Great Britain QinetiQ/Royal Radar Establishment, Malvern March 2019

[Landie_Man]

So a few weeks ago, myself and two other explorers; @albino-jay and @ Ferret whom I've known online for many years, but never managed to explore with!  We all get round to exploring with one another eventually!

This site was previously owned by a firm who were contracted to develop technology for the military, but was eventually sold off to a property developer after its 2011 closure.

The site has recently become the Urbex Hotspot for people, so it was good to get it done and dusted before it got too much worse.  We really enjoyed ourselves, and despite being fairly stripped out, there was a lot to see here.  We spent around 10 hours on site I think!!!  

Once again, we bumped into about 4 other groups of explorers.  I guess this is becoming a thing nowadays in this hobby to be honest!  Just gotta face the facts that it is now mainstream...

The Royal Radar Establishment; a former Research Centre in Malvern, Worcestershire in the United Kingdom was formed in 1953 as the Radar Research Establishment by the merger of the Air Ministry's Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) and the British Army's Radar Research and Development Establishment (RRDE). 

It new name was given after a visit by Queen Elizabeth II in 1957. Both names were later abbreviated to RRE. In 1976 the Signals Research and Development Establishment (SRDE), involved in communications research, joined the RRE to form the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE).

They had been closely associated since before the beginning of World War II, when the predecessor to RRDE was formed as a small group within the Air Ministry's research center in Bawdsey Manor. They were soon forced to leave Bawdsey due to its exposed location on the east coast of England.  

After several moves, the groups finally settled in separate locations in Malvern beginning in May 1942 with a merger in 1953 that formed the RRE and renamed these as the North Site (RRDE) and the South Site (TRE). 

In 1991 they were partially privatize, and became Defence Evaluation and Research Agency in 1996. The North Site was closed in 2003 and the work was consolidated at the South Site, while the former North Site was sold off for housing developments. The RSRE is now part of Qinetiq.

Some of the most important technologies developed from work at RSRE are radar, thermography, liquid crystal displays and speech synthesis.

Contributions to computer science made by the RSRE included ALGOL 68RS (a portable implementation of ALGOL 68, following on from ALGOL 68R developed by RRE), Coral 66, radial basis function networks, hierarchical self-organising networks (deep autoencoders), the VIPER high-integrity microprocessor, the ELLA hardware description language, and the TenDRA C/C++ compiler.

The RSRE motto was Ubique Sentio,  which is Latin for "I sense everywhere". 

The site is well explored after its sale to a Private Developer.  It is well worth visiting with its mockup of a RADAR Bunker.

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Thanks for Looking More at:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/landie_man/albums/72157704376480512/page1

This was a busy one, so you will have to exit via the Gift Shop I'm afraid!

 

[The_Raw]

Jeez there's a lot of stuff to see in there! I heard someone mention this the other day but we've not had any reports on here so cheers for posting

 

[Andy]

Still a lot of interesting things inside. I especially like the shots 11, 23 & 27.

 

[Landie_Man]

Thanks guys. Sorry for the volume of photos. There was quite a bit to see considering the amount of it was stripped!

 

[AndyK!]

I can't say I was particularly taken with this place last year, but you've done a good job here, and maybe it's more interesting than I remember!