Stoke Heath barracks

 

Hello! I'm back on the local blog, mooching around yet another abandoned military thingie. The last military site I visited had a couple of dead horses, so I was a little apprehensive but simultaneously rather doubtful that I'd find something quite so bonkers twice in a row. Surely, to quote my dating profile, the weirdest thing anyone will find here is me.

 

This place is a pretty biggish cluster of old military buildings sticking out of a sea of nettles and brambles. From what I can gather, it was known in the post-war era as Stoke Heath, but was originally part of RAF Tern Hill, a nearby airfield that dates all the way back to 1916, when the first world war was in full swing, people were getting massacred, the British military medical guys had carried out the worlds first successful blood transfusion, and Germany had to cancel the summer Olympics. What a time to be alive.

Various aircraft squadrons have been stationed at Tern Hill, but it almost wasn't the case. There was a huge fire in 1919 that destroyed a hangar and a few other important buildings, at which point the powers-that-be concluded that they didn't really need this place anyway. The Great War was over, after all. The land was sold in 1922, and the surviving buildings were turned into race horse stables.

 

But then that pesky Hitler fellow came to power, and they quickly u-turned on that decision. In 1935 the land was requisitioned in an act of foresight that proved pretty wise on the grand scheme of things. It did take a while to rebuild the airfield though, because the land had been infested with Rabbits. But the military went Watership Down on their fluffy asses, and soon RAF Tern Hill was back in the game.

In the years building up to the war, Tern Hill was primarily used for aircraft storage and maintenance, but as of 1939 it became a fighter airfield, populated by Spitfires and Hurricanes. During the Battle of Britain it served as a relief landing ground, and became a temporary base for the old Night Fighters who were protecting Liverpool and Manchester from the Luftwaffe. Following the war, it became a training school, and around 1949 Stoke Heath seems to have began being referred to as a separate camp despite its proximity to the main airfield.

 

This area appears to be an old mess hall, with the remnants of the kitchens serving hatches still present. 

 

 

It's kinda cool, imagining this place full of tables and military folk enjoying their lunch and socialising. It would have been full of conversation and banter. None of them would ever imagine that someday it would look like this, and that any old wazzock could just wander around it.

 

 

Behind the hatches, the kitchen area has seen better days. 

 

 

Here's a cool vintage light switch.

 

 

And there's a fireplace here too.

 

Stoke Heath was apparently one of Tern Hills aircraft dispersals. That is, they parked planes here. When it was redesignated Stoke Heath, it was became an RAF maintenance unit. They had an entire salvage crew who would drive out to crash sites and cart the remains back here to see what could be put to use. One first hand account tells of how they would take bits from three or four wrecked Avro Lancasters and build a whole fully functioning new one. 

Stoke Heath also trained future pilots on old noisy-as-fuck American Harvard aircraft, at least until the end of the 1950s.

But as far as those stationed here were concerned, Stoke Heath was a bit dull. The area wasn't as built up back then, and it was all mostly farmland. A few firsthand accounts tell of how they felt like they might as well be overseas, given how remote they were. A few actually did apply to be sent overseas, but they were denied. They belonged to Stoke Heath now.

 

 

And it's not so bad. It sure looks like it gets chilly in the Winter, but it's got a cool vibe to it. And as far as urbex goes, it's an absolute delight. Do you see any vandalism? Any graffiti? Any urbex stickers advertising their social media just in case I want to see the exact same place I've just been to but in grainy footage and with chavvy voice-over? 

Nope. All of this decay is purely natural, and I fucking love it.

 

 

But the Stoke Heath camp was apparently quite spread out. There were four worksites and four domestic sites. What we see here is just the last vestiges of an absolute countryside clutter bonanza. The rest have all been destroyed or repurposed. The nearby prison, also named Stoke Heath, was part of it, while the farm nearest to this camp was said to be the base infirmary. I think the nearby animal food shop, Grove Feeds, was part of the camp too. It looks suspiciously militaristic for an animal eatery.

So with everything being rather scattered, everyone posted to Stoke Heath was issued a bicycle, except for the Commanding Officer who got to have a car. They had some chap in Market Drayton, the mysterious Mr Davies, in charge of bike maintenance. I'm not sure if he was a military guy or just some random man with a bike shop who lucked out on setting up a business near an airfield. Either way, he was kept busy.

And from what I've read, the entire area was covered in workshops as far as the eye could see. There were radars, hangars, admin blocks, an airfield, a large camp cinema, a women's camp for the WAAF, messes, dining areas and a small jail for anyone who needed it. It was basically a little self-contained community.

 

 

Check this out. 

 

 

Hidden amongst the foliage, I spy a toilet. Evidently this was the toilet block.

 

 

And here's a urinal. Now the lads can help water the plants when they somehow fail to aim despite having had their penises for their entire lives. I swear some of you just stand there and helicopter.

 

This is still in better condition than the toilets in some pubs and clubs. 

 

So despite the camps being spread out and connected by a merry myriad of country lanes, it was common practice for those working in the admin block or radar workshops to ride their bikes cross country, with their routes planned out with planks of wood across any rivers that happened to be in the way. It's a level of dedication to a short cut that I just love. The work hours were 8am to 5am on a week day, and 8am to 1pm on a Saturday. They didn't have a curfew as long as they made it to work in the morning, and being in rural Shropshire there wasn't much going on that kept them out late.

Having said that, the WAAF did host dances in their mess hall, and they'd send out buses to pick up ladies from the nearby towns. The men at Stoke Heath nicknamed the buses "Passion Wagons," giving us a pretty clear indicator of what they expected from any interaction with the local girls. The gene pool of Market Drayton got a little more diversity. Let's be honest, it kinda needs it.

 

 

Behind the mess hall, there's a bit of a maze of store rooms. It's all long been stripped out.

 

 

All of these little rooms have the remnants of shelves and plenty of intrusive nature. 

 

 

I suppose this room may have once housed a generator or something maybe. 

 

 

This door does have some old military signage. That's pretty cool. 

 

 

And then there's this big spacious room. The steps leading down into it are so overgrown I didn't even see them from the outside. I had to hop in from that opening by the tyre over there. 

 

 

With this big room being somewhat semi-subterranean, I did wonder about its usage. We have the stairs coming down into it, but also a huge vertical shaft over there with sunlight coming in. I wonder what they could have stored here that they couldn't just have access to via big ground level doorways.

 

 

All the old pipes are still on the walls.  

 

And here we have the doorway leading to the steps up to a big mess of brambles. Not wanting to get stung for no reason, I left the way I came in. 

 

 

But what's this sexy piece of oceanic traversal?

It's only a fucking boat! 

 

 

I kinda like boats. I don't know why. The floor is a bit broken on this one, making it probably not the smartest choice of vessel if one wishes to cross any body of water, unless you plan on throwing it horizontally across a large puddle and using it as a footbridge. It seems to have been abandoned down here.

 

 

Moving on from the larger "community" buildings, Stoke Heath has a huge collection of very samey residential cabins, all linked by a little road. It's weird to think that people actually lived in these.

 

 

If you look closely, each building has a faded stenciled letter, which seems to be an official military designation.

 

 

I didn't look in all of them. Mainly because it was actually impossible to get to half of them without fighting through a forest of prickly things. In spite of the situations I so often find myself in, being stabbed by plants is actually one of my least favourite things. Nevertheless I got in enough of these cabins to know that it would all get pretty repetitive.

 

 

Each cabin has a central corridor which splits off into various rooms. 

 

 

I assume the size of the accommodation would vary depending on rank.

 

 

The corners of each room have these little platforms beneath a ceiling pipe. I assume there would have been paraffin heaters here back when the cabins were occupied. 

 

As well as a wide range of identical smaller cabins, there's also a wide range of identical wider buildings, which get incessantly samey and repetitive, but I can't help but stop to photograph. 

This is the Wonder Wall of Urbex. Sure, it's basic and overplayed, but I'm still gonna sing along.

 

 

Allegedly one of these more spacious buildings was converted into an indoor tennis court by a flight sergeant at some point prior to 1951, but obviously with these buildings long abandoned and stripped out, it's impossible to tell which cabin this was.

 

 Meanwhile, back outdoors, what's this?

 

 

If you've been here and completely overlooked this bush gash, I understand. I nearly missed it too! But it is in fact the entrance to an air raid shelter.

 

 Check it out! This is so cool! 

Back to the surface...

 

 

This building has no roof left, and nature has totally claimed it. On its own it wouldn't get my attention but here it breaks up the monotony a little bit.

 

 

It still has a few small rooms. 

 

 

This room has a central wall, and it looks like something was once against it, as well as the wall behind it. It has a bit of an office vibe. I can totally see people sat at desks here.

 

 

This window is still on its hinges, still retaining its latch. It's still functional despite being a wreck.

Very relatable. And just to give a sense of scale of how spread out the area is, the mess hall is all the way over there. 

 

There's a water tank up in this tower. There's no way up to it now but on a closer look, there is the remnant of a latch on the wall, which means there was probably a wooden door and steps at some point. 

 

 

There's a load of hay in here which would suggest some sort of agricultural repurposing at some point. But what''s cool is the Military designation letter G still painted on the wall.

 

 

Inside is a copy of Farmers Weekly from 1971. 

 

 

And here's a copy of the Shropshire Star from 1974. Let's see what marvelous insight into the past this rag can offer us.

Hmm... "Eye witnesses said that Israeli planes buzzed Palestinian refugee camps but did not resume yesterdays wide ranging air strikes."

Wow, the human race has grown so much!

 

 

Some of the buildings were clearly designed to house vehicles. 

 

 

Rooms like this are prevalent at military sites, featureless, windowless, and with doors at each end. I have no idea what purpose they serve. Perhaps they had dirt pushed up against the walls to make them function as shelters.

 

 

There are some little ceiling stalactites which are pretty cool. 

 

 

In 2008, long after the Stoke Heath camp closed, it was subject to some mild controversy when traces of trichloroethylene was found in the local water. It's an industrial solvent used for cleaning. It used to be a surgical anaesthetic and a pet food additive until it was linked with kidney cancer and banned in 1977, but back when Stoke Heath was active, it was all the rage. It seems that RAF activities here had contaminated the local water. 

Whoops.

 

 

Regarding the surviving parts of RAF Tern Hill, it does pop up every now and again because of some kind of controversy. The most notable of these was in 1989 when it was attacked by the IRA. The incident happened at 3am when Lance Corporal Alan Norris noticed two suspicious people, who fled. They dropped a bag containing a bomb, but this was in fact the third they had brought along. The other two had already been planted around the accommodation barracks. Luckily Norris alerted everyone and the building was evacuated before the bombs exploded. The two IRA bombers fled in a stolen Ford Montego.  

I actually did a blog about the nearby derelict building that they used as a HQ while planning the attack, all the way back in 2015, nearly nine years ago. Now that makes me feel old. Maybe I should pack it all in and get a real job already.

 

 

 

In the present day, most of RAF Tern Hill is still in use, although the airfield itself is primarily used as a training landing ground by RAF Shawbury, and the barracks itself is called The Clive Barracks, named after that guy whose statue is in Shrewsbury Square. I actually had no idea who he was until 2020, just like hundreds of other people who walked right past him every single day.

But in the height of 2020, a lot of people suddenly realised that they had no hobbies or personality and consequently became a bunch of keyboard warriors, competing for virtue points. Bristol had made headlines by throwing a racist statue into the sea, and people in Shrewsbury realised that they also had a racist statue and decided to hop on that bandwagon. Also around that time a pensioner spread a rumour that I was, with the help of the DJ from Alberts Shed, secretly running China's Yulin festival. More bizarrely, a load of old people on the internet believed him.

2020 was a crazy year.

But I digress. Circling back to Clive, his statue became a subject of "debate" between two warring camps who really just needed a hobby and a blow job.

Young people said the statue should come down. Old people said that removing it would be erasing history. Most people didn't know who Clive even was, but if he was from the 1700s then of course he was racist. So were half the pensioners barking at me for running the Yulin festival. Personally I was in favour of keeping the statue but having an information board explaining the history and why it was controversial. In the end, that's exactly what happened, but oddly the boomers of Facebook thought that this information board explaining the history was also erasing the history. The lesson is you can't win with grumpy people on the internet, and now that the lockdowns are over and people are less bored, Clive's statue is back to being ignored again.

 

 

Bizarrely, it's the cabins at the back of the complex that seem to have had the most recent use. This one is absolutely full of clutter, and some sort of wooden contraption.

 

 

Seriously, what is this?

 

 

It kinda looks like someone has been squatting in here.

 

 

But the wooden contraption crosses the entire width of the cabin, cutting off this chunk of it, which makes it functionally problematic. Obviously it's all still accessible, but who wants to climb over something every time they want to get to the rest of a room? It's doable but a bit of a faff.

 

 

I do wonder how old all this stuff is, and if any of it was actually used by the military during the time that the Stoke Heath camp was being used. 

 

 

There have been a few more recent controversies at the Clive Barracks. There was a UFO sighting in 2008, where The Sun newspaper released some grainy footage of the fucking moon, and a murder in 2014, when 32 year-old Corporal Geoffrey McNeill was attacked by another military bloke, Mr Lance Corporal Richard Farrell. Farrell had apparently been previously floored by McNeill for being a gobby twat and had later sought out McNeill in his own quarters for a little revenge murder. 

Following Farrell's arrest the other soldiers smashed his car. Fully fucking deserved.

 

More recently there's been some controversy about the living conditions at the Clive Barracks, with some people even living in shipping containers. The MOD has announced that it will all close down and get sold at some point. But they change the closing date all the time. First they said it was 2022, and then they changed it to 2025. Currently I think it's said to be 2029. If I'm still alive by then, maybe it will join Stoke Heath on this blog. Who knows?

 

 

The final cabin has had some more recent modifications, with these block walls being installed. It looks like it may have been used to keep animals, but the building is still so sufficiently decayed that I doubt it was a recent alteration. 

 

 

There's no date on this newspaper, but it's got an interview with the novelist Berta Ruck, claiming that she has just turned 94. That dates the paper at 1972. 

 

 

And of course there's a toilet. The best part of any abandoned place.

 

 

That's pretty much all I've got. But I absolutely love this place. From an urbex perspective, it's a bloody rarity to see places so lacking in vandalism. The decay is entirely natural, with every building being slowly taken over by nature. It's lovely to see. There's not a single badly drawn penis or star of David intended to be a pentagram anywhere in this entire place. 

Unfortunately it's also pretty bleak and repetitive so absolutely not everyone's cup of tea. Personally I couldn't get enough.

As of 2019 there were plans to turn this entire area into 38 homes, although the pandemic probably delayed things somewhat. Nevertheless, I'm glad I got to document this place when I did. It's been on my radar for years, but I never got around to doing it. Now I'm doing this whole "Loose End Season" thing because I have too many loose ends, and I have to admit I would have been sad if I had left this place get destroyed without documenting it first. 

My next blogs will be an abandoned house in Shropshire with some surprising history, and then a Greek villa in... Greece, funnily enough. That's right, I'm continuing my dream of being a global bad example to others.

In the meantime, I hate social media but unfortunately it's the best way for you to see updates about my blog. Hooray. So if you like my stuff, follow me on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Vero, Twatter, Reddit and... I think that's it actually. 

Thanks for reading!