RAF Kenley's Original Operations Block

Unbelievably, during the Summer of 1940, the nerve centre of RAF Kenley’s Command and Control was located in an ordinary single-storey building that was only protected by an earth bank – the standard pre-war RAF Operations block!

The Op’s room was moved to a butcher’s shop in Caterham after the devastating raid of 18/8/1940, when the phone lines to the one on the airfield were severed. By the end of the year, The Grange, in Old Coulsdon, had been converted to provide a more suitable off-site Op’s room for Kenley.

The original Op’s block on the airfield was finally demolished in 1980, forty years after the Luftwaffe’s unsuccessful attempts to destroy it.