This subject is close to my heart - I've had an enduring fascination for old airfields since I was a schoolboy. Unlike many on the thread with PPL associations, my tastes veer more towards the disused and abandoned, but it seems that all are at threat from developers, as the final tranches of surviving wartime airfields across the country, with all their savage history forgotten now, and expediently marked down as 'brownfield', are rapidly disappearing beneath swathes of ticky-tacky housing estates, whilst many more rural ones, long since returned to the plough, are suddenly sprouting solar and wind farms. In my corner of the country Watton and Oakington are two expansion period airfields that have recently fallen to housebuilders, Hornchurch and Martlesham Heath are long gone (though many of the buildings survive on the latter), and North Weald has been chipped away at for years by the local council, which bough both the airfield and its vast housing stock in the 1980s for £675k - the next encroachment will be onto the airfield itself, where Google have just dropped £85m to build a data centre, not a bad return on the council's investment.
In fairness, there were a lot of them. In 1935 there were 60 military and 90 civil airfields - by 1940 (the 'expansion period') this had become 280, all military. Wartime development of temporary airfields took the total to 720 by 1945, an astonishing feat of manpower and engineering - at one point in 1942 3 paved airfields were coming on stream a day, and a 'Class A' airfield had two 1400 x 50 yard runways, and a main of 2000 x 50 yards, with 3 miles of 50ft perimeter track and 50 odd aircraft hardstands, two 'T2' hangars, a technical area and accommodation for 2-3000 personnel, all taking up about 500 acres. Most of these temporary fields were put into 'Care & Maintenance' after hostilities, and by 1960 the total had fallen to just over 200. Most were returned to agriculture, and the roadbuilding programme of the 1960s saw a lucrative harvest in the form of concrete, with prices of up to £30 an acre paid to the farmers. Some runways survived as the bases for poultry sheds, and technical sites became industrial estates, probably the most common use of former airfields today. A few were forgotten, and still lie quietly mouldering away in odd corners, but with prices of well over £1000 an acre/year being paid to landowners for solar farms against perhaps £90-£200 an acre for wheat, I suspect it unlikely that they will be forgotten for much longer.
One development that I think I belatedly welcome is the recent trend of converting surviving buildings into houses - even the humble Nissen Hut is now a potential contemporary dwelling. A temporary airfield close to me, the former RAF Chipping Ongar, has seen the long crumbling Operations Block converted into a very swish residence, and a clutch of Nissen and Quonset huts on one of the former accommodation sites similarly adapted. Whilst I formerly loved them for their dark atmosphere, they wouldn't have lasted many more years, and their conversion into houses has preserved their legacy.
The Control Tower (or 'Watch Office for All Commands') at Smeatharpe in Devon, one of the surviving time-warp wartime airfields, photographed in 2009.
