The so-called “Brabazon Hangar” dominates the south side of Filton Airfield. In the 1960’s it became the home of the Concorde production line - but Concorde wasn’t the first aircraft to be built there....

The hangar (above) was originally built during the 1940’s to enable the construction of the massive Bristol type 167 “Brabazon” (below right). This giant 230 ft wingspan airliner powered by eight pair-coupled Bristol Centaurus piston engines driving contra-rotating propellors was Britain’s attempt at a non-stop trans-Atlantic airliner.

However, it was essentially a Government project specified by a Committee (Chaired, appropriately, by Lord Brabazon of Tara), and for which there was no firm customer - BOAC never said they wanted it, apparently, although they were consulted on the original specification.

By the time the prototype flew in 1949 - six years and £3 million after conception - it was already obsolete. The British de Havilland Comet jet-powered airliner was already well on the way and on the other side of the Atlantic the Boeing 707 was being developed. Both would fly faster and carry more passengers than the Brabazon (although arguably in less style!). It was to be the 707 that eventually won the trans-Atlantic airliner race; a series of fatal Comet crashes were to seriously delay the de Havilland programme whilst extensive investigations into what turned out to be metal fatigue were carried out.

The Brabazon I prototype flew for a short while and a second turboprop-powered prototype (Brabazon II) was being built when the project was abandoned. Both aircraft were subsequently broken up in 1953 when the project was cancelled.

On a personal note I can remember seeing one of the undercarriage wheels and the name “Bristol Brabazon” - cut from the fuselage when the aircraft was broken up - on display at Lord Montagu’s Motor Museum (now the National Motor Museum) in Beaulieu (Hampshire) in the late ‘60s - they are now part of a display at the Bristol Industrial Museum. A seat reputedly from the Brabazon prototype also survived for many years in the tea hut in our family’s garage business (Southmead Garage, Southmead Road). Sadly, this was lost when the business closed in 1996.

Returning to the Brabazon and the hangar,  when the project was being proposed it was thought that a longer runway would be required for the Brabazon’s takeoff. The answer was to widen (to 300 ft) and extend (to over 8000 ft) the existing runway (27/09) westward, and, as Charlton village was in the way, the villagers were told to leave, their homes demolished and, to add insult to injury, the rubble from the village was used in the construction of the runway.

Also severed was the recently built (1938?) Filton by-pass which ran from Patchway to Brentry on the west side of the original airfield. This was a dual carriageway of concrete construction built to the latest road specification of the time with a hedge planted on the central reservation to reduce glare from the headlights of oncoming traffic.

The remnants of the bypass on the Patchway side now help to serve the recently built Mall regional shopping centre. An excellent aerial photo is available on the Multimap.com website which clearly shows the hangar, and where the runway was extended to the west of the hangar through Charlton village (which no longer gets a mention except in some surrounding road names).

With the demise of the Brabazon project Bristol was left with one of the largest aircraft production facilities in Europe and the giant hangars were put to other uses; including the production line for the much more successful Bristol Britannia airliner (apparently originally designated Brabazon III?). Later, it became the birthplace of the British Concorde production line.

The official Filton Aerodrome website can be found here.

Brabazon Level Crossing

A final interesting point about the Brabazon hangar is that aircraft movement between it and the airfield proper means crossing the Filton to Avonmouth railway line on a level crossing (click here for more details about this). I believe this is unique in British aviation - unless of course you know otherwise!

[left] - Concorde G-BOAD on the turning circle at the end of runway 03/21. The railway can be seen in the foreground and the level crossing can be made out just above the car and onlookers.

I vividly remember an incident with the Vickers VC10 testbed (XR809/G-AXLR) being in a similar position to this after having just landed with a Rolls Royce RB211 engine on test in the mid ‘70s. It was waiting to cross the railway line and to move onto the apron in front of the Brabazon Hangar. I was a passenger in a de Havilland Chipmunk waiting to use runway 21 (seen above the Concorde’s tail in the picture). The pilot I was with was impatient to get going and so we actually took off over the VC10 - you can imagine with the jet wash from the VC10’s engines it was quite an “interesting” takeoff!

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