Qualla: RAF Hornchurch

RAF Hornchurch: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steven Duhig from Bowie, Maryland, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0. On the night of 2 September 1916, a 21-year-old pilot named William Leefe Robinson took off from a 90-acre farm field in Essex with a mixture of incendiary ammunition that was technically illegal under the Hague Convention. He found a German airship - the Schütte-Lanz SL11, one of sixteen raiders over London that night - and set it on fire from below. The wreckage came down at Cuffley, visible from much of north London, and the next morning Robinson was a national hero. He won the Victoria Cross for it. The airfield he flew from was called Sutton's Farm. Twelve years later, after the land was reclaimed and the place rebuilt, it would be renamed RAF Hornchurch and become one of the most consequential fighter stations in the defence of Britain.

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Image: Steven Duhig from Bowie, Maryland, USA | CC BY-SA 2.0

RAF Hornchurch: Zeppelins Over London

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MRSC at English Wikipedia, Public domain. The First World War brought a new kind of fear to British cities: the airship, drifting in from the North Sea at altitudes that early fighters struggled to reach, dropping bombs on a population that had never been bombed from the sky before. In 1915 the London Air Defence Area wa...

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Image: MRSC at English Wikipedia | Public domain

RAF Hornchurch: From Farm Back to Field

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Ford, CC BY-SA 2.0. Shortly after the war ended, the airfield was decommissioned, the buildings demolished, and farming resumed on the same fields where Zeppelin hunters had taken off. It was a strange peacetime reversal. But the Royal Air Force expanded again in the 1920s, the old First World War a...

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Image: Alan Ford | CC BY-SA 2.0

RAF Hornchurch: The Battle of Barking Creek

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Royal Air Force official photographer, possibly Bertrand Daventry, Public domain. On 6 September 1939, three days into the war, the Chain Home radar station at Canewdon misidentified friendly aircraft as German raiders. Hurricanes from North Weald were scrambled. Then the Hurricanes themselves were misidentified, and more aircraft were sent up to intercept the...

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Image: Royal Air Force official photographer, possibly Bertrand Daventry | Public domain

RAF Hornchurch: The Summer of 1940

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit vHH, CC BY-SA 3.0. Hornchurch was a sector airfield of 11 Group during the Battle of Britain, defending London and the southeast against the Luftwaffe. The Germans understood its importance: the airfield was raided no fewer than twenty times that summer. Richard Hillary - young, vain, brave, and ul...

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Image: vHH | CC BY-SA 3.0

RAF Hornchurch: After the Spitfires

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Ford, CC BY-SA 2.0. Following the Battle of Britain, Hornchurch shifted to offensive operations - cross-channel sweeps, fighter sweeps over France, the disastrous Dieppe Raid of 19 August 1942 in which three of Hornchurch's squadrons took part. As the war moved towards the continent, the centre of g...

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Image: Alan Ford | CC BY-SA 2.0