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Report - - Mullard observatory - Lord's bridge forward filling station, Cambs - June-Aug 2013 | Other Sites | 28DaysLater.co.uk

Report - Mullard observatory - Lord's bridge forward filling station, Cambs - June-Aug 2013

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soylent green

28DL Regular User
Regular User
I put this report in Other sites but it has bits that should be in military and bit that for me would have gone into High stuff! I had arranged to meet up with JP196 and non members bez and bro! We had a great couple of hours looking around this amazing site! Started climbing one of the one mile telescopes and not having a good head for heights, had to test myself a bit to keep going but it was definitely worth the effort:D When we got down we started to look around the rest of the non live part of the site and noticed what looked like military structures spread all over the place, it was a mystery that i would solve later when i started to write my Mullard report

SOME HISTORY ON MULLARD
Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory (MRAO) is home to a number of large aperture synthesis radio telescopes, including the One-Mile Telescope, 5-km Ryle Telescope, and the Arcminute Microkelvin Imager. Radio interferometry started in the mid-1940s on the outskirts of Cambridge, but with funding from the Science Research Council and a donation of £100,000 from Mullard Limited, construction of the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory commenced at Lord's Bridge,[1] a few kilometres to the west of Cambridge. The observatory was founded under Martin Ryle of the Radio-Astronomy Group of the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge and was opened by Sir Edward Victor Appleton on 25 July 1957. This group is now known as the Cavendish Astrophysics Group.

The site is located at Lord's Bridge, Cambridgeshire on a former ordnance storage facility, next to the now-abandoned Cambridge-Bedford railway line. A portion of the track bed of the old line, running nearly East-West for several miles, was used to form the main part of the "5km" radio-telescope and the Cambridge Low Frequency Synthesis Telescope.

SOME PICS OF MULLARD OBSERVATORY

HALF MILE TELESCOPE
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ONE MILE TELESCOPE
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CAT TELESCOPE
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THIS PICTURE OF THE CAT TELESCOPE USING CONCRETE STRUCTURES FROM LORD'S BRIDGE BOMB STORE
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LORD'S BRIDGE FORWARD FILLING STATION

I was intrigued about a lot of the structures around Mullard and so after a bit of work on the internet i discovered that the site was used in WW2 as an ammunition store and a forward filling station, which manufactured Mustard gas bombs, so i had to go back the seventy miles to check it out! In the two pictures below. you can clearly see the original layout in the present day site. including roads and buildings.

SOME HISTORY FROM SUB BRIT
Lords Bridge Forward Filling Depot is located in the south east corner of what was the Lords Bridge Air Ammunition Park, a forward ammunition depot for the RAF which opened on the 16th November 1939. The ammunition park comprised of a series of revetted magazines for the storage of high explosive and incendiary bombs. The forward filling depot, which opened in 1944, was a bulk storage and charging facility for filling 65lb light case bombs with mustard gas. After closure in 1957 the ammunition park was sold to Cambridge University where the Cavendish Laboratory established the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory*

THE PRESENT DAY MULLARD SITE
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THE SAME SITE IN WW2
( From http://www.subbrit.org.uk/sb-sites/sites/l/lords_bridge_ffd/index.shtml )

Fullscreencapture18082013173053_zps586ad3a5.jpg


PLAN OF FORWARD FILLING STATION
( From http://www.subbrit.org.uk/sb-sites/sites/l/lords_bridge_ffd/index.shtml )

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RAILWAY LOADING PLATFORM
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MAYBE THE ONLY BIT OF RAILWAY TRACK LEFT ON THE SITE
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EMERGENCY WATER SUPPLY, CHARGING BUILDING AND STORAGE BUILDING
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LOOKS LIKE BLAST DOORS IN CHARGING BUILDING LEADING TO COVERED WAY TO BONDING BUILDING
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http://i1276.photobucket.com/albums/y472/theredhour13/
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RANDOM CARAVAN PARKED IN COVERED WALKWAY LEADING TO STORAGE BUILDING
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IMG_1252_zps789a07cc.jpg


OTHER STRUCTURES FROM LORD'S BRIDGE AIR AMMUNITION PARK

AIR RAID SHELTER
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INCENDIARY BOMB STORE
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Lots of history connected with this site and i didn't see all of it!

Thanks for looking
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Tris1972

28DL Full Member
28DL Full Member
WOW!! Fantastic photos of the dishes, and great history of the whole site. I used to live a few miles from here and only ever had a couple of cursory wanders onto the site.
 

Calamity Jane

i see beauty in the unloved, places & things
Regular User
Only took 7 years to get some comments! Looks like a fun day out :)

It seems so lol. I think a lot of threads get overlooked, the forum is very busy & thats good. But its nice to see newbies looking through the forum and bumping threads. This is a great one. Were you blue before @The_Raw ? if not congrats
 

Ojay

Admin
Staff member
Admin
We used to archive threads, which included removing post replies and locking threads, seemed like a good idea once upon a time :rolleyes:
 
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