Lopcombe Corner

[broadtown]

Hi,

I have been looking at Lopcombe Corner this last few weeks. I am pretty sure a number of buildings survive. Are there any surviving plans of the place? Is Hendon a safe bet?

Best wishes

Bob

www.clarkeology.co.uk

[mickdavis]

AIR1 452/453 in the NA contain the autumn 1918 Quarterly Survey of Stations and include site plans at 6" to the mile. An easier alternative (for the buildings of the technical site) is to use www.old-maps.co.uk where the hangars etc show on maps from the immediate post-war years.

[Moonraker]

Enter "Hollom Down Farm" in the old-maps.co.uk search box, rather than Lopcombe Corner, and you'll get a 1927 map of the airfield. I couldn't get the 1925 version to load, but I do have an original 1:2500 edition showing the buildings in outline (but no details as to what is what). Snag is that the map is far too big to place my PSC, which itself is in a cramped position in my workstation. I think I might have problems getting it on the glass of many conventional photocopiers.

Mick: I didn't know about this website, so thanks, I'm off to play with it.

Moonraker

[Moonraker]

I've returned to the problem of getting a large map on my PSC, moved my workstation away from the wall, moved the PSC out, knocked my head twice and risked electrocution, but here's a selective scan from the 1925 1:2500 Ordnance Survey. Luckily the airfield is on the edge of the map. There are a couple of small buildings to the north that I couldn't fit in.

Moonraker

[broadtown]

Gentlemen,

Once again I am in your collective debt. I have taken the map posted by Moonraker and coloured the surviving buildings as far as can be assertained. Obviously some are now showing their age, but an interesting collection non the less.

Best wishes

[Moonraker]

One of my big regrets is that the big slump in postcard photography at the end of the war meant that those who had so prolifically published postcards of prewar aviation (such as at Larkhill) and soldiers on Salisbury Plain didn't seem to to bother afterwards. In eleven years of collecting, I've only come across one postcard showing a Wiltshire-area wartime airfield in the 1920s, and that was a homemade one showing Lopcombe Corner and Salisbury war memorial, with a typewritten caption. Here's the part showing "Lopcombe Corner (1924)":

(I know that the airfield was in Hampshire, but it was only just over the county border with Wiltshire.)

Surprisingly there is a series of at least 17 postcards showing RFC Yatesbury c1917 (when I would have thought censorship would have prevented their publication); and the buildings of Stonehenge Airfield can sometimes be made out in tourist postcards of the monument published in the 1920s.

Moonraker

(Broadtown: does your name indicate your proximity to the pony?)

[broadtown]

(Broadtown: does your name indicate your proximity to the pony?)

Yes I'm looking at it now!

JFYI I have just taken over the preservation group for it. Did you know it takes 1.5 tons of lime ever two years! And its a steep hill up there!

Bob