18, Driver's Office, East Fortune Hospital

Driver's Office, East Fortune Hospital (formerly First Aid Station, Royal Naval Airship Station)

This single-storey, two-bay asymmetric gabled building dates to around 1916 and stands as one of the few surviving original structures from the Royal Naval Airship Station at East Fortune. It was built as a first aid station adjacent to a garage and forms part of a significant group of related buildings at the site.

The building has a concrete plinth with integral drainage channel and brick base course, above which rises a framework of white-painted corrugated iron. The gabled ends are finished with painted timber bargeboards. The east elevation features a central entrance door flanked by two-part windows positioned close to the eaves. The structure is predominantly timber framed with multi-pane casement windows fitted with top-hung hoppers. The pitched roof is clad in white-painted corrugated iron and incorporates a large rooflight on the west pitch. A square brick chimney stack, topped with a tin can, rises through the roof.

The interior, observed in 2010, consists of plasterboard lining over the timber framing, with painted vertical timber boarding in an ancillary room. Doors throughout are boarded timber.

The building is largely unaltered and represents a rare surviving example of a corrugated iron military structure from the First World War period. Air Ministry records from 1945 identify it as having been used as a barber's shop, and it later served as a post office when the site operated as a sanatorium.

East Fortune was established in September 1915 as a home defence airfield following Admiralty approval, becoming one of five airship stations in Scotland and one of only two principal stations designed to accommodate the larger Coastal and North Sea types of non-rigid airships alongside rigid airships. The Royal Naval Air Station was officially commissioned on 23 August 1916. The station gained international significance as the launching point for the HMA R.34, which completed the first East-West trans-Atlantic flight and the first return crossing by air following the First World War. The airship station closed on 4 February 1920, and the large airship sheds were dismantled in 1922. The site was subsequently sold and operated as a sanatorium until 1997, though it was requisitioned during the Second World War as part of a major RAF and WAAF training base. The brick barracks were converted into hospital wards, with additional brick buildings constructed including a boiler house, laundry, canteen, and meeting hall. The site now forms part of the National Museum of Flight, which has operated there since 1975, occupying the disused airfield which is designated a scheduled monument.