Belter that mate. I really do never tire of seeing reports from here. It’s funny you say about it being one of your first explores away from local stuff. I think thats why I never went, or at least that’s the only reason i can possibly think of. Totally worth it though, and something I kick myself for. It was different back then though, there certainly wasn’t the urgency like there is now.
It’s crazy to think of how somewhere as big, and as epic as this could be so easy.
Last time i checked Corsham was in this country Your not far wrong tho. Id be hard pushed to choose between this and Teeside steel as a second place based purely on what was there to find. Pyestocks big downfall in the exploring rankings has to be that it was just too easy tho. There was no challenge. All its other rivals like Bishopton or even Cane Hill were all tricky challenging explores and that made them better 'explores' if not better 'locations'..
I do wonder where Port Talbot might rank if that were go in the future. Great collection thou. Why did I never go here, bizarre really. Funnily enough Dab lives not far from me now, I actually met him by accident through his OH who is very talented artist. I should nudge him about this thread!
We moved on again edging closer towards the new goal. The next building was named 'Battle House' on the map. A bit of a mystery! Even once inside i was a bit confused. We would later find out the building was primarily the site boiler house and it gained its name as it housed a pair of boilers procured from HMS Namur a Battle class destroyer. A third boiler had been installed shortly afterwards and later on a compressor test cell housing a 14,000 horsepower double ended steam turbine had been added to one end. Sadly the turbine was not still in situe! As an aside Battle house closed in 1993 and along with it the power station that it fed. It had also fed steam to the air house to help start the giant compressor sets but by the 1990s this was now possible to accomplish using VFD technology and steam was power was done away with completely. It has always slightly puzzled me why the whole lot didn't just run off steam alone but i guess there was a problem condensing that amount away from the sea or major rivers.
Battle house on the left, Admiralty house center and the power station on the right.
Ship Boilers
Air intakes
Compressor test house
Test Control
Another 'why didn't i yoink'!
Now it was time, the main event, i had hoped anyway! We had made a quick stop at the Admiralty test house where they once tested gas turbines for ships but there wasn't much to see so without wasting time on photos we crossed the road again and entered the power station building. To be honest at first glance it seemed a bit disappointing. The single Parsons turbine looked a bit lost sitting there all on its own, i had expected rows of the things but it wasn't to be. The power station was surprisingly small but i guess that made sense as when it was built most of the site wasnt there! My disappointment soon subsided once i spotted the beautiful semaphore signalling system that sat next to the turbine however. What a hunny! One of the best things ive ever seen while exploring and oh how i regret not having the foresight to liberate it back then, it would have been entirely possible im sure..
Power Turbine
Semaphore Control Panel
Steam Controls
Things were about to get better again tho. I headed up to the front offices and stepping into the main corridor i looked to one end and could just catch a glimpse of what we were there to see. Control room! The green of the panels were calling so i made a bee line down the corridor through a couple of glass doors and found myself on a glass Crittal walk way between the main power station building and the adjacent switch house. This was a fabulous moment that is hard to describe in words but what you could see through the windows was just perfect and a amazing culmination to the explore. The control room was small but oh so perfect, the single desk with a spattering of vintage paperwork an old skool chair, parquet floor stained in a hatched pattern where years of condensation had dripped off the glass bricked skylight above. Just perfect and we had no idea it existed until we clapped eyes on it! The best kind of discovery..
A Glimpse
Control Room
Reactor 1
Close ups
That pattern
Switch House
Anyway i calmed down after a while, had a look down the rest of the switch house and crossed over to the Assembly workshops which were basically empty. It was time to call it a day so we headed back across the site. I forget if it was by pure chance or if someone had seen something prior but someone suggested we had another look around Cell 3. We had glossed over it earlier in the day but now with our exploring heads on someone decided we should have a better look. Im glad we did.
Empty workshops
Heading down the steps it was getting dusky now and torches were out. We stumbled across some curved blast doors and popped out in a truly surreal scene. This was Cell 3, we didn't know it at the time but this had also been used for filming so was a little artificial in places but by torchlight it seemed real enough. We made our way through the weird doors and down a tunnel that gradually fanned out into a massive underground chamber. Again i didn't understand at the time but this was where exhaust gasses from the jet exhaust would cool before being pumped back around to the air house. We finished the day on a high and this became one of the most photographed parts of the site in latter years.
Cell 3
Yes i had a red filter for my flash, i was a cunt
Sahara Doors
Underground
9 hours on, what had started as a tourist trip down south, largely by luck more than judgment, had turned into one of my best explores ever (even today) and the finds just kept coming! Theres a few building ive not covered here mainly because they were just empty! I refuse to put up photos of that shitty plane, of all the things to photograph here that was not it! Over the next few years i returned again a few times but sadly not as many times as i should have. I dont have the quality photos nore parsons turbine cowl to show for it sadly. I think i learnt a valuable lesson that day tho. Always keep your eyes open for what the last guy didn't see and just because someone has been somewhere it doesn't mean its 'done'. You can go to some of the most touristy places out there are and still come away having truly found something if you have the right frame of mind.
My last visit to Pyestock proper was in 2010. It was all still there but trashed beyond belief compared to 3 years previous. Everything containing copper had been ripped apart and most makers plates and souvenir trinkets had gone. By 2012 it had all gone tho. Apart from this last bit. The Anechoic chamber, a building i had heard running on previous trips but by 2017 it too was dead, replaced by computer simulation. If im honest theres not much too it. Its a concrete box with foam tiles and an inlet and outlet silencer. Was cool to finish it off tho. Hopefully you found this interesting, its something to pass the time at least eh?
A good selection of photos in that report, and in other reports on here too. I started work at the National Gas Turbine Establishment (NGTE) Pyestock as a mechanical engineering apprentice in 1976 remaining there until 1988 when I transferred to the adjacent Royal Aerospace Establishment (RAE) at Farnborough. Pyestock quite rightly had a reputation as a major industrial facility, matched only in the south of England by Didcot Power Station, the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston and Fawley Refinery.
Pyestock had two sites about ¼ mile apart, referred to as the Old Site and New Site. The Old Site was established in the 1940s and had some small scale test facilities and support workshops as well as the apprentice training school. The Old Site was swept away in the 1990s with the expansion of the Defence Evaluation Research Establishment, previously RAE and subsequently QinetiQ.
Construction of the New Site began in the early 1950s, the Admiralty Test House being commissioned in 1952 and other facilities likewise with Cells 1 & 2 being completed by 1957. Development continued with Cell 3 (the underground one) being commissioned in 1961 and Cell 4, to simulate supersonic flight in 1965. Cell 3 West was completed by 1969, being the largest altitude chamber at Pyestock. Separated and part way towards the Old Site was the Glen Test House, Pyestock’s sea level test facility. It was the first facility to be demolished when the site was closed.
The Air House was my first posting in 1977 outside of the apprentice training school and it rightly attracted a lot of attention on here. There were 8 GEC compressor / exhauster sets there which could be configured in series or parallel to blow air into or draw it from the test cells. It was commonplace to run 3-4 sets together, the most I ever recall being run simultaneously being 7. In the photos, the red part machine was the steam turbine, there to bring the machine up to synchronous speed before switching to the National Grid. Once Variable Frequency Starting was introduced sometime in the early 1980s, the steam turbines were redundant and the couplings between them and the compressors was removed. The three white sections were the compressors themselves, comprising low, intermediate and high pressure sections. Finally was the electric motor.
At Southern Electric’s control at Littlewick Green, Pyestock appeared on their grid diagram as its own entity given its huge power consumption. At one stage, water for Pyestock was drawn from the nearby Basingstoke Canal and the sluice west of the A323 Norris Bridge is still there.
The Battle Test House (BTH), housing the three admiralty marine boilers A, B & C was one that features in photos on this site. They were starting to get a bit long in the tooth and a new one, D boiler installed closer to the Air House. It was supposed to have been similar to one installed aboard the QE2 and on paper could match the capacity of those in the BTH. D boiler had a reputation for being unreliable and the BTH was retained in use to the end.
I’ve no idea how much of Pyestock has simply been buried. The foundations for some of the plant were massive and breaking them out would have been very costly. I watched a small Old Site building being demolished back in the 1970s. The contractors set about chipping away at the concrete and after 2 days had made very little impression on the building, such was the strength of the concrete used.
The Plant House had cubicles on either side, the ‘A’ side housing a variety of combustion rigs and the ‘C’ side housing admiralty diesel test rigs which undertook trials for marine diesel engines installed on board surface and sub-surface ships. All traces of that work had gone when Pyestock closed.
By 1988 when I left, Pyestock needed huge investment to upgrade its 1950s and 1960s facilities for the next century. In parallel, the British aviation industry was only working on European collaborative projects, defence spending was being reduced and the more widespread use of computers meant that testing could be modelled rather than undertaken for real. It was obvious really where things were heading.
Investment was made in the mid-1990s to concentrate all of the RAE’s manufacture in the main workshop at Pyestock (hence some modernisation there) and also a new building was erected, housing the fuel & lubricant laboratories. I addition the anechoic chamber soldiered on but in the end its fate was determined.
Being a MoD facility, photos of it during its heyday aren’t that common, which is a shame. It’s of course great to see the photos here and elsewhere (I should have followed suit) but I remember it as a vibrant, working establishment, not as a derelict and decaying industrial relic. RIP the National Gas Turbine Establishment, NGTE (aka Naughty Girls Training Establishment and Never Get Too Energetic).
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A good selection of photos in that report, and in other reports on here too. I started work at the National Gas Turbine Establishment (NGTE) Pyestock as a mechanical engineering apprentice in 1976 remaining there until 1988 when I transferred to the adjacent Royal Aerospace Establishment (RAE) at Farnborough. Pyestock quite rightly had a reputation as a major industrial facility, matched only in the south of England by Didcot Power Station, the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston and Fawley Refinery.
Pyestock had two sites about ¼ mile apart, referred to as the Old Site and New Site. The Old Site was established in the 1940s and had some small scale test facilities and support workshops as well as the apprentice training school. The Old Site was swept away in the 1990s with the expansion of the Defence Evaluation Research Establishment, previously RAE and subsequently QinetiQ.
Construction of the New Site began in the early 1950s, the Admiralty Test House being commissioned in 1952 and other facilities likewise with Cells 1 & 2 being completed by 1957. Development continued with Cell 3 (the underground one) being commissioned in 1961 and Cell 4, to simulate supersonic flight in 1965. Cell 3 West was completed by 1969, being the largest altitude chamber at Pyestock. Separated and part way towards the Old Site was the Glen Test House, Pyestock’s sea level test facility. It was the first facility to be demolished when the site was closed.
The Air House was my first posting in 1977 outside of the apprentice training school and it rightly attracted a lot of attention on here. There were 8 GEC compressor / exhauster sets there which could be configured in series or parallel to blow air into or draw it from the test cells. It was commonplace to run 3-4 sets together, the most I ever recall being run simultaneously being 7. In the photos, the red part machine was the steam turbine, there to bring the machine up to synchronous speed before switching to the National Grid. Once Variable Frequency Starting was introduced sometime in the early 1980s, the steam turbines were redundant and the couplings between them and the compressors was removed. The three white sections were the compressors themselves, comprising low, intermediate and high pressure sections. Finally was the electric motor.
At Southern Electric’s control at Littlewick Green, Pyestock appeared on their grid diagram as its own entity given its huge power consumption. At one stage, water for Pyestock was drawn from the nearby Basingstoke Canal and the sluice west of the A323 Norris Bridge is still there.
The Battle Test House (BTH), housing the three admiralty marine boilers A, B & C was one that features in photos on this site. They were starting to get a bit long in the tooth and a new one, D boiler installed closer to the Air House. It was supposed to have been similar to one installed aboard the QE2 and on paper could match the capacity of those in the BTH. D boiler had a reputation for being unreliable and the BTH was retained in use to the end.
I’ve no idea how much of Pyestock has simply been buried. The foundations for some of the plant were massive and breaking them out would have been very costly. I watched a small Old Site building being demolished back in the 1970s. The contractors set about chipping away at the concrete and after 2 days had made very little impression on the building, such was the strength of the concrete used.
The Plant House had cubicles on either side, the ‘A’ side housing a variety of combustion rigs and the ‘C’ side housing admiralty diesel test rigs which undertook trials for marine diesel engines installed on board surface and sub-surface ships. All traces of that work had gone when Pyestock closed.
By 1988 when I left, Pyestock needed huge investment to upgrade its 1950s and 1960s facilities for the next century. In parallel, the British aviation industry was only working on European collaborative projects, defence spending was being reduced and the more widespread use of computers meant that testing could be modelled rather than undertaken for real. It was obvious really where things were heading.
Investment was made in the mid-1990s to concentrate all of the RAE’s manufacture in the main workshop at Pyestock (hence some modernisation there) and also a new building was erected, housing the fuel & lubricant laboratories. I addition the anechoic chamber soldiered on but in the end its fate was determined.
Being a MoD facility, photos of it during its heyday aren’t that common, which is a shame. It’s of course great to see the photos here and elsewhere (I should have followed suit) but I remember it as a vibrant, working establishment, not as a derelict and decaying industrial relic. RIP the National Gas Turbine Establishment, NGTE (aka Naughty Girls Training Establishment and Never Get Too Energetic).
Do you know anything about the Cell 3 Air Heater? It was one of the only structures dismantled after closure I believe. Would have made for a cool photo were it still there back in the days we were exploring Pyestock!
Do you know anything about the Cell 3 Air Heater? It was one of the only structures dismantled after closure I believe. Would have made for a cool photo were it still there back in the days we were exploring Pyestock!
I don't recognise that exactly. Cell 3 certainly had an air cooling plant and part of it looked like the photo. The refrigerant was ammonia and there was a huge quantity of the stuff in the plant. It had its own leakage alarm and it was always reckoned that if the ammonia alarm went off, you just got as far away from the place as possible. You can see the plant (two circular towers) towards the bottom of the first photo. I can understand the ammonia plant being dismantled pretty quickly after closure as it was a very hazardous part of the whole site.
I don't recognise that exactly. Cell 3 certainly had an air cooling plant and part of it looked like the photo. The refrigerant was ammonia and there was a huge quantity of the stuff in the plant. It had its own leakage alarm and it was always reckoned that if the ammonia alarm went off, you just got as far away from the place as possible. You can see the plant (two circular towers) towards the bottom of the first photo. I can understand the ammonia plant being dismantled pretty quickly after closure as it was a very hazardous part of the whole site.
It may have been dismantled much earlier than I originally assumed - the only decent photo I can find of it is the one I posted, which if you scroll down to point 15 on the excellent NGTE website is where I found it - http://www.ngte.co.uk/doc/doc/eactf3.htm
"The Cell 3 heater is shown in Figure 59 and consists of a vertical oil fired cylindrical furnace, 80 ft hight and 20 ft diameter, with the walls lined with tubes through which the air supply is passed. Heat is tranferred to the air tubes by radiation from the 12 oil burners which are fitted on the floor of the furnace and arranged to fire upwards. The air inlet mainfold is mounted at the top and the outlet manifold is situated under the furnace floor, thus the air flow direction is downwards. The heater is arranged to be manually operated during the starting cycle and switched to automatic control once the desired operating temperature has been reached"
It seems to be one of those structures nobody really knows much about because it no longer exists, it would have been situated to the left of Cell 3 in the second aerial photo where the long portacabin type building is.
It may have been dismantled much earlier than I originally assumed - the only decent photo I can find of it is the one I posted, which if you scroll down to point 15 on the excellent NGTE website is where I found it - http://www.ngte.co.uk/doc/doc/eactf3.htm
"The Cell 3 heater is shown in Figure 59 and consists of a vertical oil fired cylindrical furnace, 80 ft hight and 20 ft diameter, with the walls lined with tubes through which the air supply is passed. Heat is tranferred to the air tubes by radiation from the 12 oil burners which are fitted on the floor of the furnace and arranged to fire upwards. The air inlet mainfold is mounted at the top and the outlet manifold is situated under the furnace floor, thus the air flow direction is downwards. The heater is arranged to be manually operated during the starting cycle and switched to automatic control once the desired operating temperature has been reached"
It seems to be one of those structures nobody really knows much about because it no longer exists, it would have been situated to the left of Cell 3 in the second aerial photo where the long portacabin type building is.
I certainly don't recall a structure like that, but then changes were made to the site, structures built and dismantled during my time there and I don't recall all of them. The two aerial photos I took on 14th January 1998..
Your not far wrong tho. Id be hard pushed to choose between this and Teeside steel as a second place based purely on what was there to find. Pyestocks big downfall in the exploring rankings has to be that it was just too easy tho. There was no challenge. All its other rivals like Bishopton or even Cane Hill were all tricky challenging explores and that made them better 'explores' if not better 'locations'..
