Co-authored by Vron Ware, Antonia Dawes, Alice Cree and Mitra Pariyar and published by Manchester University Press, ‘England’s military heartland’ provides an eye-opening account of the sprawling military presence on Salisbury Plain. Read an extract from the book below.
National heritage
If you were planning to head across the Plain as a way to avoid the A303, it would be a good idea to consult a map. Most of the larger roads run from north to south connecting the larger towns and cities: Salisbury, Marlborough, Devizes and some minor routes follow the path of meandering rivers like the Avon. Traveling east from Tilshead, in the direction of Tidworth, you would first need to drive south before turning on to the Packway, an old road that was rebuilt by the army at the end of the nineteenth century.
Taking this route across the Plain would ensure that contact with the modern British Army was unavoidable. While Tidworth, the focus of this book, is the largest town on the eastern side of the SPTA, the ‘super garrison’ encompasses a sprawling conglomeration of camps and training facilities that suggest significant investment in defence infrastructure as well as a highly securitised environment typical of all military bases. Even without a tour guide, the indelible signs of Britain’s involvement in war-fighting in many parts of the world can be read off these built-up areas too, revealing a very different story about national heritage than the one offered by Stonehenge a few miles to the south.
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As the road curves into the garrison of Tidworth, the first purpose-built army buildings come into view. The town was originally two villages – North Tidworth and South Tidworth – and the Wiltshire-Hampshire border ran between them until county boundaries were redrawn in 1992. The barracks and army lines were constructed on the former Tedworth Estate in the first decade of the 1900s, and the town that developed from this foundation provides one of the best examples of military place-making in the country. In order to transport men, equipment and building materials, a system of railway lines was constructed across the Plain. It ran through the heart of Tidworth garrison for many years until it was dismantled, leaving barely a trace. However, the red-brick walls of the Victorian barracks survive as testimony to British colonial power at its zenith, casting a peculiar shadow over this part of the world.
In many ways, Tidworth’s built environment can be approached as a heritage centre, much like a theme park designed to acquaint the visitor with distant geographies. Names of roads and buildings act as mnemonics, summoning legends of military prowess, bloodshed and honour that no British schoolchildren would ever be asked to learn today. Sandwiched between The Mall and Bazaar Road, the Grade 2 listed barrack blocks still bear their original names over their front elevation: Aliwal, Assaye, Candahar, Mootan, Bhurtpore, Delhi, Jellalabad, Lucknow.
Behind them runs a minor throughway linking both new and old administrative buildings, identified by a mundane sign that reads: Grand Trunk Road. In every direction there are road-names derived from British imperial expansion into South Asia: Plassey, Meerut, Lahore, Lowa, Nainital, Baroda, Agra, Jasna, Jamrud. The miss-spelling of the word ‘Nepaul’ is not so much a hint of illiteracy as a sign of the long relationship between British Army and their Gurkha workforce.
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Driving round one of the new estates designed for soldiers of different ranks and their families, it is clear that, while architectural and environmental standards have improved considerably, military narratives play an important role in maintaining Tidworth’s civic identity. The pattern of naming buildings and roads after historic battles seems just as important today as it has been in the past. Over many decades planners have been able to draw from an inexhaustible sourcebook with little sense of the political implications of their choices. Thus the ‘crimson thread’ of heroism, sacrifice, terror and slaughter runs through Tidworth Garrison and its adjoining camps, marking the whole of the training area as occupied territory.
Just as the aftermath of the Crimean War prompted reform of a sclerotic and corrupt institution, so Britain’s most recent wars have resulted in a concerted attempt to alter the political, social and cultural profile of military labour in response to public dismay about what all those grim sacrifices were for. Yet as time goes by, it becomes harder to gauge the impact of these latest measures, some of which were aimed at integrating the armed forces into a disintegrating welfare state.
While the prospect of military training summons images of guns, tanks and bodies dressed in khaki, it is the sprawling infrastructure of the military base that remains almost impossible to visualise. Camouflaged in a benign rural setting, tucked away behind the world-famous megaliths of Stonehenge, Tidworth is a spectacular example of an overlooked military outpost: at once an anachronistic monument to imperial history yet also a laboratory for understanding what it is like to live in such close proximity to the British Army today.
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‘England’s Military Heartland: Preparing for War on Salisbury Plain’ is out now and available here (£18.99).