Military secrets

Yesterday evening I happened to be looking at the West London Landranger Map from Ordnance Survey, Sheet 176, and my eye landed on Northwood, a little to the east of Rickmansworth, on the northwestern sector of the M25.

Mainly on account of a naval chap with whom I had once done some work, I remembered about the naval headquarters there. So where was it?

I was not particularly surprised not to find it as I thought that it was the custom to omit sensitive military installations, be they ever so large and visible on the ground. An important munitions dump near Edgehill coming to mind - sufficiently important that the local council ran paper fire drills - this from a local council employee taking a pipe in a public house nearby.

However, ever curious, I ask Bing and he comes up with reference 1. Complete with detailed instructions on how to get there; on foot, by car or whatever.

Thus armed, I trace the route in gmaps, Satellite view, and it is not long before I get to the place, just to the west of Oxhey Woods. All present, labelled and correct, although the Street View camera van was not allowed through the reasonably serious looking gate house.

I then go to the online version of Sheet 176, and find the place all present, labelled and correct there too. And given the capabilities of online maps, it would have been quite hard to grey it out or camouflage it in an inconspicuous way. I associate to greying out large lumps of employment at such places in my days with the late, Annual Census of Employment.

And while it is present in my deluxe edition of the London AZ, it is very discretely labelled, sufficiently discrete that you would have to know what it was and roughly where it was beforehand.

So not an unreasonable outcome. You are not going to hide such a place from the enemy professional, but no need to make it too easy for the disaffected amateur.

PS: we might not have much left to command these days (think aircraft carriers without aircraft), but we do at least have the command structure, the command infrastructure. Lots of bunkers, admirals, air marshals, generals, permanent secretaries and secretariats. All that sort of thing. Not least an imposing map room, where our fat leader can be press-opportunitied while poring over a map. From where I associate again to an incident in the Good Soldier Švejk, an incident involving a map, a colonel and a cat. Pages 436-7 of the Heinemann edition of 1973. Translated by Parrott, sold by Foyles, late of Charing Cross Road. Where today, I also noticed some mild anti-Semitism, more having sport with racial stereotypes than seriously abusive, more virulent forms of which were endemic in central Europe at the time of writing.

References

Reference 1: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/northwood-headquarters/northwood-headquarters.