A few weeks ago we had a monumental break-through. After more than two years navigating the labyrinth of ecology and planning, Landmark was granted planning permission for our restoration project at RAF Ibsley in Hampshire.

The final step in our mission to save the derelict Watch Office is in sight.

While we were deep in the maze, on occasion despairing of ever finding a way out, some of our most steadfast supporters joined us at Ibsley on 8 May 2025 – the 80th Anniversary of VE Day. Our little group stood before the derelict Watch Office, which vandals had strewn with more smashed bottles and crushed cans and daubed with more graffiti. Warblers sang and water boatmen skimmed the lake as we listened to Winston Churchill’s words from 80 years before, and contemplated the chilling spectre of what losing the Second World War would actually have meant.

We came away with renewed determination to prevail and save this building.

It was at the start of the war, on 20 August 1940, that Churchill spoke in the House of Commons of the unprecedented role of the Allied pilots. These were ‘airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the war by their prowess and by their devotion’. Pilots ‘whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day’. He then reflected, unforgettably, that never in the history of warfare was ‘so much owed by so many to so few’.

During the course of our campaign to save the Watch Office at RAF Ibsley (known to the USAAF as a control tower) and a monument to the heroism of these ‘few’, we received hundreds of messages from supporters sharing their own wartime memories or connections to the site.

Your messages reassured us of our cause.

Peter Rees told us of his father, Harry Rees who served at RAF Ibsley as a Band Sergeant, charged with lifting the spirits of the young British and American fighter pilots facing ‘mortal danger’ day after day.

Marcia Brocklebank told us of her ‘glamorous and brave’ brother Richard Early of the USAAF who died volunteering for one last sortie weeks before the end of the war, aged just 21. ‘He received the Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal with Four Oak Leaf Clusters and the Purple Heart for his service ... He may well have flown his last mission from Ibsley.’

You can help us put this precious place back together.

After a long journey, the scene is finally set fair. Measures are currently being taken, under carefully controlled conditions, to relocate the bats that use the building. Thereafter we will be ready to start putting this precious place back together. The breeze blocks can be removed from the window openings allowing light to flood the building once again. New steel-framed windows can replace those smashed and torn down by vandals. The Control Room on the first floor, where the Control Officers scoured the skies for the returning planes, will become the new living space and kitchen. The rooms will be decorated and furnished in a spare but stylish fashion inspired by surviving photographs, including the green-painted dado, simple wooden furniture and a kitchen hand-made in our Honeybourne workshop.

The reborn Watch Office will be a Landmark for eight with four bedrooms (two doubles and two twins), four bathrooms and panoramic views. From inside and out the exceptional wildlife of the lakes and woodland of the New Forest, which long since reclaimed the former runway, can all be enjoyed. Meanwhile, in the History Album, library and in the restored building itself its fascinating history can be explored. There could be no better place to pay homage to the spirit of the Second World War, and to the debt we owe to those who won it.

Like Churchill on VE Day, Landmarkers will be able to stand on the roof and proclaim aloud ‘Long live the cause of freedom!’ But we can only achieve this with your help.

We have 94% of the funds needed to save the Watch Office at RAF Ibsley. If we can raise the last 6% we can retrieve this building from the dreadful state into which it has been allowed to fall. Revived as a Landmark, it can regain its dignity and be reborn as an uplifting place in which to celebrate and savour everything that our forebears were fighting for.

Please join us!

Dr Anna Keay OBE, Director