Probably not up to the standards required here, but...

Wasn't there talk of the water tower at Hornchurch on AiX a while back?? If I remember rightly it was being compared to the round water tower at Upper Heyford, something about the number of legs on it?? I may have the wrong place but it does sound familiar....

Paul, no sleight intended re knowledge of Mods here!
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Ref, yes you are right - I think it's on the Hornchurch thread.
Ian, I had a copy of the whole site plan scanned, it's too big to post here (about 4.5MB).
If you email me your details I will put a load of info (drawings, photos etc) on a disk and post it.
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The interesting thing about the water tower is that it does not appear on the site plan but it is listed on the reference schedule (bldg 38). It is cearly shown on a couple of photos so it should be easy enough to interpolate a location for a simulation. The matter of the legs is a strange one. As Ref commented above Dwg 1178/25 shows 40' legs in a hexagonal arrangement wheras the photos show 4 legs in a square.

Paul, from what little I know I think you are right in your assessment of the fate of the airfield.
Apart from the Officers Mess there are quite a lot of the accommodation buildings nearby which still exist. I don't know if they have any conservation status, but I doubt it. The existing buildings are all the other side of Southend Road and were outside the Station perimeter (as is the Officers Mess).

I wasn't aware of that Paul, as you say great shame (verging on criminal neglect) that more wasn't done to preserve or at least record the Technical site before demolition.
Another sad thing is that many people who now live on the former airfield know little or nothing about it.
An ex-girlfriend used to live in West Malling Way and had no idea that it was the former location of the Aircrew Selection Centre, one of the last buildings demolished I believe, still in use well into the 1960s.

It's not at all unusual for people to not care about what they are living on - indeed I'd say it is the norm, people simply aren't interested. They may be interested to know that they live on an ex-airfield, in passing, but my sister lives on the site of an old barracks that was built over in the 1960s. She has no interest in the history of the regiment that were based there or whether it was a training site or not and, to be honest, I wouldn't expect her to. History (particularly military history) has little relevance to most people.

What's more worrying is the attitude of conservation bodies and the like, who really should have an interest. They will also quite happily and very easily write off WW2 as being of no historical value.

An excellent example of this was when my father went on a fishing expedition for me after bits of RAF Atcham, while he was volunteering for the National Trust, doing grounds maintenance for the Attingham estate on which Atcham was/the remains of are located. There's a copy of the aerodrome plan on the grounds maintenance building's wall, but questions of what happened to the structures and surfaces were responded to with "oh, we got rid of those to restore the land or make it better for our tenant farmers."

There was no interest at all in the history of WW2 from the NT (although the grounds staff seemed a lot more interested), it was "look at this pretty house" and "look at the pretty grounds". No thought at all given to more recent history - and that's from a conservation organisation, not a LA whose job it is to make most efficient use of land or a developer whose job it is to provide (much needed, to be fair) housing and to make money. There's a legal obligation on them now to let archaeologists onto the site before development, but they'll be looking for pre-Industrial Revolution archaeology that would "otherwise be lost". WW2 is considered "fully documented and understood" by most people.

Ian P.