RAF Kenley

RAF Kenley sits on the chalk plateau of the North Downs in Surrey, a little over 500 feet above sea level on the southern edge of London, on a site that has been an aerodrome since the closing years of the First World War. The airfield was laid out in 1917 by the contractor Constable, Hart & Co for the Royal Flying Corps as an aircraft acceptance park, processing machines on their way to the Western Front, and it carried a continuous frontline RAF presence from that point until 1959. Between the wars Kenley was home to a succession of biplane fighter squadrons flying Bulldogs and Gloster Gladiators, and in August 1939 the station was rebuilt almost from scratch with concrete runways, dispersed blast pens and the infrastructure needed for a generation of monoplane fighters then entering service.

By the summer of 1940 Kenley had become one of the three principal Sector Stations of No. 11 Group, Fighter Command, sharing with Biggin Hill and Croydon the air defence of London and the south-east. Hurricanes and Spitfires from 64, 111, 501, 615 and other squadrons flew from its runways through the Battle of Britain, vectored onto incoming raids by the sector operations room. The airfield itself was on the Luftwaffe target list, and on 18 August 1940 — the day later christened the “Hardest Day” because of the losses on both sides — a low-level strike by Dornier Do 17s of KG 76 caught Kenley with its hangars and aircraft still on the ground. Two of the station’s three remaining hangars were destroyed, ten aircraft including six Hurricanes were written off and the runways were cratered from end to end, though the sector operations room was kept running from a requisitioned shop in nearby Caterham within hours.

Kenley remained in the fighter role through the rest of the war and into the post-war years, hosting Polish, Canadian and Auxiliary Air Force squadrons — among them 302, 312, 350, 602, 611 and 616 — flying Spitfires and later jet types. Fighter Command’s withdrawal in 1959 ended powered fixed-wing operations, and the station was wound down to a gliding role under what became No. 615 Volunteer Gliding Squadron. The site remains Ministry of Defence property and is shared with the public as Kenley Common, managed by the City of London Corporation.

What survives at Kenley is unusually complete. Eleven of the twelve original E-shaped fighter pens built in 1939 are still in place around the perimeter, together with the surviving hangars, blast walls and the pattern of the wartime airfield itself, and the whole layout was given Scheduled Monument status in 2004. It is generally accepted as the most intact Battle of Britain fighter airfield left in Britain.