Cardington Airfield

Where it sits. Cardington Airfield lies a few kilometres south-east of Bedford, on flat farmland beside the village of Cardington and the model estate of Shortstown. Two structures dominate it and can be seen from most of the surrounding countryside: a pair of airship sheds, each about 247 metres long, 84 metres wide and 55 metres high, standing side by side on the plain like beached ocean liners. They are among the largest enclosed volumes in Britain, and there is nothing else in the landscape for scale.

The story behind it. Short Brothers bought the land as a private venture in 1915 and put up the first shed to build rigid airships for the Admiralty. The site was nationalised in 1919 as the Royal Airship Works. For the R101 project the No. 1 shed was extended between 1924 and 1926, its roof raised by 35 feet and its length taken to 812 feet; the second shed was dismantled at RNAS Pulham in Norfolk and re-erected here in 1928. The R101 flew out of Cardington on 4 October 1930 bound for India and came down the next morning on a hillside near Beauvais in France, killing 48 of the 54 people aboard. Britain's airship programme ended that day. The dead were brought home and buried in a communal grave in the churchyard of St Mary's, Cardington, where the ship's ensign hangs inside the church.

The rivalry. The R101 was the state-built half of an experiment: the government commissioned two airships to the same brief, one designed in-house at Cardington and one, the R100, by a private team at Howden in Yorkshire whose chief calculator was a young engineer named Nevil Shute Norway — later famous as the novelist Nevil Shute, who wrote about the whole affair with considerable bitterness. The R100 crossed to Canada and back successfully in the summer of 1930. The R101 was heavier, ran into persistent lift problems, was lengthened by an extra gas bag to compensate, and was pushed into departure for political reasons before its trials were complete. After the crash the R100 was sold for scrap.

Afterwards. The station turned to barrage balloons from the late 1930s, trained balloon crews through the war, and served in the 1950s as the RAF reception unit where thousands of National Service recruits were kitted out. A gas factory on site produced the RAF's compressed gases until 2000. In 1971 the second shed became a fire research station, later part of the Building Research Establishment, and full-size multi-storey steel and concrete buildings were erected inside it and destructively tested — the Cardington tests, still cited in structural engineering literature. More recently the sheds housed the Airlander 10 hybrid airship, returning the site to the business it was built for.

On screen. The clear-span interior made Cardington one of the most useful film stages in Britain, and it built the Rebel Alliance base on Yavin 4 for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story in 2015 — the hangar where the fleet assembles, where Jyn Erso addresses the council, and where the pilots walk out to their ships. Full-scale X-wings and U-wings were constructed for it, and both sheds were used, one for interior volume and one for a large exterior set built against its face. Star Wars returned for The Rise of Skywalker. Christopher Nolan is the other regular customer: Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and Inception all used the sheds, which are big enough to hold a city street indoors and dark enough to control completely.

What you can actually visit — and what you cannot. This matters, because the sheds attract far more people than the site can take. Cardington Airfield is private, in active commercial and industrial use, and there is no public access to the hangars or the apron. What visitors can do is see them from the public road between Cardington and Shortstown and from footpaths across the surrounding fields, which is enough — the scale reads better from half a mile away than from the fence. St Mary's Church in Cardington village is open and holds the R101 memorial, the communal grave and the ensign, and it is the most substantive thing to see here. The Shortstown estate, built by Short Brothers for its workers, is a period piece in its own right.

Getting there and timing. Bedford is 40 minutes from London St Pancras by train, and Cardington is about four kilometres south-east of the town centre — cycleable, or a short drive with roadside parking near the church. There is no visitor centre, no café at the airfield and no signage explaining what you are looking at, so read up first. Any clear day works; low winter light in the afternoon models the sheds' corrugated flanks better than flat summer haze, and the flat Bedfordshire horizon means sunsets sit directly behind them from certain angles in autumn. Bedford itself offers the riverside embankment, Priory Country Park and the Higgins museum if the trip needs filling out.