

The site also has associations with the bouncing bomb, the Viking, Valiant and V1000 prototypes as it remained in use until the mid 1950s. Today only the hangar-like Machine Shop building survives at the corner of Redhill Road and Byfleet Road and has been the home of the Cobham Bus Museum since the 1970s(?). Silvermere Lake (now part of the Silvermere golf course complex is just South of the bus museum and saw some of Barnes Wallis’ early catapault trials with small scale bouncing bomb models.