Building No 47 (Ration And Adjutant Stores)

Ration and Adjutant Stores, RAF Bicester

A ration and adjutant stores building constructed in 1926 by the Air Ministry's Directorate of Works and Buildings, to drawing number 2151/25.

The building is a simple rectangular gabled block in dark red brick laid in stretcher bond with a slate roof. An open verandah at the east end has a hipped slate roof supported on three slender wooden posts set on concrete base-pads, standing over two plank doors on a slightly raised concrete apron. The opposite end features a door with an over-light and a large seven-light steel casement window. The long south flank has three doors (two with over-lights) and three casement windows, while the north flank has two square lights flanked by two deeper casements with transoms on each side. A small ridge stack is positioned near the west end.

The interior is plain, retaining original doors and joinery. A series of rooms are separately accessed by external doors, serving as a bakery and meat shop, hairdresser, grocery, shoemaker and tailor's shop.

This small free-standing building closes the south end of the broad Parade Ground between the barracks blocks, positioned between the Station Sick Quarters and the airmen's Dining Room and Cookhouse. It represents a unique and unusually well-preserved example of an inter-war RAF barracks building, retaining the architectural style of the first phase of permanent designs for Britain's independent air force.

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 onwards, based on the philosophy of offensive deterrence. It retains, better than any other military airbase in Britain, the layout and fabric relating to both pre-1930s military aviation and the development of Britain's strategic bomber force in the period up to 1939. The flying field survives with its 1939 boundaries largely intact, bounded by bomb stores built in 1938/9 and airfield defences from the early Second World War. For much of the Second World War, RAF Bicester functioned as an Operational Training Unit, training Canadian, Australian and New Zealand air crews as well as British personnel for service in Bomber Command. These Operational Training Units, of which Bicester now forms the premier surviving example, fulfilled the critical requirement of enabling bomber crews to form and train as complete units once individual members had trained in flying, bombing, gunnery and navigation.