Control Tower

Control Tower, Robertson Barracks (former RAF Swanton Morley)

A control tower built in 1939–40 to the 1939 Watch Office with Meteorological Section design by the Air Ministry's Directorate of Works, drawing number 5845/39. The building has brickwork walls, reinforced concrete floors and roof with asphalt finish.

The control tower adopts a near-square plan across three floors with wide glazed balconies facing the flying field. The ground floor contains the main watch office and pilots' room, forecast and teleprinter facilities, and WCs. The first floor accommodates the main control room, with meteorological and signals offices to the rear. A rear staircase provides access to a glazed observation room at second floor level.

The exterior retains the original steel casements with horizontal glazing bars throughout, including those serving the long observation frontages. At ground floor, the front elevation features three large 4-light windows separated by brick piers, beneath a concrete balcony cantilevered out to semi-circular ends and fitted with a steel balustrade of simple uprights. At this level a continuous multi-light window returns to quadrants at each end above a low breast wall, with a deep parapet wall rising as a balustrade to the top deck. The top deck carries a further range of full-width glazing to a set-back observation room. The return walls each have a series of tall casements linked at the upper level by a frieze band under the cantilevered flat slab, with the nautical balustrade continuing to the rear and stair tower. The rear façade has single lights each side of the projecting stair tower, a small bulls-eye above a deep stair light, and small lights on the return. The building is flanked at each side by two-bay fire tender and flare stores.

The interior preserves original doors and joinery, with a solid concrete staircase.

Swanton Morley possesses one of the best-preserved examples of the most distinctly Art Deco of the Air Ministry's control tower designs, with meteorological facilities incorporated behind the control room. Its treatment strongly recalls the Bauhaus tradition from which this style evolved. During the second half of the 1930s, increasing emphasis was placed on aircraft dispersal and shelter from attack, serviceable landing and take-off areas, and airfield movement control. This drove the evolution from the simple watch office of the 1920s toward purpose-designed control towers. Planning of the first airfields with runways and perimeter tracks began in 1938. The development of radio communication and the need to organise the flying field into distinct zones for take-off, landing and taxiing necessitated control from a single centre. Control towers thus evolved from the simple duty pilot's watch office through the 1934 tower design to the integrated traffic control and weather monitoring embodied in the Art Deco horizontality of the 1939 Watch Office with Meteorological Section. The control tower became the most distinctive and instantly recognisable building of military airfields, particularly during the Second World War when they served as focal points for base personnel awaiting aircraft returns from operations.

One of the last phase of 1930s Expansion Period stations, Swanton Morley opened as a medium bomber base on 28 September 1940, followed a month later by the arrival of Blenheims from Watton. It played an active operational role in Bomber Command's 2 Group as a medium bomber and especially Mosquito base. Both Churchill and Eisenhower were present on 29 June 1942 for the launch of the first combined bombing raid involving British and American personnel. From December 1944 to the end of the war, Swanton Morley's Bomber Support Development Unit came under the command of 100 Group.