Places
Runways, dispersals, and the human geography of wartime flying. Each place connects to the aircraft and squadrons that passed through it.
Airfield
RAF Abbots Bromley was a Royal Air Force airfield in Staffordshire, England, that operated between 1940 and 1949. During World War II, it served as a Relief Landing Ground for pilot training, specifically used by flight schools based at nearby RAF Burnaston. Trainees at the site typically practiced in Miles Magisters and Tiger Moths.
RAF Abbots Bromley was a British military airfield in Staffordshire that operated from 1940 to 1949. It primarily served as a training base for novice pilots during World War II, using small biplanes like the Tiger Moth.
Because the site was boxed in by local roads, it couldn't be expanded for larger combat planes, so it was eventually used to store bombs toward the end of the war. After the RAF left in 1949, the land was mostly returned to farming. Today, most of the old runways are gone, though a small part of the site is still used as a private grass airstrip for light aircraft.
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Today, most of the former RAF Abbots Bromley has returned to its original state as farmland. Because it was a training base with grass runways and temporary buildings, there is very little military infrastructure left to see.
The main things that remain are:
RAF Abbots Bromley did not have the concrete or tarmac runways typically seen at larger bomber bases. Instead, it was an all-grass airfield. The site featured three grass runways arranged in a triangular pattern to allow training aircraft to take off and land in different wind directions.
Because the airfield was boxed in by local roads, these grass strips were relatively short—roughly 600 metres (about 2,000 feet) long. This limited the airfield to small training planes like Tiger Moths, as there wasn't enough space to build the long, paved runways required for heavy bombers.
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