Full WW2 control tower details and photos for this wartime airfield are coming soon. Please check back later as this is work progress. If you would like to contribute information or photos please get in touch.
RAF Blackbushe, originally opened as RAF Hartford Bridge on 1 November 1942, occupied a strategically useful position in Hampshire close to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough and within reach of the south coast. Its wartime role combined operational flying with development work, and it became a busy, flexible station supporting reconnaissance, defence and strike operations through the final years of the war.
During 1943-44 the airfield hosted a mix of squadrons and aircraft types, including Spitfires, Venturas, Mustangs, Bostons and Mosquitoes. This variety reflects the station’s adaptability: different squadrons could use Blackbushe for tactical reconnaissance, intruder missions, armed reconnaissance and light bombing. The presence of Free French units, including the ‘Lorraine’ squadron, also highlights the international nature of Allied air power operating from southern England.
Blackbushe also had a distinctive experimental thread. During construction, the already-laid runways were used for glider testing, including trials involving the large Hamilcar glider – a reminder of the airborne planning that sat alongside conventional air operations. Its proximity to Farnborough also meant the airfield was associated with work on the Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation (FIDO) system, designed to help aircraft land in thick fog by burning fuel along runways to clear the air. Such developments were part of the wider wartime push to keep air operations going regardless of weather.
The station’s importance was not purely technical. Senior figures used the airfield, and it became one of the many places where the machinery of Allied leadership intersected with operational aviation. In November 1944 the station was renamed RAF Blackbushe, and toward the end of the war and immediately after it supported transport and communications flying. One tragic post-war event associated with the airfield was the 8 October 1945 crash of a Liberator shortly after take-off, an accident that underlines how dangerous flying remained even when the shooting had stopped.
Blackbushe closed as an RAF station in November 1946 and became a civil airport, later known again for commercial and general aviation. Its wartime story, however, is an unusually rich blend: a tactical station with a broad mix of squadrons, a testing ground for glider and fog-dispersal work, and a busy Hampshire base whose runways connected operational air war with the technical innovations that helped keep aircraft flying.
Tactical airfields in southern England were closely tied to the build-up for D-Day and the campaign in northwest Europe, with units rotating through as needs changed.
Development and operational flying often overlapped, meaning a station could be simultaneously a working base and a test site for equipment designed to reduce weather-related losses.
The station’s later civil aviation history gives it continuity, but the wartime period remains the foundation of its airfield layout and much of its infrastructure.
For visitors and researchers today, the most rewarding approach is to combine surviving site evidence (perimeter tracks, dispersal loops, building footprints) with squadron ORBs, logbooks and local testimony, which together recreate how the station worked day to day.