A walk today around the former Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) site on the far side of the Farnborough airfield is an eerie experience.
Across the runway, verges are overgrown, buildings semi-derelict, the straight avenues deserted. The absence of people from a site that once housed thousands is subtly unsettling. Thoughts surface of an abandoned film set, or a town struck by some natural disaster decades before.
That odd feeling at the base of the spine intensifies when one views the control rooms from where the site's five wind tunnels were operated. Banks of analogue dials and multi-coloured push-buttons sit undisturbed, as though their operators simply walked away at 5pm on a Friday and never came back.
The buildings' architecture - a random mix of brick and concrete, with institutional, multi-paned, metal-framed windows - is uninspired. These structures were built to a budget; functional shells to house equipment and experiments of greater importance. Notices on some warn of falling debris; paint peels from all.
Remarkable, then, that some have been 'listed' by the English Heritage organisation as Grade 1, the same classification as great edifices such as Westminster Abbey.
That status is recognition not of their aesthetic merit but of the history that unfolded within them. In those wind tunnels, for example, designs of aircraft such as the Spitfire, Comet and Concorde were fine-tuned.
One, complete with gigantic 9.1m (30ft) diameter laminated mahogany propeller, is thought to be the largest extant in the world. When operational, up to 4.4 million ft of air passed through it each minute and it was used to test the shape of everything from submarine propulsors to Olympic bobsleighs.
As most present here this week will be aware, the RAE was where some of aviation's groundbreaking inventions were developed. Ejection seats, supersonic aerodynamics, carbonfibre - even space suit technology - were all the subject of research in the collection of buildings whose most famous members were the 'black sheds'.
Now, however, a major redevelopment is getting under way and planning permission to regenerate some of the UK's most historic aviation buildings is being sought under a $35 million masterplan.
Most details of the site's research, cloaked as the RAE was in a veil of secrecy, were unknown to the general public. Indeed, property investment company Slough Estates, which bought the 50Ha (125 acre) former RAE site from the Ministry of Defence in 1999 to redevelop as a business park, now admits that it did not realise exactly what it was taking on.
"The full significance of this historic core was not appreciated because so much of the work done here had been conducted in secret," said senior development manager Steve Lord.
That is about to change. Slough Estates, one of the UK's largest property developers, was made aware of what it had acquired by organisations such as the Farnborough Air Sciences Trust (FAST), a collection of volunteers appalled that the MoD's sell-off of the site could lead to the cradle of British aviation vanishing for ever.
The site, which the company is reinventing as Farnborough Business Park, contains a 25-acre Historic Core, a cluster of buildings for which planning permission as a mixed-use urban regeneration project is hoped to be granted around the time the show opens.
As well as new and restored office buildings and ancillary community facilities, Slough Estates is seeking permission for The Square, an open-air civic area whose centrepiece would be the 80m-long, 21m-high iron latticework of an airship hangar built around 1913.
At present, this forms part of the internal structure of two buildings on the site; it is planned to reunite these sections, to give the public an idea of the scale on which early 20th century aviation pioneers built.
If plans are approved, the first phase would see the complete external restoration of RAE buildings, plus car parking and landscaping, with work starting in September and completion of the package scheduled by July 2006 - just in time for the next Farnborough show.
But within the Historic Core, it is its plans for the Historic Quarter that will find most resonance with visitors to the show.
Plans have been drawn up to make the most of the historical aspects of the site and draw in visitors. Several uses, for example, have been suggested for Building Q121, the home of that gigantic wind tunnel and wooden fan. A destination restaurant, with the propeller slowly turning behind a glass wall as diners eat, is one possibility; an art gallery, another. A theatre could be fitted into the cathedral-like building. And it is possible that the wind tunnel could yet be returned to commercial use.
Other wind tunnels may also be viable commercially. It would be difficult, but not impossible, for example, to restore the transonic tunnel to operational service. And consideration is being given to bringing a section of the long, low building that housed the RAE's seaplane testing tank into the public view for the first time.
All this, says Slough Estates' Steve Lord, is not a pipe-dream: "The cost for the restoration work is just short of £20 million. We've budgeted for this."
Visitors to the Farnborough airshow who look across the runway to the other side of the field may see a very different skyline by the time the 2006 show rolls around. It would be especially fitting to mark that occasion with the re-opening of some of the facilities that helped to drive aviation forward throughout the 20th century.
Source: Flight Daily News
