Reasons for Designation
Military Aviation building
Details
1783/0/10007
MANBY,
MANBY BUSINESS PARK,
Tedder Hall (former Instructional Building)
GV II
Training school and workshops. 1937, to 1935 design by A Bulloch, architect to the Air Ministry's Directorate of Works and Buildings (drawing no. 77/35). Cavity wall brick with hipped interlocking tile roof.
Plan: main range set around a central courtyard with additional narrow yard to E bounded on E side by workshops.
Exterior: 2 storeys. Flat arches with brick voussoir heads and concrete sills to glazing bar sashes throughout. N front, facing onto parade ground, has 17-window range and central first-floor triple window with brick mullions to 16:32:16-pane sashes. This is set above a flat-roofed porch, with scolloped metal lights to small windows in side returns and keyed semi-circular arch with imposts extended over flanking channelled lights. All other sashes are 32-pane, with the exception of a triple window of same form as centre to off-centre of each side of first floor. W and S elevations are similar. To the E are 5-bay ranges with 9-pane sashes that extend to N and S sides of narrow courtyard to meet a parapetted workshop range along the E side of Tedder Hall. This has large entrances to N and S, flanked by 6-pane sashes, and a single-storey E elevation. This has a 5-bay projecting central section, with a taller parapet, that has 3 tall semi-circular arched sashes flanked by narrow sash windows, that on left deepened into door; this range is flanked by 28-pane sashes with casements to flat-roofed dormers above.
INTERIOR: Hall has stairs with steel Art Deco balustrade. Main entrance flanked by phone booths and half-glazed panelled doors.
HISTORY: This imposing and uniquely designed building, by the Air Ministry architect, A Bulloch, makes a significant contribution to a key aviation site. Detailing is restrained throughout, but massing, spacing and proportions are carefully considered, in the neo-Georgian style favoured at this period, and influenced by the impact of the Royal Fine Arts Commission, especially though the architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens.
Manby was one the first generation (Scheme A) of post-1934 Expansion Period stations, although construction did not commence until 1936 and it was not opened until July 1938. It was built as an Armament Training School, and comprised the RAF's principal armament training section at the beginning of the Second World War, training armament officers, bomb aimers, air gunners and armourers with a variety of aircraft ranging from Hawker Hinds to Wellingtons. At the outset of the war it was provided with a decoy airfield at Mablethorpe and used the bombing and gunnery range at Thaddlethorpe. It was later equipped with two paved runways (1,448 and 1,232 yards). The RAF Flying College was formed here in 1949, and the base was closed in 1974.
It ranks with Hullavington in Wiltshire - another Scheme A station - as the most complete and architecturally unified of the post-1934 Expansion Period stations, reflective of the consultation with the Royal Fine Arts Commission which resulted in the appointment of A Bulloch as the Air Ministry's consultant architect, on the same lines as Holden's appointment by London Transport. They were both designed for the purposes of training, a purpose which allowed a greater formality of planning than purely operational stations, here achieved by the grouping of the principal buildings around a large parade ground. The domestic and administrative buildings - Bullish designs of 1934-5 - are designed in a broadly neo-Georgian style, using timber double-hung sashes, and elevations presented in carefully-considered areas of wall and window, with regularity of layout and the comfortable proportions characteristic of the period. Many of these designs, from the barracks blocks to the sergeants' mess and the fine instructional block, have not been noted on any of the other sites identified during the course of this thematic survey. The technical buildings, grouped around the C-type hangars which front onto the flying field to the west, use standard steel casements, with horizontal bars, but again there is meticulous attention to layout and detail, seen for instance in the grouping of rows of lights to a continuous drip course, and the neatly finished flush copings. The Officers' Mess, the largest of the domestic buildings, is set apart to the south, with its own driveway, and the married officers' and NCO's quarters to the south-east form an exceptionally well preserved group.
(Bruce Barrymore Halpenny, Action Stations 2 (Military Airfields of Lincolnshire and the East Midlands), Wellingborough, 1981, pp.130-136; Operations Record Books, PRO AIR 28/1074 and 29/588; Paul Francis, British Military Airfield Architecture, Sparkford, 1996; Colin Dobinson, Airfield Themes (report for English Heritage), 1997)
