Situated just half a mile away from Coalhouse Fort, East Tilbury Battery, was constructed from 1887-93 and supplemented Coalhouse Fort as part of the Thames’ coastal defence system. It housed six breech-loading guns, mounted on disappearing carriages. There was two 10-inch guns in the centre, and two pairs of 6-pdr guns on either flank. At…
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Cfen Coed Hospital, in Swansea, is one of few original asylum buildings to still be in use today. It was also one of the last to be built following delays caused by the First World War which led to a shortage of materials and labour. Construction started in 1928 and the asylum was completed in…
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This battery is perhaps one of Cliffe’s least well-recognised pieces of ruined defence heritage. The initial Lower Hope Battery was built to defend the Thames Estuary at Lower Hope Point from around 1796, predating the Palmerston Fort defence scheme in the wider area such as Cliffe, Shornemead and Coalhouse Fort by almost 70 years. It…
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We recently embarked on a roadtrip across Scotland, focused on abandoned asylums and other hospitals. We photographed a total of eight, six of those being former asylums. The variations and similarities in their architecture was most interesting, with changes to asylum design being apparent. This varied from the streamlined design of the Georgian Royal Murray…
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Along Salt Lane in Cliffe lies an overgrown pair of air raid shelter tunnels installed to protect industrial workers of the Alpha cement works in WW2. It is suggested that the two shelters remaining today were actually two entrance-ways into a larger shelter capable of holding hundreds of people, although they seem to be of…
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Heatherwood Hospital, in Ascot, has been in use for over a century. Construction started in early 1920’s for a hospital to care for the children of servicemen from the First World War. The first patients were admitted in May 1922 and the hospital was officially opened by the Duke of Connaught in the following year….
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Headley Court Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre (DMRC) was once one of the leading rehab centres in the UK. The 58-bed facility helped injured servicemen and women with rehabilitation and prosthetics and even went on to treat veterans. Corporal Andrew Garthwaite, was the first person in the UK to receive a mind-controlled prosthetic limb and spent…
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St. Mary’s Church in the tiny village of Mundon in Essex is a strikingly unusual and old-looking building. It’s timber-framed construction sets it apart as a building of bygone origin and design. It was built in the fourteenth-century within the moated site of Mundon Hall. Possibly built on the site of an Anglo-Saxon church, it…
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As bombings intensified during the Second World War the Government embarked on a programme of constructing deep level air raid shelters beneath the streets of London, usually near underground stations. This one has some 210 steps before you reach the bomb-proof tunnels where up to 8,000 people would have sheltered. Due to the challenges of…
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Following intense bombing during the Second World War, Londoners were in need of new homes – and fast. The solution adopted by the Government was a unique scheme which saw temporary homes being built in factories, sometimes by prisoners of war, to speed up the construction process. 1,500 homes were destroyed in Lewisham in the…
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