Recent Military Heritage
Background
Many of English Heritage's best known and most popular properties have served a military purpose at one time or another. Dover Castle in Kent for example; Pendennis and St Mawes castles in Cornwall; Hurst Castle in Hampshire; and Tilbury Fort in Essex. Military re-enactments, from the Romans to World War II, form an important part of our summer programmes at these sites, which are also used as part of the national curriculum. Many military sites now have statutory protection, as listed buildings or scheduled monuments.
Underpinning many of these initiatives is the need to understand and conserve buildings, sites and monuments in order that they can continue to be enjoyed by this and future generations. It is an increasingly popular subject, as the viewing figures for television programmes on this theme, and visitor numbers to properties indicates. But we must understand this part of the heritage if we are to manage it effectively. To provide this understanding, English Heritage has been commissioning original historical and archaeological research on the subject of recent military heritage since 1995. Much of this work has been based on archive sources held at the National Archives (formerly the Public Records Office or PRO), Kew. Studies have been concluded which document anti-aircraft gunnery, radar, coast artillery, the bombing decoys put in place during World War II to deceive enemy bombers, civil defence structures and so on. A progress report provides a comprehensive list of projects to date. For most of these classes of site the work has provided a classification which can be used by surveyors and investigators in the field, as well as revealing the distribution and total numbers of sites (to the accuracy of 6-figure grid references) and the strategic thinking behind each of these types of site. The reports produced are substantial documents now held by local authorities in their Historic Environment Records, and at the National Monuments Record, Swindon. Books on these themes are also being published in partnership with Methuen in their Monuments of War series. date can be purchased through our Customer Services Department.
In addition we have extended this study chronologically into the Cold War, continuing a programme of work started by the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME, now merged with English Heritage), and thematically to include studies of army camps, prisoner of war camps, as well as military aircraft crash sites and war art. As well as these national programmes our survey teams continue to investigate military sites, while many new sites have been added by the National Mapping Programme. Some examples of particular projects and initiatives follow.
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