An airfield on the downs
RAF Harwell opened in 1937 on the high ground south of Harwell village, about six miles east of Wantage. In the Second World War it trained bomber crews and then became a base for airborne forces. On the night of 5 June 1944 the first pathfinder aircraft of the D-Day landings took off from Harwell, carrying paratroops who were to mark the dropping zones in Normandy. A memorial stone on the site, unveiled in 1955, marks the spot.
Britain’s atomic laboratory
On 1 January 1946 the airfield was handed from the RAF to the Ministry of Supply to become the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE), the centre of Britain’s post-war nuclear research. The physicist John Cockcroft was chosen to set it up and became its first director. Klaus Fuchs led its theoretical physics division until he was exposed as a Soviet spy and convicted in 1950.
Harwell built a series of experimental reactors. GLEEP, the Graphite Low Energy Experimental Pile, went critical on 15 August 1947, the first nuclear reactor to work in western Europe. It was followed by BEPO in 1948, LIDO, and the larger research reactors DIDO and PLUTO in 1956–57. Harwell scientists also worked on nuclear fusion, most famously with the ZETA machine in the 1950s. In 1954 the site passed to the new United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. Other science grew up around the atomic work: the Medical Research Council set up a radiobiology unit in 1947, and the Rutherford Laboratory, later the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, developed next door at Chilton from Harwell’s accelerator work.
What it meant for Wantage
The establishment needed thousands of scientists, engineers and support staff, and they needed homes. Wantage and Grove grew with new estates in the post-war decades, and from 1955 the Atomic Energy Authority also used part of the old Grove airfield. For more than half a century Harwell has been one of the biggest employers for people living in and around Wantage.
From reactors to a science campus
As Britain’s need for civil nuclear research fell away, Harwell turned to other work. The last three reactors, GLEEP, DIDO and PLUTO, closed in 1990, and much of the commercial research passed to AEA Technology after privatisation in the 1990s. Decommissioning and clean-up followed, and in 2006 the first part of the site was released from nuclear regulation. That year the site was relaunched as the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus.
Today Harwell Campus covers about 700 acres and is home to more than 200 organisations. It includes the ISIS neutron and muon source, the Diamond Light Source synchrotron, which opened in 2007, the Central Laser Facility, the European Space Agency’s UK centre and the Satellite Applications Catapult. Remaining nuclear clean-up is the responsibility of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.