History : For over 50 years Pyestock was at the forefront of gas turbine development and was almost certainly the largest site of its kind in the world. V bomber, Harrier and Tornado engines were all rigorously tested on site, the power of the air house allowed Concorde’s engines to be tested at 2,000 mph, every single gas turbine installed in the Royal Navy were checked here, captured Soviet engines were discretely examined – and all this on terra firma, without a single plane taking off.
We decided that we needed to make the trek down to Pyestock before the bulldozers move in so we did.
Walking round the perimeter fence we noticed lots of places where openings had been fixed. We spent ages looking for a way in, thought we’d found one but it was too small and one of us got a little stuck! We kept looking and eventually found a way in.
We went straight to the Air House. Went upstairs and walked around for a bit, got to the end of the building then heard what we thought we foot steps coming from near the entrance moving towards us. We quietly darted up and down stairs looking for another way out with no luck. We walked round until we got back to the entrance and made a swift exit. We still don’t know if we were being paranoid, was it security, pigeons or pikeys? You can see evidence that pikeys have been hard at work all round the site stripping out cables.
We walked across to cell 4. This place was pretty interesting, spent a while walking round it. Really wish I had more than an iphone to take photos with!!!
We started to walk towards the computer building, I stopped to takes some photos, while I was doing this Ash spotted the white Land Rover heading our direction.
Not wanting to push our luck we swiftly climbed over loads of blue pipes until we made it to our exit point.
Check out Ash’s report here.
