RAF Signals Museum Henlow

A few miles down the road from us is RAF Henlow, or at least what is left of the site.
For some years there has been talk of it closing down, and a fair amount of the adjacent housing has already been sold off for private dwellings.

However it keeps going at the moment. There are though a myriad of buildings and objects on the site that would provide many many Derelict Sunday blips - if they’d let me wander round.

Its history is long and proud, like many I expect. It opened in 1918 when the RAF was only 6 weeks old. And actually from the original list of RAF stations, Henlow is one of only 5 other stations which remain open today.

(Halton, Leuchars, Northolt, Waddington and Wittering being the others)

During the war it became one of the largest maintenance units and now provides support to enable lodger units to deliver global operations.

They have a signals museum on site, which has an open day once a month, and recent social media communications suggest that will be closing next year in it’s present location at least. So we had decided on one such suitable Saturday when Callum was off, we would visit.

Some very knowledgeable volunteers were around to guide you through the various pieces of equipment, most of which was well over my level of understanding.

In the front foyer they had a history of Henlow, which included the railway background, the London Midland line, particularly interesting to me as for most of my life until 12 years ago we lived alongside said railway branch from Hitchin to Bedford, at Old Warden Tunnel, closed in the 60’s, so it was just somewhere to play when I was growing up.

The one piece of equipment I did know about was this old manual telephone switchboard which they had sort of working. I spent 15 years working for BT, including the time they changed over from GPO/BritishTelecommunication/BT and I saw most of the years that transformed telephony.

Those were the days…..