Building No 96 (Lubricant Store)

Building No 96 (Lubricant Store)

Oil storage and liquids storage building, dated 1926. Designed by the Air Ministry's Directorate of Works and Buildings to drawing number 329/26.

The building is constructed in English bond brickwork with an asbestos-cement slate roof. It comprises a simple rectangular plan in two sections: a higher section with a raised floor and external loading platform, and a lower section floored at normal level. Both units are gabled.

The front elevation features a plain wall with a central pair of sliding steel doors providing access to the centre bay of the raised platform. Above these doors sits a near-flat corrugated steel canopy supported on four very thin posts. To the right, at the lower level, is a pair of doors set in recessed jambs formed in bull-nosed engineering bricks. The roof incorporates continuous roof-lights to both slopes and has four ridge vents on the main roof and two on the lower section. The left gable features an added lean-to structure over a pair of doors, with the remainder of the building presenting plain walls.

Internally, steel trusses are visible, bearing on interior brick piers. The main room has a raised concrete floor at the level of the exterior platform.

This building is one of the original structures on the Technical Site at RAF Bicester, set close to an 'A' type hangar (Building 70) from the same period. As such it represents an externally complete example of one of the first permanent designs for Britain's independent air force. Bicester is the best-preserved of the bomber bases constructed as the principal arm of Sir Hugh Trenchard's expansion of the RAF from 1923, which was based on a philosophy of offensive deterrence. The airfield retains, better than any other military base in Britain, the layout and fabric relating to pre-1930s military aviation and the development of Britain's strategic bomber force in the period up to 1939. The grass flying field survives with its 1939 boundaries largely intact, bounded by bomb stores built in 1938/9 and airfield defences constructed in the early stages of the Second World War. During much of the Second World War, RAF Bicester functioned as an Operational Training Unit, training air crews from Canada, Australia and New Zealand as well as British personnel for service in Bomber Command. Bicester now forms the premier surviving example of such OTUs.