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RAF Brooklands is unusual among wartime ‘airfields’ because its story is inseparable from industry. Brooklands at Weybridge, Surrey, was already famous long before 1939: an early aerodrome and the home of major aircraft firms, sitting alongside the motor-racing circuit. When war came, Brooklands became a vital production, repair and flight-test centre – less a front-line station and more a hard-worked engine room of Britain’s air war.
The Vickers-Armstrongs works at Brooklands was central to the Vickers Wellington, one of the RAF’s key twin-engine bombers. Designed here by Rex Pierson using Barnes Wallis’s geodetic construction principles, the Wellington was strong, damage-tolerant and adaptable. Across the war 11,000+ were produced, and Brooklands accounted for a substantial portion of that output. The aircraft’s durability made it valuable for training and operations alike, and its steady production helped sustain Bomber Command during a period when Britain urgently needed bombers in quantity.
Brooklands also mattered to Fighter Command through Hawker’s presence. Hurricanes were assembled and supported here, and the surrounding area carried the tension of 1940 when aircraft output was as strategically important as radar stations and fighter airfields. That importance made Brooklands a target. On 4 September 1940 the Luftwaffe mounted a brief daylight raid that devastated the Vickers factory – an attack remembered for its heavy civilian casualties and for the shock of a major strike on a key aircraft plant in the Battle of Britain period. Two days later the Hawker facilities were attacked as well, reinforcing the point that the Battle of Britain was fought over factories as much as over airfields.
After the September 1940 bombing, Brooklands adapted rapidly. Design and experimental teams were dispersed to safer nearby locations while production and acceptance work continued under camouflage and defensive precautions. The Brooklands engineering culture also fed into special-project development, including work associated with Wallis’s ideas that culminated in the ‘bouncing bomb’ concept, later used by 617 Squadron in 1943.
Operationally, Brooklands functioned as an aerodrome for test flying, deliveries and acceptance – roles that can look mundane until you consider the scale. Camouflage, dispersal and off-site work areas around Weybridge helped keep production moving under threat of further raids. Aircraft do not win wars unless finished machines can be proved, flown out, delivered, and supported with repair and modification capacity. Brooklands’ runways and flying village made that possible, bridging drawing office, factory floor and operational squadron.
By the end of the Second World War, Brooklands had produced and flown thousands of military aircraft through the Hawker and Vickers companies, while also bearing the scars of bombing and hurried wartime construction. Its wartime legacy is the risk taken by engineers and factory workers who built the aircraft that fought the war. If front-line airfields were the spear, Brooklands was part of the forge that made the spearheads.