Creslow Park is a large specialist technical facility located in

Creslow Creslow (occasionally also known as Christlow) is a village and civil parish within Aylesbury Vale district in Buckinghamshire, England. It is close to Whitchurch, about six and a half miles from Aylesbury. It is in the civil parish of Witchurch ...

, in the Aylesbury Vale in the English county of

Buckinghamshire Buckinghamshire (), abbreviated Bucks, is a ceremonial county in South East England that borders Greater London to the south-east, Berkshire to the south, Oxfordshire to the west, Northamptonshire to the north, Bedfordshire to the north-ea ...

. It was originally established in 1944 as Creslow Transmission Station, a top secret radio communications facility for Section VII (Communications) of the

Secret Intelligence Service The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6 ( Military Intelligence, Section 6), is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligenc ...

. It is believed to have been one of three remote radio sites operated by the

Diplomatic Wireless Service The Diplomatic Wireless Service (DWS) was the name of the communications system set up for the British Foreign Office by Brigadier Richard Gambier-Parry, the first Foreign Office Director of Communications, in the latter part of 1945. It grew o ...

and managed from

Hanslope Park Hanslope Park is located about half a mile south-east of the village of Hanslope in the City of Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England. Once the manorial estate of the village, it is now owned by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Of ...

near Milton Keynes. All three of these sites were located in rural locations in Buckinghamshire, the other two being close to the villages of Gawcott and

Poundon Poundon is a hamlet and a civil parish in Aylesbury Vale district in Buckinghamshire, England. It is located near the Oxfordshire border, about four miles northeast of Bicester, three miles southwest of Steeple Claydon. The hamlet name is Anglo ...

respectively.

Building and intended purpose

The original buildings and aerials were erected in 1944. Little is known about these buildings, but some photographs are available. In these photographs a semi-circular transmission building believed to be of the same design as the one located at Signal Hill in Gawcott (which still exists today) can be clearly seen. The site was completely overhauled and modernised in 1989-90 with many of the post-war buildings, including the main transmission building, being demolished and a new state-of-the-art building replacing them. The main building contains 5000sq/ft of highly secure, purpose built technical space divided into two areas, one denoted the 'Drive and Mux Room' (approx 1000sq/ft) and the other the 'Transmission Hall' (approx 4000sq/ft). The former appears to be where the signals were generated and is fully lined internally with a copper

faraday cage A Faraday cage or Faraday shield is an enclosure used to block electromagnetic fields. A Faraday shield may be formed by a continuous covering of conductive material, or in the case of a Faraday cage, by a mesh of such materials. Faraday cage ...

. Dual-redundant power was designed in to the building from the outset and a dedicated HV connection to the grid supported the historical use of the site. This combined with 2x Rolls-Royce Diesel Generators provides excellent power redundancy. In recent years diverse fibre optic communications have been installed meaning the site has an abundance of connectivity.

Modern times

Documents found at the site suggest that the facility was decommissioned in 1995 and after sitting empty for several years it was sold to the local farmer upon whose land the access route resides. The site was leased to local Internet Service Provider Electronic Communities Ltd in late 2018 who are gradually converting the site for modern data centre use and as a central hub for their Fibre To The Home (

Fiber to the x Fiber to the ''x'' (FTTX; also spelled "fibre") or fiber in the loop is a generic term for any broadband network architecture using optical fiber to provide all or part of the local loop used for last mile telecommunications. As fiber optic ...

) network. In November of 2019, a pair of IBM System 360 Model 20 were moved to Creslow Park for restoration.

References

External links

Creslow Park official website
{{coords, 51.8880, -0.8184, display=title Buildings and structures in Buckinghamshire