RAF Henlow

RAF Henlow stands on flat Bedfordshire land midway between Bedford, Luton and Stevenage. It began in 1917 as a repair depot for aircraft returning from the Western Front and opened officially in May 1918 when forty airmen arrived from Farnborough under Lieutenant Colonel Robert Francis Stapleton-Cotton. Four Belfast hangars built in 1918 survive as listed buildings, and a later 1930s hangar is also protected. Around the base a civilian settlement grew up, known as Henlow Camp, providing homes for workers. The station became the first RAF parachute-testing centre in 1920, using Vickers Vimy bombers to drop men with manually deploying canopies. The site played a central part in the Second World War. Between 1940 and 1942 more than a thousand Hawker Hurricanes, built in Canada under Elsie MacGill, were shipped in crates, reassembled at Henlow and flown to Malta. The empty packing cases were even used to build the original control tower, later seen in the 1969 film The Battle of Britain. No. 13 Maintenance Unit repaired many aircraft types here, and in 1941 a hundred fitters sailed with carriers to complete fighters at sea for Operation Quickforce. After the war the station housed the RAF technical training college until 1965, then became home to signals and medical units including the RAF Centre of Aerospace Medicine. Visitors find wide runways and the remaining hangars set among brick buildings from the 1920s and 1930s. The Signals Museum, which closed in June 2024, once displayed the RAF’s electronic communications history from the First World War onwards. The Joint Arms Control Implementation Group and the Centre of Aerospace Medicine remain active, while the listed Belfast hangars mark the station’s origins. The flat Bedfordshire landscape stretches away from the airfield, linking the site to the towns that surround it.