Look at the memorial from above and the walls form the camber of an aircraft wing. The Kent county architect Sidney Loweth designed it that way on purpose. Stand at the front and you see a frieze of fifteen carved aircraft - Avro Triplane, Cody 1, Dunne D.5, Sopwith-Wright biplane, Short Flying Boat - each one rendered in white Portland stone by the sculptor Hilary Stratton. Beneath the central plinth is an area paved in blue glass setts, intended to look like water. A stone Short Flying Boat appears to be skimming in to land on it. This is what a country builds when it remembers that almost everything in British aviation started in a marshy field on an island in the Thames Estuary.
In 1909, members of the Aero Club rented a flying ground at Leysdown on the eastern tip of the Isle of Sheppey - flat ground close to the sea, with steady prevailing winds and few trees. Their clubhouse was Mussel Manor, a 16th-century farmhouse that briefly became the most important building in British aviation. Nearby, the brothers Horace, Eustace and Oswald Short put up assembly sheds and won a contract from the Wright brothers to build six licensed copies of their Flyer - the first contract for the production of aeroplanes anywhere in the world. The flat Leysdown ground proved less than ideal; in 1910 the Short factory moved south to Stanford Hill above Eastchurch, where its sheds are still standing. The Aero Club moved to nearby Stonepitts Farm. Two miles of marshland had become the cradle of British flight.
In 1911 the Admiralty - more imaginative about new technology than the army of the time - established a Royal Navy flying school at the Eastchurch flying ground. The Short Brothers built it special aircraft. By 1912 Eastchurch was headquarters of the Naval Wing of the new Royal Flying Corps. In 1914 it was reorganised as a Royal Naval Air Service station, and later became RAF Eastchurch. The first four pilots of the RNAS - Charles Rumney Samson, Arthur Longmore, Reginald Gregory of the Navy and Eugene Gerrard of the Royal Marine Light Infantry - were all trained here. Samson would go on to make the first take-off from a moving warship. Longmore would command in the Mediterranean during the Second World War. The marshes of Sheppey were quietly producing the founding generation of British naval aviation.
The memorial names the men who flew here in those first years. John Moore-Brabazon, later Lord Brabazon of Tara, who held Royal Aero Club Aviator's Certificate Number One. Charles Rolls of Rolls-Royce, the second man to make the round trip across the Channel by air, killed in a flying accident at Bournemouth in July 1910 - the first Briton to die in a powered aircraft. Frank McClean, who had bought the original Leysdown ground and leased it to the Aero Club. T.O.M. Sopwith, who would go on to build the Camels that fought in the First World War. Cecil Grace, lost in the sea between France and England in December 1910, and his brother Percy. J.W. Dunne, designer of the radical Dunne D.5 swept-wing biplane. A.K. Huntington, Maurice Egerton, Alec Ogilvie, Ernest Pitman, G.P.L. Jezzi, James Travers. And the Short brothers themselves - the engineers whose name still flies on every Belfast-built airliner.
The memorial took five years to come together. A public meeting at the village hall in late 1949 first proposed a monument. In February 1950 The Times published a letter signed by Winston Churchill, Brabazon and Hugh Oswald Short calling for public support. Sidney Loweth, the Kent county architect, gave the design its wing-camber plan. Hilary Stratton carved the allegorical sculptures and the frieze of aircraft. G.E. Wallis and Sons of Maidstone - the firm that had built the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment Cenotaph and the Royal Berkshire Regiment War Memorial - did the masonry. Lord Tedder, former Chief of the Air Staff and Eisenhower's deputy at SHAEF, unveiled it on 25 July 1955. It was Grade II listed in 1978 and upgraded to Grade II* in 2018, the centenary of the Royal Air Force. The central plinth carries a bust of Zeus. The south wall ends with a globe. The north wall ends with the bust of an unnamed aviator gazing east, as though watching for an aircraft.
The Eastchurch flying ground closed at the end of the Second World War. The Stonepitts Farm site is now HM Prison Standford Hill, an open prison. The Short Brothers sheds still stand at Stanford Hill and carry a Grade II listing. Mussel Manor has been restored. A short walk down Church Road from the memorial, you reach All Saints Church - itself Grade I listed - whose churchyard contains the graves of Charles Rolls, Cecil Grace and other early aviators who died in the years when crashing was so common it was nearly an expected outcome of the profession. The monument's central inscription reads, in part: "THIS MEMORIAL COMMEMORATES THE FIRST HOME OF BRITISH AVIATION 1909... FLIGHTS AND EXPERIMENTS WERE MADE BY MEMBERS OF THE AERO CLUB (LATER ROYAL) OF GREAT BRITAIN." Below it the blue glass setts catch the Kent sky like water - or, if you tilt your head and squint, like the Thames Estuary itself, viewed from the deck of an aircraft that has just lifted off the grass.
The Memorial to the Home of Aviation is at 51.41°N, 0.86°E in the village of Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent - at the junction of Church Road and High Street, opposite All Saints Church. Recommended viewing altitude is 1,500-2,500 feet. Look for the village's parish church spire as the visual reference. The original Eastchurch flying ground lies just to the east of the village; the Short Brothers sheds are at Stanford Hill to the south. Nearby airfields: London Southend (EGMC) about 5 nm north across the estuary, Manston (EGMH) 18 nm southeast on the Kent coast. The site is under the London TMA - coordinate with Southend or Thames Radar.