Former RAF base near Cambridgeshire that played vital role in WW2 and Cold War

While fighter planes, bombers, and their pilots were instrumental in WW2, there were hundreds of people in the RAF whose feet never left the ground. The roles these people played were no less important than their flying colleagues – but are often less celebrated.

Not far from Cambridgeshire, an RAF base on the outskirts of Leighton Buzzard played a pivotal role in WW2 and the Cold War. RAF Stanbridge, also known as RAF Leighton Buzzard, was a non-flying RAF station with important intelligence and communications roles.

Between 30 November and 1 December 1937, a wireless transmitter van travelling through the countryside found that Leighton Buzzard was suitable for building a remote reception station. The location was also favourable as it was near an existing General Post Office (GPO) telephone cable.

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The base opened as RAF Leighton Buzzard in May 1939, acting as the RAF’s main wireless receiving station for all international traffic. Its landline communications were integral to both the Army and the Navy – without it, the whole of the landline communication network in the country would have collapsed.

RAF Leighton Buzzard was used for many war-time tasks, including training plotters and experimenting on the effects of keeping pigeons underground during battles. The station also housed the Air Defence of Great Britain’s (ADGB) Emergency Operations Room (EOR) in the base’s technical area, before it was converted to host teleprinters.

Service workers and military personnel stationed at Leighton Buzzard during WW2 lived in hostels in the town. As the number of personnel required to work the station increased, a camp at Marley Tiles Works was expanded to keep up with the numbers.

Renamed RAF Stanbridge after the war, the base continued to be a hub for the RAF’s communications network during the Cold War, becoming the RAF’s Central Signals Centre in 1959. Overall, around 10,000 messages a day were dealt with by RAF Stanbridge.

Between January and November 1958, the station handled 2,614,000 messages and had a failure rate of only 0.0047%. Each message which arrived at Stanbridge was transcribed manually at the speed of 40 words per minute before being sent out again.

The site officially closed in 2013 and a single Spitfire from the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight flew over the station as the ensign was lowered for the last time. It is now a housing development.