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 Stanley Park is best understood as part of Blackpool’s wider wartime RAF ecosystem rather than as a classic operational flying station with its own runways. Blackpool became a major training, accommodation and technical instruction centre during the war, linked closely to the nearby flying airfield at RAF Squires Gate. In that context, ‘Stanley Park’ functioned as an RAF site that supported the human and administrative needs of the war effort – billeting, instruction spaces, medical and welfare facilities, and the kind of back-room organisation that kept trainees and ground staff moving through the system.
Blackpool’s wartime value came from scale. The town could absorb large numbers of personnel, and its transport links made it ideal for training establishments and technical schools. RAF Squires Gate hosted flying and industrial activity (including aircraft production and test flying in the area), while ancillary sites and camps around Blackpool – including locations associated with Stanley Park – helped house, feed and train the thousands of men and women needed to operate and maintain aircraft. In practical terms, that meant classrooms, drill squares, workshops and the constant administration of postings, examinations and trade tests.
Although Stanley Park itself is not remembered for squadrons launching combat sorties, it still connects to aircraft and units through the training it supported. Technical and trade instruction in Blackpool fed aircraft types being produced and operated in the region, including the Vickers Wellington (built in large numbers at the area’s shadow-factory sites), and the range of training and operational aircraft using the north-west’s coastal airspace – Avro Ansons, trainers, and fighter types that rotated through for defence and conversion. The ‘unit story’ here is therefore a school story: training units, technical training schools, RAF Regiment/defence elements and administrative organisations rather than front-line squadrons.
For visitors, the most useful way to interpret RAF Stanley Park is to see it as part of the RAF’s workforce machine. The war was won by systems: not only pilots in the air, but mechanics, armourers, wireless operators, administrators, medics and instructors who made flying possible. Sites like this trained and sustained those people. They also reveal something about the RAF’s social geography – how seaside towns and parks became militarised spaces, with barrack blocks and classrooms replacing peacetime leisure at the height of mobilisation.
- Primary wartime role: Blackpool support and training infrastructure linked to the wider RAF presence in the town and nearby RAF Squires Gate.
- Typical units: training and technical instruction organisations; administrative and welfare/support elements; airfield defence presence in the Blackpool network.
- Aircraft connection (via nearby flying and production activity): Vickers Wellington, Avro Anson and other RAF trainers and defence types operating from the local area.
Stanley Park’s WWII significance is therefore ‘human infrastructure’: a reminder that air power depended on training, accommodation and organisation on a massive scale, as much as it depended on runways and combat sorties.