Depiction of Airfields on Landranger 128, 1974-2018 Lez Watson
Draft 1.1 Depiction of airfields on Landranger 128, 1974-2018 Lez Watson Airfields, both military and civil, are a feature of many one-inch and 1:50 000 maps of Britain. They have been depicted in varying degrees of detail. Two seminal articles on this were published in 2014 by Ronald Blake1 2. They provided a fascinating introduction to key aspects of ‘charting the aeronautical landscape’. Blake published a paper forty years ago on disused airfields as a planning resource3. He discussed East Midlands including four in Derbyshire on the 1:50 000 sheet 128. His study identified three types of potential – locational, structural and development. He deemed Darley Moor as having little potential, but proposed Ashbourne, Burnaston and Church Broughton as ‘requiring special planning attention’. Indeed, these are the Derbyshire sites that have fulfilled this potential to some degree. Fradley in Staffordshire can be added to this category. Twenty years ago, John Nicolls wrote an introduction to airfields on Ordnance Survey 4 post-war one-inch mapping for Sheetlines . This Figure 1 provided an insight to the variation in aerodrome mapping detail. Around that time, I began to compile a publication history of my local Landranger map, including information about the airfields depicted. Later this listing evolved into a website page5. This study covers thirteen airfields: one pre-war, seven RAF Second World War plus two associated landing grounds6, one army base, and four more airfields established in recent years (fig. 1). It considers whether openings, closures, changes and subsequent 1 Ronald Blake, 2014a. ‘Charting the aeronautical landscape – Part 1: depiction of airfields on Ordnance Survey one-inch maps from the birth of practical aviation to the aftermath of World War 2’, Sheetlines 99, 19.
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