The Aero Club of Great Britain took its first flying ground at Leysdown in 1909. One of its members, Francis McClean - astronomer, photographer and self-funded patron of British aviation - bought Stonepits Farm on the marshes opposite and converted it into an airfield for club use. The club's house was at Mussell Manor, nearby. The Short Brothers - Horace, Eustace and Oswald - put up factory sheds a short distance away at Shellbeach and began building licensed copies of the Wright A biplane, the first series production of aircraft anywhere in the world. In May 1909 the Wright brothers themselves visited Sheppey, inspected the Shorts' factory and the airfield, and lunched with the club at Mussell Manor. By 1910 both the airfield and the factory had moved two and a half miles inland to better ground at Eastchurch, where the Short-Dunne 5 became the first tailless aircraft to fly successfully and the S.39 Triple Twin was one of the first practical twin-engine aircraft.

In November 1910 McClean wrote to the Admiralty with an audacious offer: the Royal Aero Club would lend the Royal Navy two aircraft, the use of its airfield, and the volunteer services of its members as instructors so that naval officers could be trained as pilots. The Admiralty - characteristically forward-thinking under reformist First Sea Lord Jacky Fisher - accepted. Two hundred officers applied; four were selected. They were Lieutenants Charles Rumney Samson, Arthur Longmore and Reginald Gregory of the Royal Navy, and Captain Eugene Gerrard of the Royal Marine Light Infantry. Cecil Grace was meant to be their instructor but had been lost over the Channel the previous month, presumed drowned; George Cockburn took the role, refusing payment. Horace Short handled the technical instruction. The four officers learned to fly through the spring of 1911, and by the end of the year all of them had qualified - the seed corps of British naval aviation.

Winston Churchill came to Eastchurch in 1913. He was thirty-eight, First Lord of the Admiralty, and obsessed with the strategic possibilities of military flight. Against the strong advice of his wife Clementine and his colleagues - the death rate among early aviators was extraordinary, and Churchill had a Cabinet seat - he insisted on learning to fly here. He never qualified as a pilot in the formal sense, but he made hundreds of hours of instructional flights at Eastchurch and elsewhere, and his enthusiasm was a key reason the Royal Naval Air Service became, by 1914, the most advanced naval air arm in the world. Samson, by then a Commander, ran the station with twenty-four trained pilots and forty-one men. When war came he led the first armoured-car columns into Belgium and made the first take-off in history from a moving warship.

On 1 April 1918, in the last desperate phase of the First World War, the Royal Naval Air Service and the Royal Flying Corps were merged into a new independent service - the Royal Air Force. Eastchurch became RAF Eastchurch. During the last months of the war it housed No. 204 Training Depot Station, the 64th (Naval) Wing and the 58th (Training) Wing. In the inter-war years it carried on as a training and trial establishment. During the Battle of Britain in 1940 it was home to No. 266 Squadron, flying Spitfires, and was bombed repeatedly by the Luftwaffe because of its proximity to the Thames Estuary approaches to London. During the rest of the Second World War it operated under Coastal Command, hunting submarines and watching the North Sea. RAF Eastchurch closed in 1946 - the war won, the aircraft of the future obsolescing the airfield of the past.

The Memorial to the Home of Aviation was unveiled near All Saints' Church in Eastchurch village in 1955, naming the men who had flown here in the years before the Royal Navy arrived. The flying field itself became HM Prison Standford Hill in 1950, with HMP Swaleside built next to it later. Inside the perimeter fence the main roads carry the names of those first aviators: Rolls Avenue for Charles Rolls, who died flying at Bournemouth in 1910; Airfield View for what the ground used to be; Short's Prospect for the brothers whose factory once stood there; Wright's Way for the American inventors who lunched at Mussell Manor in 1909. Several pillboxes from the wartime defences still stand among the prison buildings. In the entrance to HMP Swaleside, two brass plaques record what the ground was - the airstrip of RAF Eastchurch, and the names of every owner of the land between 1909 and 1946. The aircraft are gone. The names are still on the doors.