Flight Test Hanger

Flight Test Hanger, a project to promote community cohesion in Salisbury Village and Hatfield Garden Village funded by Awards for All and Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council and others.

The project is being managed by Anji Archer our Education Officer and involves Digswell Fellows Kim Bevan, Marion Hewitt, Lorna Brown, Suzy Drake, Jo Taylor, Jon Falconer and Ana Robinson helping the people living and working in the area, local schools, the University of Hertfordshire, Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies and Mill Green Museum.

The project has been commissioned by the De Havilland Housing Partnership.

On a lovely summer evening on Wednesday 23rd June, the residents around Horsa Gardens in Salisbury Village in Hatfield came out to paint! Artists from Digswell Arts Trust came to mark out a pattern which represented the layout of the aerial navigational beacons which covered the south east of England before the invention of RADAR.

The last remaining beacon was on a building now demolished on the old airfield before Salisbury Village was built and it will be returned and displayed on a site on university land when funding permits. In the meantime pupils at Green Lanes and Howe Dell Schools have been making replica Beacons and now the residents have been painting the pattern on Horsa Gardens.

"The painting took a couple of hours to set up and nearly three hours before we ran out of the 70 litres of paint we used" said project leader Anji Archer " We lost count of the number of people who actually did some painting as some went early but there were 30 in the end of project picture".

Jason Blight brought the youth group that meets in the Community Centre and then more and more people joined in. The following day Geoff Collins kindly used part of his flying lesson to come over and take photographs of the completed work.

The work was also celebrated in the exhibition at the University on the Thursday which exhibited the beacons the school children had made and showed all the other work that went into the project Flight Test Hangar, the culmination of which will be an 'art book' to be published in July.

Please click on poster image for larger version.