Building No 92 (Parachute Store)

Parachute Store and Drying Room, RAF Bicester

This small rectangular gabled structure was built in 1926 by the Air Ministry's Directorate of Works and Buildings to drawing number 2355/25. It is constructed in stretcher bond brickwork with diagonal asbestos-cement slates.

The building comprises a lobby and principal space beneath a gabled roof. A long ridge dormer light runs across the main drying area. The main front elevation features four large steel casements, each of three lights containing eight panes, set flush to concrete lintels with stone sills. The left gable is dominated by a wide pair of plank doors with a date-stone positioned above, whilst the right gable contains a circular vent. The rear wall is plain but includes a central external brick buttress. A continuous dormer light with eight six-pane casements extends over the central bays, running to a near-flat roof that continues back to the ridge.

Internally, the building retains its original spatial layout with the main drying area open to the roof structure. Timber queen-post trusses remain visible, supported on internal brick piers. A small office with a hatch is accessed through a panelled door.

The Technical Site at RAF Bicester, separated from the Domestic Site, contains many original buildings, predominantly from 1926 with additional structures added during successive phases of the 1930s Expansion Period. This parachute store is an important survival, virtually unchanged, representing an unusually complete example of the earliest design for such a specialist store. The isolating lobby was an important design feature, intended to reduce dust interference to the drying parachutes. Following the Second World War, the building was used temporarily as the Station Church.

RAF 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, based on a philosophy of offensive deterrence. It retains, better than any other military airbase in Britain, the layout and fabric relating to pre-1930s military aviation and the development of Britain's strategic bomber force. The site preserves evidence of how RAF expansion reflected both domestic political pressures and international events in the period to 1939. The grass flying field survives with its 1939 boundaries largely intact, bounded by bomb stores built in 1938-39 and airfield defences from the early Second World War. During much of the Second World War, RAF Bicester functioned as an Operational Training Unit, training Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and British air crews for Bomber Command. These OTUs, with Bicester now the premier surviving example, fulfilled the critical requirement of enabling trained individual aircrew members to form and train together as units.