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Orford Ness Pagodas
These are the 'pagodas' (properly called laboratory 4 & 5) on Orford Ness in Suffolk, a long shingle spit, 16 km long. It begins in the town of Aldeburgh and reaches down the coast to the hamlet of Shingle Street. A curious place, shrouded in secrecy from it's days belonging to the Ministry of Defence and used as a weapons research and testing site. A lot of stories that surround the area are apocryphal due to little hard evidence remaining; however it's true to say that Watson-Watt developed radar here. The above labs were used for missile testing, in particular of the WE177 and possibly Polaris warheads. Official reports deny it, but ex-workers from the site claim that these labs were used for testing Blue Streak. The site now belongs to the National Trust, and as well as being a place of one-time strategic military importance, also comprises 12% of the world's coastal vegetative habitat. The National Trust are doing their best to maintain the extremely fragile ecology of the site and you can't just wander at will. Another reason for that is that there's still unexploded ordnance that keeps coming to the surface!
Worth taking a guided tour.
Orford Ness Pagodas
These are the 'pagodas' (properly called laboratory 4 & 5) on Orford Ness in Suffolk, a long shingle spit, 16 km long. It begins in the town of Aldeburgh and reaches down the coast to the hamlet of Shingle Street. A curious place, shrouded in secrecy from it's days belonging to the Ministry of Defence and used as a weapons research and testing site. A lot of stories that surround the area are apocryphal due to little hard evidence remaining; however it's true to say that Watson-Watt developed radar here. The above labs were used for missile testing, in particular of the WE177 and possibly Polaris warheads. Official reports deny it, but ex-workers from the site claim that these labs were used for testing Blue Streak. The site now belongs to the National Trust, and as well as being a place of one-time strategic military importance, also comprises 12% of the world's coastal vegetative habitat. The National Trust are doing their best to maintain the extremely fragile ecology of the site and you can't just wander at will. Another reason for that is that there's still unexploded ordnance that keeps coming to the surface!
Worth taking a guided tour.