Qualla: Memorial to the Home of Aviation

Memorial to the Home of Aviation: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Memorial to the Home of Aviation: 1909: The Marshes Take Off

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 impor...

Memorial to the Home of Aviation: The Admiralty Pays Attention

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 F...

Memorial to the Home of Aviation: The Pilots and the Aircraft Designers

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 f...

Memorial to the Home of Aviation: Loweth and Stratton's Wing

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Ken...

Memorial to the Home of Aviation: What Survives in the Fields

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...