Adastral Park is a science campus based on part of the old

Royal Air Force Station The Royal Air Force (RAF) operates several stations throughout the United Kingdom and overseas. This includes front-line and training air bases, support, administrative and training stations with no flying activity, unmanned airfields used fo ...

Martlesham Heath Martlesham Heath village is situated 6 miles (10 km) east of Ipswich, in Suffolk, England. This was an ancient area of heathland and latterly the site of Martlesham Heath Airfield. A "new village" was established there in the mid-1970s and th ...

, near

Ipswich Ipswich () is a port town and borough in Suffolk, England, of which it is the county town. The town is located in East Anglia about away from the mouth of the River Orwell and the North Sea. Ipswich is both on the Great Eastern Main Line r ...

in the

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

county of Suffolk. When the site opened it was known as the

Post Office Research Station The Post Office Research Station was first established as a separate section of the General Post Office in 1909. In 1921, the Research Station moved to Dollis Hill, north west London, initially in ex-army huts. The main permanent buildings at ...

, but it was subsequently renamed BT Research Laboratories or BT Labs and later Adastral Park to reflect an expansion in the organisations and activities co-located with BT Labs at the campus.

History

The original laboratories (when BT was part of the

Post Office A post office is a public facility and a retailer that provides mail services, such as accepting letters and parcels, providing post office boxes, and selling postage stamps, packaging, and stationery. Post offices may offer additional serv ...

) were first opened by

Elizabeth II Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary; 21 April 1926 – 8 September 2022) was Queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms from 6 February 1952 until her death in 2022. She was queen regnant of 32 sovereign states during ...

in 1975. Prior to this the

was at

Dollis Hill Dollis Hill is an area in northwest London, which consists of the streets surrounding the 35 hectares (86 acres) Gladstone Park. It is served by a London Underground station, Dollis Hill, on the Jubilee line, providing good links to central Lon ...

in northwest London. Martlesham Heath was chosen as the site for a research facility because the surrounding countryside was relatively flat and therefore ideal for testing the radio-based communication systems in vogue at the time. Initially, research was carried out into postal sorting and delivery technology, and telecommunications. After the Post Office was split apart and prior to British Telecom's privatisation in the early 1980s, the research concentrated on telecommunications. In keeping with the stellar theme of the site name, buildings on site are named after stars or constellations (an example being the Main Laboratory Block now named the Orion building). The Orion building is easily recognisable from the nearby

A12 road This is a list of roads designated A12. Entries are sorted in alphabetical order by country. * A012 road (Argentina), a road around the city of Rosario * A12 motorway (Austria), a road connecting Kufstein and the German Autobahn A 93 to Landec ...

with its radio tower, now named Pegasus tower, dominating the skyline. The change to the current name occurred in the late 1990s with the aim of turning the site into a high-technology business park, no longer exclusively for the use of BT. The name was created by Stewart Davies, the CEO of the BT business (BT Exact Technologies) headquartered at the site at that time. It is derived from the motto of the

Royal Air Force The Royal Air Force (RAF) is the United Kingdom's air and space force. It was formed towards the end of the First World War on 1 April 1918, becoming the first independent air force in the world, by regrouping the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and ...

—''per ardua ad astra'' ("through adversity to the stars"). The Royal Air Force were prior residents of the site, as

RAF Martlesham Heath Royal Air Force Martlesham Heath or more simply RAF Martlesham Heath is a former Royal Air Force station located southwest of Woodbridge, Suffolk, England. It was active between 1917 and 1963, and played an important role in the development of ...

. Experimental aircraft test flights flew from the airfield and the name was meant to reflect this. In March 2001,

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...

, Faculty of Engineering Sciences, chose Adastral Park to set up the first-ever postgraduate research and teaching centre on an industrial campus, which was housed there until 2009. During the transformation of the business park, many of the old buildings were removed and car parks were moved to the perimeter of the site, with the centre made into open parkland with a water feature to provide a 'park' feel to the complex. The site accommodates approximately 4,000 people.

Current use

Companies based at Adastral Park besides BT (BT Applied Research) include: *

Openreach Openreach Limited is a company wholly owned by BT Group plc, that maintains the telephone cables, ducts, cabinets and exchanges that connect nearly all homes and businesses in the United Kingdom to the national broadband and telephone network. I ...

F5 Networks F5, Inc. is an American technology company specializing in application security, multi-cloud management, online fraud prevention, application delivery networking (ADN), application availability & performance, network security, and access & autho ...

Juniper Networks Juniper Networks, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The company develops and markets networking products, including routers, switches, network management software, network security products, ...

GENBAND Ribbon Communications US LLC is a public company that makes software, IP and optical networking solutions for service providers, enterprises and critical infrastructure sectors. The company was formed in 2017, following the merger of Genband and S ...

* Maly IT Solutions *

Cisco Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...

* Coderus.com *CommsUnite *

Fujitsu is a Japanese multinational information and communications technology equipment and services corporation, established in 1935 and headquartered in Tokyo. Fujitsu is the world's sixth-largest IT services provider by annual revenue, and the la ...

Huawei Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. ( ; ) is a Chinese multinational technology corporation headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. It designs, develops, produces and sells telecommunications equipment, consumer electronics and various smar ...

O2 plc O2 (typeset as O2) is a global brand name owned by the Spanish telecommunications company Telefónica. The company uses the O2 brand for its subsidiaries in the United Kingdom and Germany. Since 2018, it is also used as an online-only flanker br ...

Arqiva Arqiva () is a British telecommunications company which provides infrastructure, broadcast transmission and smart meter facilities in the United Kingdom. The company is headquartered at the former Independent Broadcasting Authority headquarters ...

* CIP * Milner Strategic Marketing There is also a

satellite earth station A ground station, Earth station, or Earth terminal is a terrestrial radio station designed for extraplanetary telecommunication with spacecraft (constituting part of the ground segment of the spacecraft system), or reception of radio waves fro ...

operated by

; the location was chosen for the visibility of satellites on the eastern horizon. In 2018 there were 98 high-tech companies at the site.

Peregrine falcons

BT worked with the Hawk and Owl Trust to set up a nesting box for a pair of

peregrine falcon The peregrine falcon (''Falco peregrinus''), also known as the peregrine, and historically as the duck hawk in North America, is a Cosmopolitan distribution, cosmopolitan bird of prey (Bird of prey, raptor) in the family (biology), family Falco ...

s. These produced two chicks in 2019, and in 2020 a YouTube channel was set up and three chicks were produced.

Adastral New Town

Over many years, BT has put forward various proposals and plans to expand activities at the business park. In June 2001, a framework for expanding the business park was created, but it was not linked to building any residential housing on the site. At the time BT forecast 3000 to 3500 additional jobs by about 2010. In 2007, BT said that they could develop the business park without the need for the income from selling land for housing. In 2006, Suffolk Coastal District Council (SCDC) rejected a planning application for 120 log cabins on a site next to Waldringfield Road. The rejection was on the grounds that it was too near the

Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty An Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB; , AHNE) is an area of countryside in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, that has been designated for conservation due to its significant landscape value. Areas are designated in recognition of thei ...

amongst other reasons, and would result in an unacceptable increase in visitor numbers to a sensitive areas. BT initially objected on the grounds that it would interfere with their radio test area, although BT subsequently withdrew their objection provided the developer created a protective earth bund, rejected by SCDC. BT subsequently lodged a planning application for 2000 houses to be built. At its closest the site comes within of an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and there are several

Site of Special Scientific Interest A Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) in Great Britain or an Area of Special Scientific Interest (ASSI) in the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland is a conservation designation denoting a protected area in the United Kingdom and Isle of ...

close by, such as Newbourne Springs. In April 2018, SCDC (subsequently merged with a neighbouring council to become

East Suffolk District Council East Suffolk is a local government district in Suffolk, England, which was established on 1 April 2019, following the merger of the existing Suffolk Coastal and Waveney districts. At the 2011 census, the two districts had a combined population of ...

) gave outline permission for the development, which is now named Brightwell Lakes.

References

External links