About the Campaign

Local residents, heritage supporters, and members of the Essex Historic Military Vehicle Association have come together with a shared purpose: to save the last remaining T2 Hangar at Boreham Airfield and secure its future as a heritage and community space.

The Essex HMVA, a long established not for profilt charity, dedicated to preserving military history and supporting local remembrance, is working alongside the community to champion a positive, practical future for the building.

Much of Boreham’s wartime landscape has already been lost — including the control tower and several key structures that once defined the airfield. The T2 Hangar is now the final substantial survivor. Its loss would erase the last physical link to a site that played a vital role in both local and national history.

Support for saving the hangar continues to grow across Chelmsford and the surrounding villages. Parish councils, local councillors, and local Members of Parliament have all recognised the importance of protecting this rare wartime structure and exploring its potential for education, community use, and heritage interpretation.

Meanwhile, the developer’s plans for the wider site remain unclear and frequently changing, with no consistent vision for how the land will be used or how the hangar fits into that future. Demolishing a structurally sound building without a settled plan is wasteful, environmentally damaging, and financially unnecessary. The carbon cost of demolition and disposal — along with the loss of embodied energy in the existing structure — runs directly against modern sustainability principles. Current owners of the land have failed to maintain it, and it s state will only worsen if left. The time to act is now.

The T2 Hangar is an irreplaceable part of our local story. Preserving it gives us the chance to create a space that honours our history, brings people together, and provides lasting value for future generations. Once it's gone - it's gone forever!

Standing beside the T2 Hangar is another rare piece of Boreham’s wartime fabric: the original Romney Hut, historically used as the airfield’s armoury. Although modest in scale, it is an equally important survivor — one of the last remaining ancillary buildings that once supported the daily operations of the airfield during the Second World War.

Like the hangar, the Romney Hut is a structure with genuine potential. Its simple, adaptable form makes it ideal for mixed‑use community activity, from small group meetings and heritage workshops to volunteer training, craft sessions, or as a quiet social space for local residents. With sensitive restoration, it could become a warm, welcoming hub that complements the larger hangar and helps anchor the site as a living, usable heritage environment rather than a static relic.

The wider scheme offers further opportunities to reconnect people with the history of the airfield and the home‑front experience. A 1940's ‑ style allotment, for example, would provide an engaging educational feature for schools and families, linking wartime food production to modern sustainability. The site could also provide a permanent home for another important local heritage asset: the Bailey Bridge currently held in storage by Chelmsford City Council. Re‑erecting it here would not only preserve a significant engineering structure but also create a powerful, tangible link to the ingenuity and resilience of the wartime period.

Together, the T2 Hangar, the Romney Hut, and these wider heritage elements form a coherent, meaningful vision for Boreham — one that respects the past while creating practical, community‑focused spaces for the future. This is a chance to save not just a building, but an entire story.