Building 75 (C-type Hangar) , Aircraft Storage Unit Site

Details

1360/0/10017

ST PAUL MALMESBURY WITHOUT
HULLAVINGTON BARRACKS
Building 75 (C-type hangar), Aircraft Storage Unit site

GV II

Aircraft storage shed. 1938. A Bulloch, architectural adviser to the Air Ministry's Directorate of Works and Buildings, Drawing No 4637/35. Bath stone ashlar on concrete or block, steel stanchions and roof framing, asbestos slate roofs.

PLAN: Hangar in 12 bays with annexes along side-walls containing crew room, locker room, armament, ground equipment rooms, offices and other workshop accommodation.

EXTERIOR: At each end are 6 full-height steel doors with paired full-width lights at the top, to overhead sliding gear, but no gantries. Above the doors is a deep apron clad in asbestos slate, and at each end there is a one bay return with parapet taken to this same height; the remaining 10 bays have a lower parapet, above a continuous range of paired lights in 4 x 4 large panes, protected externally by (later) translucent corrugated sheeting. The parapets conceal the series of hipped roofs. To side walls are low, flat-roofed single-storey annexes, with 2 and 3-light steel casements with horizontal bars, the windows grouped under lintel bands, and central doorways.

INTERIOR: The principal trusses, set to the right-lines of the multiple roofs, are formed from paired small channel connected by flat zig-zag bracing, or some flat plating, with main bracing of flats or angles, and a complex of cross members at two levels carried to horizontal chords at mid bay; lateral support and bracing is provided in the outer wall planes above the window strip. The end bays have wind-bracing in the horizontal plane at door-head height. The roof slopes have been underlined with fibre-board insulation.

HISTORY: The Type C, of which 146 sheds were built on 72 sites, was the standard hangar of the post-1934 expansion scheme: it was designed with a span of 150 feet (45.7m) and a length of 300 feet (91.4m). The first designs by Bulloch displayed an assured handling of the functional and aesthetic challenges that these large sheds posed, Moderne influences being particularly strong in the handling of the end bays and the massing of the workshop blocks to the rear of the repair hangar. The hangars at Hullavington, by virtue of their degree of preservation and the use of local limestone, present themselves as the finest architectural assemblage of aircraft hangars of the inter-war period. This building comprises part of a remarkably complete technical group, established to the N of the main group on this nationally-important base for the purpose of providing repair and administration facilities to the Aircraft Storage Unit.
Hullavington, which opened on June 6th 1937 as a Flying Training Station, is in every respect the key station most strongly representative of the improved architectural quality characteristic of the air bases developed under the post-1934 expansion of the RAF. Its position in the west of England with other training and maintenance bases also prompted its selection in 1938 as one of series of Aircraft Storage Units for the storage of vital reserves destined for the operational front-line. For further details on the site, see Buildings 59, 60 and 61 (The Officers' Mess).

End of official list entry