Sampford Airfield

Passed your old man’s house and he was outside chatting to someone in a car, in fact there were 4 cars outside, does he ever change his clothes!

Yes, they just all look the same! 😀

Adrian

Adrian
Just arrived back from Notty Uni having taken my ‘restored back to life’ son back, and judging by the hugs and kisses from stunning girls that leapt on him and caused me to have to look at the floor, he’s having a dogs life.
Anyway, on the way back, drove around Sampford Airfield and found a lot of buildings that aren’t listed, there are also mysterious clumps of pine trees on some of the sites, there is also a brand new building going up on Wrights yard, only one building of which looks original. Due to the amount of work that I did on that area when I was working for RCA, I think that they may have some interesting OS maps of the area, and they have a reproduction agreement with the OS, so I shall go in there, see me old mates and get some copies which I can send on to you.
A photographic and bicycle tour of this site could be very fullfilling, I shall prime the camera and wait for warmer weather, has anyone done a proper recent survey of this site because it looks very interesting.
Passed your old man’s house and he was outside chatting to someone in a car, in fact there were 4 cars outside, does he ever change his clothes!
On the way back I had a look at Tollerton ( Nottingham Airport), which looked very run down and a mess.
I also called into Huntingdon to go to the supermarket and passed the gates of Alconbury which still has the dramatically posed F-5 Aggressor, is this real or a reproduction, it didn’t look real to me, I didn’t realise that the USA still had such an interest in the airfield, what do they do there.

OK thanks Adrian – I see the airfield is listed on www.ukcontroltowers.co.uk, although there is no photo of the demolished tower available yet.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of this airfield – perhaps it has a better known war-time name (or its name has changed since the war)? Otherwise I guess its one of the more obscure and shortlived sites from 1944/45?

RAF Great Sampford – us locals tend to drop Gt & Lt and just refer to one homogenous Sampford!

Adrian

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of this airfield – perhaps it has a better known war-time name (or its name has changed since the war)? Otherwise I guess its one of the more obscure and shortlived sites from 1944/45?

That’s the hangar alright. I couldn’t tell you where they were located, but I’ll try to drag the map out and have a look.

Adrian

Aha, the blister hangar is in Lowes old coal yard on the site of the old Thaxted station.
Many years ago when I worked for RCA structural engineers, we used to do a lot of work for Mr Lowe.
He wanted to reclad the blister hangar frame to park the coal lorries in overnight.
Our engineers tried to make the calculations work, but couldn’t, the load tables had drastically changed since the 1940’s, anyone now trying to reclad a blister hangar in new materials will have a bit of trouble proving it will work, though we all know that it obviously will.
So presumably the skeletal frame is still up there, where abouts on the airfield were these located.
Incidentally your dad wasn’t in the garden today when I drove past, do you have a blue Clio, I saw one parked outside the bungalow over Xmas.
Don’t worry, I won’t gazump your E-bay ambitions, but any photo info from that would be appreciated.

Did someone mention my name? 😀

I would like to find photos too – the best info I have ever found in books has been James Goodson saying “Great Sampford was anything but!”, and a brief mention by Geoffrey Wellum in “First Light”. The latter gentleman was kind enough to send a short reply to my letter stating that although he was there only briefly before he went to Malta, he remembered it in rather better ways than Goodson!

There was an article on it in an old Air Britain publication – there is a copy on eBay at the moment (which is how I know ) and it’s MEMEME! watching it so hands off (tantrum mode off…) Unless of course it’s another forum member bidding in which case we might be able to come to an agreement if you read this?

Where is Wright’s Yard? There is/was a mushroom farm between the site itself and Radwinter which is all WW2-type asbestos buildings, though I suspect these were moved together later. There’s also a garden nearby with a large air-raid shelter.

The airfield map can be obtained from the RAF Museum, where I got mine. Interestingly, the area was a blank on the large scale OS Map (the old equivalent of what is now the Explorer series) I bought in the late 1980s, despite the airfield being out of use by VE-day.

When I first visited in about 1990 the ditches across the flying area had only just been reinstated, and there were a lot of odd bits of Sommerfeld(?) tracking lying round that had obviously been missed when the runways were lifted. I don’t know about buildings, but the old guardhouse still survives (you would have driven past the road it is on – easy to spot once you know where it is because it branches offa little country lane, but is very wide with kerbstones!) and is now a house. There may be other buildings surviving in Gt Brockholds farmyard, which I didn’t nose round back then. I think I’ve mentioned before that the frame of one of the (two?) blister hangars survives, just off the Thaxted-Broxted road on the right.

Anything I’ve missed?

Adrian