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 Croydon was not a remote wartime aerodrome carved from fields, but Britain’s pre-war ‘London Airport’ at the edge of the capital, already famous for civil flying when war came. That prominence made Croydon strategically valuable and dangerously exposed. As the threat grew in 1939-40 the airfield shifted from commercial hub to military station, supporting fighter defence and the wider air communications network of southeast England.
In the early months of the war, RAF squadrons rotated through Croydon as operational needs demanded. During the crisis period of May-June 1940, units such as No. 607 Squadron used the station briefly, followed by No. 111 Squadron flying Hawker Hurricane Mk.I fighters. These were intense weeks: the evacuation of Dunkirk, the collapse of France and the looming prospect of invasion placed enormous pressure on Fighter Command, and Croydon’s proximity to London made it part of the defensive ring guarding the capital and the approaches from the Channel and the North Sea.
The airfield’s most dramatic wartime moment came on 15 August 1940, when Luftwaffe aircraft attacked Croydon in a raid that caused destruction on the aerodrome and surrounding area. The event became a defining local memory, illustrating how battlefronts could suddenly appear over suburban streets. The station’s fighters were launched to intercept, and while air combat and anti-aircraft fire shaped the engagement, the bombing’s impact on people and buildings was immediate and personal. Croydon’s role as a combined civil-military site meant that the boundary between ‘airfield’ and ‘town’ was thin, and the raid’s casualties and damage reinforced the reality that Britain’s air war was fought within reach of everyday life.
Croydon’s wartime function extended beyond fighters. As a key node for air communications and administration, the station supported movements of personnel and aircraft, and its facilities remained useful for transport and liaison tasks. Yet the threat environment constrained operations: blackout conditions, air raid alerts and the need to disperse or protect assets all shaped how the airfield could be used.
Compared with rural sector stations, Croydon faced unique pressures: limited space for dispersal, constant civilian presence nearby, and the symbolic weight of being ‘London’s airport.’ Its hangars, control facilities and perimeter were part of a landscape already built up with roads and housing, making camouflage and defence more complicated.
After the Battle of Britain, Croydon’s frontline fighter role diminished and civil aviation gradually reasserted itself elsewhere, but the airfield’s Second World War story remains significant. It demonstrates how major transport infrastructure was rapidly militarised, how fighter squadrons were surged into threatened areas, and how the Luftwaffe’s bombing campaign reached deep into the capital’s orbit. Today, surviving buildings and museum interpretation help connect visitors to an airfield where Britain’s civil flying heritage and wartime defence history intersected in a single, dramatic place.
Croydon also shows how quickly civil infrastructure was absorbed into the war effort: commercial terminals and hangars were repurposed for military control, dispersal and administration, and the airfield’s story became inseparable from home-front life.