Massive Military Base - Thread - Urban Exploration Resource

Be warned, this is likely to be my lengthiest photo thread ever. I wasn't kidding when I said it was massive!

There is a lengthy personal back story to how this all came about but it's pretty irrelevant and I want to keep the text here to a minimum. Basically this was a permission visit that was over three and a half years in the making, and we finally got the go ahead a month ago, just a week after the Ministry of Defence handed the keys to the site over to the new security team and developers. The military vacated the base last year and the whole site is going to be demolished to make way for a pretty much completely rebuilt town. Two of the four parts of the site which sit in other areas have been flattened already and were quite big in their own right.

This place is absolutely mind-blowingly huge. The size of a small town. One half of the base is the former barracks and communal side which housed many, many accomodation rooms. But also a supermarket, two self-serve launderettes, a bar/pub/club, huge canteen, sergeants mess, officers mess, armoury, police station, jail, gymnasium and all sorts of other buildings. This was the half we decided to explore on the first day. I was fully expecting for me and my companion to be constantly shadowed by security, but they let us in to two buildings and after that we were on our own. This meant we had to get our 'urbex' hats on and find ways into everything else ourselves! After much perseverence we managed to get around most of what we wanted to see, although disappointly the armoury, police station and gymnasium were locked up securely no matter how hard we tried to find a way in.

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Fast forward a few weeks and I was back there, this time to tackle the bigger half of the site. This was a vast industrial area, which in it's former usage went to creating armoured vehicles, tanks, personnel carriers etc etc but in it's later life it was a huge military training facility, which taught recruits all kinds of disciplines from engine and transmission maintenance/construction, weapons training, welding, electronics, machine tools and everything in between. Thankfully we could drive between buildings on this part, but even so we spent over seven hours there and walked ten miles according to my mates fancy smart watch. Had we been slogging it between each building on foot we wouldn't have seen as much for sure.

Once again we were left to our own devices from the beginning, and we managed to get into about half of the bigger buildings on site.

The first building we found was the former welding facility, recruits were trained in both arc and oxy-acetylene welding in this building.

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The next building was the former electrical engineering and engine/transmissions building, but in earlier life it had a much more heavy industrial use. There was a load of random stuff dumped in here in one corner, presumably from some old exhibition or something.

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They had built a partition wall through the end of the crane gantry, which was quite odd. The end of it was just visible poking out the other side of the wall.

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After a little wander we found ourselves in the former admin building, it was empty but had a few nice features like the old telephone exchange, and also housed classrooms and laboratories.

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By this point we were getting hungry so popped off-site to pick up some lunch, came back and had a nice munch sat on the grass outside our next target, the boiler house.

It was almost unbearably hot and stuffy in here thanks to one side of the building being entirely made of glass panels, but it was good to see none of the stuff had been stripped out.

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Whilst on our way to the next big target building we swung by the former dog section kennels. Each dog had it's own purpose-built hut inside each of the numerous pens....

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...before we ducked into the firearms test-firing tunnel. The extremely thick concrete-lined tube was built into an earth bank and lined with sound-deadening material.

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After those two smaller sections of the site we popped into the largest building by far, which dominates the landscape of this part of the base. Parts of it have been sectioned off now into some surprising things as we were to find out, but one half was used for the storage of armoured vehicles, personnel carriers and other heavy machinery as well as recovery training and bulk machinery stores.

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Part of it had been turned into an indoor sports hall.

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And another area had formed the home of the motorcycle workshop.

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We then hopped over to the second biggest building handily right next door, this was a much more modern facility which formed the field workshop. It also had fully functioning gantry cranes which we may have had a little play around with. We also later found out from the security team that police dog handlers regularly train in this building and around the site ;)

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Who put that up there.... ;)

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When we had finished playing with the machinery in the massive cavernous field workshop we headed back up the site to the small arms and optic instruments training building, which had a bundle of absolutely brilliant signage scattered throughout.

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Last stop on our marathon journey after striking out at a few inaccessible buldings was the fittings & machine shop.

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So there it is, likely the biggest location I will ever get the chance to explore. I took almost 300 photos across the two days, so cutting it down to a third of that I thought was quite good!

If you didn't get bored halfway through I salute you.