Hatfield was a big industrial town that housed British Aerospace. Which shut down in 1993. Everyone in the town worked there so the whole place went into a poverty stricken nightmare for about 20 years. The outcome of this was some particularly nasty bits.
Wow, thanks for the info ! How come I missed that ?! Can't remember anyone mentioned this site, ever ! It closed 5 years prior to my arrival, so I guess locals had already moved on and nobody was talking about it any more...
Funny how I lived next to that site without even knowing and 10 years later I would retrain in aviation ! It was destiny ?!
Well your Uni stands on the old airfield that used to be British Aeropace, hence why the roads on that large industrial and retail estate have aircraft names and of the famous Comet Hotel by the roundabout that has a model of The Comet racing plane on a pole outside. This plane was actually built there in 1934 and some photos of this plane, taken by my son, at Shuttleworth, which is where it is now kept, adorn many of the walls in the Comet Hotel and might even be used on place mats in the dining room.
Edit You might find this site interesting http://www.hatfield-herts.co.uk/history.html
Very interesting, that history. deHavilland aircraft are also very closely tied in to that history. Hmmm, must be more to Vince's aviation relationship than first thought?
Although no longer at that location, those deHavilland aircraft designs and the company name both still exist.
The deHavilland aircraft designs from those past times in Hatfield are now owned by Viking Aircraft on the west coast of the Great White North. Actually, I think Viking holds all the out-of-production designs of deHavilland now.
@Spec, does your son have photos of deHavillands as well by any chance?
The story continues a bit more. The owners of Viking also acquired a few years back all the in current production deHavilland designs along with the deHavilland name.
For now, deHavilland Canada is in the Toronto area, but need to move to a new location.
Hmmm, the situation of needing to move location is almost the same scenario of when AlliedSignal and Bendix had to move away from being co-located with another Toronto airport....
and we have successfully gone recursive back to Robert's APU.
EDIT: Not bad ... I am only 10 pages behind in this thread