Building Nos 43 And 46 (Station Sick Quarters And Decontamination Centre)

Station Sick Quarters attached to gas decontamination centre at RAF Bicester. The Station Sick Quarters was built in 1927 and the Decontamination Centre in 1939, both designed by the Air Ministry's Directorate of Works and Buildings to drawing numbers 106/23 and 1360/25 (Building 43) and 6224/37 (Building 46).

The Station Sick Quarters is constructed in dark red brickwork in Flemish or English bond with a slate roof. The Decontamination Centre has reinforced concrete walls and roof, faced with Flemish bond brickwork above earth levels, with an asphalt roof finish.

The sick quarters building began as a simple L-plan with hipped roofs, later extended at the north end with a gabled cross wing and to the south with a slightly lower gabled range. It contained an officers' ward and three small wards for other ranks, plus waiting and inspection rooms for dental surgery. It connects by a high-wall passageway to the Decontamination Centre, built to a pattern evolved in 1937. The centre comprises undressing, showering and clean clothes sections, with its own water tanks above the flat roof. It was protected by earth abutments and at the north end by protected brick walls and stores.

Windows are wooden sash, some with over-lights. The entrance on the east front is in two sections, with the lower added unit to the left featuring a deep recessed doorway offset to the left, and three small stacks. The return to the left has been modified. The inner face includes a large blocked light with blind arch and herring-bone brickwork to the gable, and a deep recessed doorway with hipped return connecting to the passageway to the Decontamination Centre. There are two further stacks on this side, all with stepped brick cappings. The decontamination centre is partly concealed by earth blast protection, with plain walls above to flat parapet. Tank housing comprises a hipped metal-clad addition. At the north end is a substantial blast wall and two external stores protecting the exit doorway.

The Station Sick Quarters has retained original doors and joinery. The Decontamination Centre retains all plain spaces to original plan form and retains steel-shuttered openings for discarding contaminated clothes outside.

The Station Sick Quarters lies at the south end of the main group of buildings, opposite the contemporary Dining Room, dating from the first phase of development of this important group of airfield buildings, representative of the first permanent designs for Britain's independent air force. It is an unusually complete example of this type of building, attached to the Decontamination Centre of 1939, which comprises another complete example of a highly specialised type of structure developed by the Air Ministry in response to the then widespread fear of gas attack. Unlike Building 50, this example was intended for the use of personnel injured as a result of aerial attack.

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 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 grass flying field still survives with its 1939 boundaries largely intact, bounded by a group of bomb stores built in 1938/9 and airfield defences built in the early stages of the Second World War. For much of the Second World War RAF Bicester functioned as an Operational Training Unit, training Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders as well as British air crews for service in Bomber Command.