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Goodbye to the RAF Hut

RAF Hut at Walton HallOpen University staff at Walton Hall have been informed that this week the RAF Hut on campus is to be demolished to reduce costs and carbon emissions. The RAF Hut came from RAF Cardington as a temporary building in 1969. It was finally demolished 42 years later in July 2011. Recently it has been used mainly for storage but the hut’s structural condition had deteriorated and it is no longer fit for purpose.

Several huts were erected as temporary accommodation in 1969 and 1970, but because of a shortage of capital funding ended up being in still in use many years later.

Visit the History of the OU website for more information about the history of the campus at Walton Hall.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011 at 12:03 pm by Rachel Garnham and is filed under History of the OU, Walton Hall campus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Goodbye to the RAF Hut”

  1. Dianne Sutton Says:
    July 7th, 2011 at 2:35 pm

    The end of an era – the space where the RAF hut used to be looks very strange now.

    When I started working at Walton-on-(not quite so much)-Mud in February 1971 I remember one came from the back of Walton Hall and walked through a temporary building approx on the site of the new Estates building and into Wimpey 1 where there was a small switchboard in the entrance area (looked after by Kitty). To the right of the entrance was the fledgling Technology faculty and to the left the Student Computing Service, complete with our Hewlett Packard 2000 series computer and bank of modems, I’d come to work for. I remember the RAF hut being next door but can’t remember what we went there for – Finance maybe? Or did it house Mac’s Stores before they moved to the end of Wimpey 3?

    Later in 1971 Wimpeys 2 and 3 were erected and over the Christmas period at the end of 1971 we moved the computer over to Wimpey 3 where SCS remained until moving into the purpose built M Block (now Burrows Building) in 1979.

  2. Rachel Says:
    July 14th, 2011 at 10:16 am

    I think, looking at some of the recollections in the oral histories, that initially the RAF Hut housed Finance and ‘General Facilities’, which was the forerunner of Estates. There may have been others – if anyone remembers, please do add your information.

  3. History of the OU Says:
    July 12th, 2015 at 8:58 am

    agen ceme

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