Details
173/0/10007
01-DEC-05
NORTH WEALD BASSETT
EPPING ROAD
Former RAF North Weald
(South side)
Norway House (former Officers' Mess)
GV
II
Officers' mess. By the Air Ministry's Directorate of Works and Buildings, to drawing no. 1524/25. Red brick with rusticated quoins, slate roofs and brick stacks.
PLAN: A complex group, symmetrical to the front. Hipped single-storey central block with ante-room and card and writing rooms connected to the main mess and billiard rooms behind, sited next to which are the kitchen and service ranges. Set back to each side a lower connecting corridor to 2-storey wings containing single rooms to central corridors; the whole forming a wide extended 'H'.
EXTERIOR: Windows are timber cross-windows set to brick soldier arches and stooled concrete sills. Single-storey 7-bay central range with gablets to outer hips. The main entrance porch has engaged Tuscan columns to entablature and with flanking rusticated quoins. Double-leaf inner doors. Cupola set to louvred clock tower on central axis behind. Accommodation blocks have multi-bay returns, with flat-roofed dormers.
INTERIOR: Dog-leg staircases. Classical chimneypieces. The dining room has a flat segmental plaster panelled ceiling above a continuous horizontal moulded architrave, panelled doors in moulded architraves, wall pilasters, and high-level windows.
HISTORY: This mess building, conforming in its separation of mess from accommodation the principles of dispersal against aerial attack, was one of the first buildings completed for Trenchard's Home Defence Expansion Scheme, underway from late 1923 and which included the rebuilding of bases in a 'fighter belt' stretching from Duxford near Cambridge to Wiltshire. North Weald was one of the sector stations in Fighter Command's front-line 11 Group which played a key role in the Battle of Britain, the first time in history that a nation had retained its freedom and independence through air power. It was developed as a key fighter station in the inter-war period, the officers' mess being a good example of a standard 1920s design that now survives as the principal surviving structure on this former military base. North Weald was one of a series of key fighter airfields around London that were provided with runways, perimeter dispersals and fighter pens at the outset of the Second World War. As a little-altered military airfield landscape of this period and o in the Second World War it has considerable historic interest. After Kenley and Debden, North Weald has the most complete survival of fighter pens on a key aviation site, although the airfield was remodelled for jet fighters in the 1950s and 12 pillboxes and most original fighter pens have survived on the airfield perimeter, together with 14 out of the original 23 frying pan dispersals. Of all the sites which became involved in The Battle of Britain, none have greater resonance in the popular imagination than those of the sector airfields within these Groups which bore the brunt of the Luftwaffe onslaught and, in Churchill's words, 'on whose organisation and combination the whole fighting power of our Air Force at this moment depended'. It was 11 Group, commanded by Air Vice Marshall Keith Park from his underground headquarters at RAF Uxbridge, which occupied the front line in this battle, with its 'nerve centre' sector stations at Northolt, North Weald, Biggin Hill, Tangmere, Debden and Hornchurch taking some of the most sustained attacks of the battle, especially between 24 August and 6 September when these airfields and later aircraft factories became the Luftwaffe's prime targets.
Wilf Nicoll, 'North Weald', in W.G. Ramsey (ed), The Battle of Britain Then and Now, (5th edition, London, 1989), pp. 160-175; Churchill, W. The Second World War. Volume II: Their Finest Hour (London, 1949); Lake, J. and Schofield, J., 'Conservation and the Battle of Britain'. In The Burning Blue. A New History of the Battle of Britain, Addison, P. and Crang, J. (eds), 229-242 (London, 2000); Wood, D. and Dempster, D. The Narrow Margin (London, 1969)
