Researching RAF Hartlebury MU25

20 Dec, 2025

It's said an army marches on its stomach but somewhere along the way they need not only food, but petrol and socks as well as all the other bits that make things work, and what is true for the Army must also be true for the Royal Air Force.

As the prospect of war increased in 1938, a military command was formed to provide logistical support to the RAF. RAF Maintenance command formed on the 1st April 1938 and a few months later in September of that year, a site very close to me in Worcestershire, Maintenance Unit (MU) Number 25 - RAF Hartlebury was deployed. As a large logistical hub for the RAF, MU25 handled general logistics for the RAF bases of the region as well as overseas. Certainly from records, it acted as a medicine storage and creation centre ¹. Other than medicines, it appears to have handled storage and logistics for everything not a munition or actual plane in 7 distributed sites. Certainly it handled Rolls Royce Merlin engines and likely took in parts from Gloster (Hawker) works in Hucclecote 25 miles away, as well as Vickers-Armstrong engines and parts from Castle Bromwich near Birmingham. Its proximity to the industrial city of Birmingham and the manufacturing centres of the West Midlands, presumably also meant it was well supplied from industries close by, before distributing to the regional RAF bases like RAF Pershore and RAF Defford - who were doing some very interesting things with radar development - as well as further afield.

Whilst the warehouses on the site look as you might expect, with thick walls and light roofs, the site was built at the end of a period when the RAF was encouraged by the Royal Fine Arts Commission to build at least some attractive buildings to distract from the general ugliness of storage, barracks and airfields. In the case of RAF Hartlebury the former guard house is a remaining example of this way of thinking.

For protection during the war, RAF Hartlebury had its own Home Guard platoon ² of civilian staff as well as defence positions and earth blast protection walls built up around some of the sites. No walls or defences appear to still be in place which isn’t entirely surprising given the site is now an industrial park heavily used by a media agency.

It's a big site, in 1941 it had 1,230 people on site, including 300 women, 800 men over 50 and 130 enlisted people there was also, slightly unusually, 2 Americans as RAF CTC — Civilian Technical Corps on site ³. Given the role of the CTC as American advisors especially on radio and Radar matters, it's interesting they were based there as opposed to RAF Defford, but perhaps someone had to ensure certain items got boxed up, secured and no one was peeking (purely speculation on my part).

The base stayed in use long after the war as well with 1772 people working there in 1968 ⁴, however by this time in the late ‘60s it was clearly being discussed that it would be closed and its facilities moved elsewhere or wound down as overseas commitments (even at the time of the cold war) were decreasing. Finally closed in 1977, it must have fairly quickly become overly run down and damaged as a question in Parliament in 1978 indicates some £15000 has been spent on maintenance over the last few months ⁵.

Today in 2025, its a industrial park with buildings spread down the A422 - the guard house can't be photographed as its covered in a large advertisement for the modernist section of the site, largely now occupied by a media agency.