Royal Air Force Station Duxford opened in September 1918.
Accomodation for it's personnel was very primitive, mostly tents
and a few wooden barracks.
As the airfield was improved it was realised that more permanent
facilities were required, houses were built on the North west side
of the Newmarket to Royston road (What is now the A505).
House building started in 1922, the first to be built were Nos 1 to 18 Woburn Place.
Not long afterwards, Nos 19 to 44 Whitehall Gardens were built.
Things settled down for a few years, but when the threat of war was
seen to be coming, a huge expansion plan was put into place which saw
new building on the airfield (Officers Mess, Barrack Blocks, various
buildings for engineering, stores, motor transport etc) and more housing!
Building started again in the mid 1930s and Nos 45 to 48 Woburn Place and
50 to 55 Kingsway were erected.
The Sergeant's Mess, (which is now the Iceni Water building) and a barrack
block adjacent (now demolished), plus parts of Burma and Ledo Road (behind
Texaco) also went up at this time.
World War Two stopped further building but when peace returned, so did the builders!
Nos 54 to 81 Kingsway went up from 1947 to 1950, and Nos 82 to 109 Kingsway
were last to be built in 1953-1956.
The RAF remained at Duxford until 1961 when the airfield was closed as it was
too far south and too far inland to be strategically important and the costly
improvements required for modern supersonic jet fighters could not be justified.
After the closure of RAF Duxford, the housing stock was remained in use for RAF
famillies stationed at RAF Bassingbourn.
In 1969, RAF Bassingbourn was transferred to the Army, and likewise the Duxford
housing was now used to house the Army famillies.
In 1976, plans were made to sell off the properties and the Army left, and the
housing boarded up.
In 1982, Blue Boar bought the whole site and then sold the individual freeholds,
and then transferred the ownership road network and public open spaces to a company
that is now known as the Heathfields Residents Association Ltd.
Such is the popularity of the estate, many of the houses are still owned by the
people who bought them from Blue Boar back in 1982 and 1983.
The ownership of the road network and public open spaces on most modern housing
estates estates is usually transferred from the developers to the local council,
who then take on the financial and legal responsibility for future maintenance, but
because the road network construction of the ex RAF estates does not meet the standards
required for the local council to "adopt" them, they remain in private ownership, and
therefore the HRA estate is a "Private" estate, where the owners are financially and
legally responsible for the maintenance, which in our case gives us much more control.
As well as buying the freehold of their house, each purchaser also had to buy a share
in Residents Association, therefore the house owners collectively own the Residents
Association that owns the road network and public open spaces. Every time a house is
sold, the seller has to transfer their share in the HRA to the new house owner, thus
ensuring that the home owners maintain ownership of the HRA.
To enable the HRA to pay for things like street lighting, grass cutting, general
maintenance and improvement of the estate, each shareholder is required to pay an
annual management charge of £120, which may be be paid in monthly installments.
The Heathfield estate was the first former RAF housing estate to be sold off to
private freeholders, and as far as we know, it is the only estate where the
ownership of the road network and public open spaces was transferred to a residents
assciation that is actually owned by the owners of the houses on the estate, which
gives the owners a say in how the estate is managed as the HRA Board of Directors is
elected by the house owners.
Subsequent RAF estate sales have seen the roads and public open space ownership
retained by the developers that acquired their estates from the RAF, which gives
the residents of these estates no say in the way their estates are managed, and has
often resulted in exorbitant management charge, in many cases they are in excess
of £500 per year per house.
Incidently, the name "Heathfield" comes from the farm that was here back in 1917, w
hen the builders first arrived to build what was to become Royal Air Force Duxford.
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Heathfields
