RAF Hendon

Hendon, in what is now north-west London, was one of the birthplaces of British aviation. From around 1910 the showman-aviator Claude Grahame-White turned the open ground at Colindale into a celebrated aerodrome, the scene of pioneering airmail and night flights and, after the First World War, of the famous RAF Pageants and Displays that drew crowds of a hundred thousand and more through the 1920s and 1930s. By the Second World War the surrounding suburbs had closed in and Hendon’s grass field was too small for front-line operations; its wartime role was chiefly communications and transport, ferrying staff and despatches and housing a number of communication squadrons, with a brief flurry of fighter activity during the Battle of Britain. Flying ended in 1957 as the jet age made the field obsolete. The site is best known today as the home of the Royal Air Force Museum London, which opened on the historic airfield in 1972, the remainder having been given over to housing.