Great Richmond Road Factory Exhibition
Heritage Open Days 9th & 10th September 2017

The YMCA’s generous help in letting us use the restaurant area of what was the Hawker Aircraft Athletic and Social Club added a special Heritage Open Day element to the event and the 1928 Trojan car built in the factory made a unique outside exhibit on the Saturday.

 This exhibition was a special effort to recognise it is 100 years since the order was placed to build National Aircraft Factory No.2 on this site and 25 years since it closed in 1992.

In just twelve hours, six hours each day, the welcome desk recorded an amazing 871 visitors including 125 children through the doors.  

At times we had to hold back the queue to stop the room getting overcrowded.

The exhibition included our ever popular twenty panel portable exhibition of the entire history of the aviation industry in Kingston and the associated sites at Brooklands, Langley and Dunsfold.

The new element of the exhibition was 20 panels with some 200 photographs never before brought together, exposing a comprehensive history of the Richmond Road Factory, its workers and its products from 1917 to 1992 including many aerial photographs.

The presence of Hawker Association Committee members and volunteers ensured that ex-employees had a special welcome and the room was buzzing with reminiscences and stories as old colleagues got together.

Joint Project Leader Bill Downey as the curator of our ‘Hawker people’ digital photo archive and website, was equally busy constantly surrounded by people wanting to find images and bringing along their own photos to be scanned.

Mike Frain’s initiative in devising guided tours of the housing development now on the factory site to show residents and others what once happened where they now live was a great success.  With help from the Kingston Tour Guides, extra tours were added to cope with demand.  The specially prepared new overlay of the factory plan on the current 360 home housing development was really popular.

When the steering committee, all busy people in their own right, started planning the event nine months ago we had no idea that it would be so popular.  There are no plans to repeat it despite growing pressure.  At the very least we now have the comprehensive photo set and hope to get many of these onto our website in due course and into the Brooklands archives.

Special thanks go to the Hawker and Photo Archives at the Brooklands Museum, the Trojan Owners Cub, the Trojan Museum Trust, the British Commercial Vehicle Museum, the London Bus Museum at Brooklands, the RAF Museum, the National Archives and BAE Systems for images and permission to share them.  We thank the YMCA for their superb co-operation, the Kingston Local History Centre for providing a room for our meetings, Jaggerprint for the excellent photo printing and last minute help with leaflet production, Frank Rainsborough who does not appear in the pictures above because he took most of them and finally Mark Bromley and Martin Alton for the use of their paintings and children’s colouring sheets.

A huge thank you to all our volunteers and all those who were able to turn up and enjoy our exhibition at the YMCA Hawker Centre.

David Hassard & Bill Downey Joint Project Leaders

History panels as a set of PDF files on the Kingston Aviation Centenary Project website in a new window; best to return to the Menu, from a pdf file display, using the back arrow or backspace key.