English Electric
A story told to me the other week………by a friend from up North.”The story is that a joiner was doing some work at my house in 1999 and saw all my aircraft bits. We got chatting and he told me the story of what he described a ‘front cockpit mockup’ in an underground storage area under the car park of what would have been Handley Page premises during the war. He was doing some work in the car park putting up some security fencing and the drill would only go about 2 inches before it struck some inpenetrable concrete which were old wartime air raid shelters. The nearby site is now GEC Astholm who do lots of locomotive and train signalling stuff. He seems to know what he was on about and described what sounded like a WWII cockpit mockup. He didn’t know if it was Hampden or Halifax but he assured me it wasn’t a jet cockpit.
I phoned him a number of years ago to ask about it and he seemed genuine in what he was telling me.
I think it would be a lot of hard work and messing about to get under the car park, especially as the entrance hatch is now tarmaced over, but don’t let that stop you”It is in the car park next to Slater’s Scuba Diving Centre in Preston, on the corner of Strand Road and Watery Lane. It is in the car park of what used to be HSS tool hire, although that company left the premises a few years back. The entrance has been tarmaced over quite a few years ago, so most people won’t have a clue about it. I did speak to the woman responsible for Oyston Mill who are responsible for the property and explained what I knew about it. I just got the response ‘There isn’t a way under the floor’, basically it wasn’t in her interest to be helpful, so I gave up at that point. I didn’t need a third project to be involved with.
That might not be as far fetched as in seems, that whole area from watery lane to the strand was part of the English Electric factory, And there still is a Scuba Diving centre on watery lane. 😀
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