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Planes over Port Meadow: revealing a First World War Home Front aerodrome
A century after the site was dismantled, can the ephemeral remains of Oxford’s tented First World War flying training aerodrome be rediscovered? The Wolvercote WWI Aerodrome Memorial Project, a community initiative, sought to find out with the help of scientific surveying. Roger Ainslie reports.
Port Meadow, in the north-west corner of Oxford by the River Thames, is a 300-acre floodplain that has been pasture for approximately 1,000 years, if not longer. The land is scattered with Bronze Age burial mounds and evidence for Iron Age settlement, and the site has been a Scheduled Ancient Monument since the 1970s. While this listing (www.historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1010717) documents many of the meadow’s prehistoric features, it fails to mention that it also contained a First World War flying training aerodrome at its northern end, near Wolvercote. This was not a small complex to ‘forget’: built in early 1916, by 1918 the site accommodated more than 800 train
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