• Welcome to this forum . We are a worldwide group with a common interest in Birmingham and its history. While here, please follow a few simple rules. We ask that you respect other members, thank those who have helped you and please keep your contributions on-topic with the thread.

    We do hope you enjoy your visit. BHF Admin Team

Hay Mills Rotor Station

  • Thread starter Thread starter Tom24
  • Start date Start date
T

Tom24

Guest
Does anyone know where the “Hay Mills Rotor Station” was located during the early 50’s. I recently came across a Civil Aircraft publication from 1951 which stated that B.E.A. were operating 3 flights a day from Hay Mills to Northolt aerodrome in London, using Sikorsky S51 3-seater helicopters.
The cost of the 70min journey was £2.10s single and £4.10s return, with an extra £1 for the onward flight to Heathrow.

Apparently, local M.P. Gerald Nabarro used this service regularly to fly down to Westminster, and spoke in support of it in the House.

There would have been a helicopter landing circle and some sort of control tower. At the time, they planned for a nationwide network of these stations, some being planned for the roofs of mainline rail stations in city centres, but presumably the idea never really “took off!” – possibly because of the cost. £4 must have been pretty much a week’s wages then.

Any ideas?
 
hay mills rotorstation 56.jpgThe Rotostation was based at Heybarnes Recreation Ground.
 
Last edited:
Thanks Postie.
I guessed it must have been there - what a great picture as well!

Cheers!
 
In an earlier post regards some photo's etc on Flickr I noticed a picture that related to HAY MILLS ROTO STATION, Just wondered if anyone has any memories of this site and where exactly it was. Have attached the picture see if it jogs anyone memory.
 
I've seen the picture before, and I thought it was here. which would put the river in the right place. Long time ago now, but I'm sure the when I was a kid there was a concrete or asphalt patch, maybe even a pavillion approx where the bushes are in the centre of the picture, which I though would have been where the building is on the original.

Any thoughts ?
 
Col h that would put it in a more residential area, also next to the school, although I don't know if that was built in 1950! The other end by the Coventry Road would have given it a straight run to the airport.
 
Yeah, I see your point.
But the houses in Heybarnes Rd are surely pre 1950. I'm pretty sure there was no school in there, even in the 60s it was allotments I think.

Rootes factory was the otherside of the A45, and the other side of the river was rough ground used to have the fair there, and I think the caravans from Bob Wilsons fair used to park up there out of season.
 
Someone will know for sure! It's hard to image "how it was" so like you say may well have been Heybarnes Road end, will have to try and get a A to Z from the period see if that give any clues.
 
Coming down the A45 (Coventry Rd) past Bedders fish & chip shop on your left next is a Tyre fitting garage and the entrance to Haybarnes park is next there was a turnaround for the Trolley bus there years ago, inside the park behind it was the Heli-pad a reasonable distance from the Cov Rd to the left of the river, it was not a success it, if you continue along the Cov Rd & at the traffic lights turn left and into Shipway Rd you will see the Funfair owners mansion?, not sure if it was built for Pat Collins or Bob Wilson?, some fairground people winter there and Fair Rides are stored there. Len.
 
Last edited:
Some how I knew you would have the answer Len! Can't imagine why anyone thought it would have been a good idea to build it in the first place! Remember the tyre place when it was a motorbike shop Percy Tait if I remember right.
 
From "Flight" magazine, 8th June 1951:

B.E.A. HELICOPTER SERVICE STARTS
ONE of the first passengers on the new Birmingham (Hay Mills)
to London (Northolt and Heathrow) helicopter service was
Mr. Nabarro, M.P., the member for Kidderminster. He used it to
save time in travelling to Westminster. At question time in the
House the same day he asked Mr. Beswick, Parliamentary Secretary
to the M.C.A., whether there were any technical or economic
obstacles to the erection of rotor stations as superstructures on
main railway termini. To this enquiry he received a typical
Parliamentary answer : "Without accepting the premise that this
would be economically or operationally feasible we do not rule out
the erection of superstructures over railway stations."
The service operates three times daily—0700, 1205 and 1600hr
from the Hay Mills rotor station, which is some three miles
distant from the centre of Birmingham. The journey to Northolt
takes 70 minutes and the crossing to Heathrow (London Airport) a
further ten. Fares are £2 10s. single and £4 10s. for the return
journey. If seats are available, the service between the two
London airports may be used at £1 each way.
At the moment the service is being run by five pilots and three
3-seater Westland-Sikorsky S51 helicopters. Cruising speed is
85 m.p.h. and, according to the weather and the section being
flown, a height of between 500ft and 1,500ft is maintained.
Within the next two years B.E.A. hopes to be using the 12/14-
seat Bristol 173 helicopter and the four-seat Bristol 171 may be
employed in the interim. The thrice-daily service (except Sundays)
will be continued until the end of August. During September it
will fly twice a day, but during the winter once only.
B.E.A.'s helicopter unit is in the charge of W./C. R.A.C. Brie,
who was for many years with the Cierva Autogiro Company.
 
Lloyd, Thanks for your reply giving the fare prices, trust Gerald Nabarro, MP to be one of the first to use the service, he would`nt have had to drive around any traffic islands!. Len.
 
I've always thought that the rotor station was a bit odd. OK it was an experiment, at the time the potential domestic helicopter services was being evaluated. But why build the terminus here? Less than four miles away is Elmdon Airport with all its facilities including ATC and fire cover. Furthermore BEA were by now well established at Elmdon and the helicopter was positioned there overnight. Why build a completely separate facility just up the road?
 
Probably because Hay Mills was closer to the urban population, few of whom had personal transport at the time. Elmdon had...er... a bus stop on the Coventry Road outside, with the Midland Red 159 service between Birmingham and Coventry every half hour.
 
Very true but surely it would have been easier/cheaper for BEA to have used a taxi to pick up the passengers from the city centre or wherever, after all the helicopter only carried three passengers! But in any case the city centre air terminal had opened at Queens Drive (in the old New St station) in 1949, presumably with transport to Elmdon to connect with flights.

It just seems very odd to me, I could understand a dedicated helicopter facility being built in the city centre, but not in a surburban area between the centre and the airport.
 
Possibly a 'toe in the water' approach, with minimum development costs. If there had been more demand, and using the Bristol 12-14 seaters proposed, it could have become worth building a heliport in the centre, say over New Street station.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
That's an interesting photo that I have not seen before. It answers the question of where the rotor station was relative to Hob Moor Road. The bridge that carries the road over the River Cole looks much the same today on Multimap bird's eye view.
 
I travelled on the helicopter service to Northolt as a 14-year old on the 18th of Sepember 1951 - having won a competition in the "Eagle" comic.

The station was on HeybBarns Recreation ground (known locally as "the reck"), and was situated just to the right adjacent to where you enter "the reck" from Kingscliff Road.

As I recall, it was reached by turning off the coventry Road into Heybarnes Road and taking the second right -into Kingscliffe Road, which was only about 60/70 metres long before you entered "the reck". (see page 75 of the A to Z).

We lived in Hall Green at the time, having moved from Summer Lane in June 1940. My elder brother Tom still lives in the house.
 
BEA Heliport at Hay Mills! I am guessing that with a stream in the background of the photo it was near the river Cole on land by Heybarnes Circus - oddly enough a location where travelling circuses used to put up shop many years ago? Here’s an extract from a paper entitled.....

Helicopter dreaming: the unrealised plans for city centre heliports in the post-war period

Martin Dodge
Department of Geography, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester

Richard Brook
Manchester School of Architecture, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester


Beginning in 1950, BEA undertook several long-distance trial services for paying passengers. The ambition was to see how helicopters could become more than personal air taxis, replacing private motorcars for ad hoc journeys and to develop scheduled services, like buses of the skies. The first experiment began on 1 June 1950, with a daily service between Liverpool and Cardiff, plus a request stop at Wrexham to collect any passengers that wished to join.

The service operated for just under a year, and was used by only 819 passengers (Flight Magazine, 1952b, p. 621). The route of the second trial was a more obvious choice, flying between the two major centres of population in Britain. BEA commenced a service linking Birmingham and London in June 1951. There were three scheduled flights a day, with tickets ticket costing £2 10s for a single, £4 10s return (Flight Magazine, 1951, p. 683). At the Birmingham end the helicopters operated from a dedicated site, built on a recreation ground, at Hay Mills, about three miles east of the city centre. Flights connected to Northolt Airport in the outer suburbs of West London and then onwards to Heathrow Airport. The Birmingham ‘rotorstation’ at Hay Mills was described thus: “ It had two asphalt touch-down points, a small wooden traffic building, and was the first special helicopter station used by B.E.A.” (Flight Magazine, 1956, p. 189) (Figure 6). It was a crude building and pragmatic facility, but it is worth remembering that in the early 1950s most airports were themselves much smaller in scale and less architecturally elaborate than we might imagine. It is less obvious why Hay Mills was selected as a site. The proposition of a suburban heliport seems nonsensical and it was only a couple of miles away from Birmingham’s existing airport at Elmdon.

The location probably matched the ‘make-do’ circumstances of the time, contingent on available land that was vaguely suitable (i.e. council owned, flat and expansive, with open approaches, to safely handle these unfamiliar aircraft). The journey between Hay Mills and Northolt took about 70 minutes in small Westland-Sikorsky S-51 helicopters, which could only carry 3 or 4 passengers at a time. Despite positive press coverage of the opening of the service and enthusiastic support for, and patronage of, the service by Sir Gerald Nabarro,(‘maverick’) MP for Kidderminster, the flights stopped in April 1952 (House of Commons,1952).

These were trial services, required government subsidies to operate and were often under-used. They were also fundamentally ineffective in testing the raison d’etre of the helicopter that it could take off from the centre of towns. Indeed this point was flagged in a short report in The Times, noting that the Birmingham-London service represented only “an intermediate stage between carrying passengers from airport to airport and the 52 ultimate aim of direct services between city centres” (The Times, 1951, p. 4). From the reporting of these trials it would appear that their aim was to evaluate the machines and flight systems (navigation controls, autopilots, air traffic control) and not really about building a robust business case for inter-city routine helicopter services. Our preliminary research suggests that once the flights out of Hay Mills ceased, there was no further progress in developing a centrally-located heliport in Birmingham in the
1950s. The Birmingham City Corporation was much less active in this regard than itscounterparts in Liverpool and Manchester.

There is reference to a heliport as part of speculative plans in the early 1960s for a £21m redevelopment for the then moribund Snow Hill railway station. The scheme was being advanced by City Wall Properties Ltd. with the intention “to develop the 20-acre site over and alongside Snow Hill station, which would be transformed into the most modern railway station in Europe with the
hotels, sport stadium, heliport, offices, shops and flats above the tracks” (The Guardian, 1961, p. 4). This renewal project was not realised.


Odd how history turns full circle, re-introduction of trams in Birmingham and emerging technology to develop unmanned passenger drones

upload_2018-4-18_10-33-37.png
 
mbenne said:
BEA Heliport at Hay Mills! I am guessing that with a stream in the background of the photo it was near the river Cole on land by Heybarnes Circus - oddly enough a location where travelling circuses used to put up shop many years ago? Here’s an extract from a paper entitled.....

Helicopter dreaming: the unrealised plans for city centre heliports in the post-war period

Martin Dodge
Department of Geography, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester

Richard Brook
Manchester School of Architecture, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester


Beginning in 1950, BEA undertook several long-distance trial services for paying passengers. The ambition was to see how helicopters could become more than personal air taxis, replacing private motorcars for ad hoc journeys and to develop scheduled services, like buses of the skies. The first experiment began on 1 June 1950, with a daily service between Liverpool and Cardiff, plus a request stop at Wrexham to collect any passengers that wished to join.

The service operated for just under a year, and was used by only 819 passengers (Flight Magazine, 1952b, p. 621). The route of the second trial was a more obvious choice, flying between the two major centres of population in Britain. BEA commenced a service linking Birmingham and London in June 1951. There were three scheduled flights a day, with tickets ticket costing £2 10s for a single, £4 10s return (Flight Magazine, 1951, p. 683). At the Birmingham end the helicopters operated from a dedicated site, built on a recreation ground, at Hay Mills, about three miles east of the city centre. Flights connected to Northolt Airport in the outer suburbs of West London and then onwards to Heathrow Airport. The Birmingham ‘rotorstation’ at Hay Mills was described thus: “ It had two asphalt touch-down points, a small wooden traffic building, and was the first special helicopter station used by B.E.A.” (Flight Magazine, 1956, p. 189) (Figure 6). It was a crude building and pragmatic facility, but it is worth remembering that in the early 1950s most airports were themselves much smaller in scale and less architecturally elaborate than we might imagine. It is less obvious why Hay Mills was selected as a site. The proposition of a suburban heliport seems nonsensical and it was only a couple of miles away from Birmingham’s existing airport at Elmdon.

The location probably matched the ‘make-do’ circumstances of the time, contingent on available land that was vaguely suitable (i.e. council owned, flat and expansive, with open approaches, to safely handle these unfamiliar aircraft). The journey between Hay Mills and Northolt took about 70 minutes in small Westland-Sikorsky S-51 helicopters, which could only carry 3 or 4 passengers at a time. Despite positive press coverage of the opening of the service and enthusiastic support for, and patronage of, the service by Sir Gerald Nabarro,(‘maverick’) MP for Kidderminster, the flights stopped in April 1952 (House of Commons,1952).

These were trial services, required government subsidies to operate and were often under-used. They were also fundamentally ineffective in testing the raison d’etre of the helicopter that it could take off from the centre of towns. Indeed this point was flagged in a short report in The Times, noting that the Birmingham-London service represented only “an intermediate stage between carrying passengers from airport to airport and the 52 ultimate aim of direct services between city centres” (The Times, 1951, p. 4). From the reporting of these trials it would appear that their aim was to evaluate the machines and flight systems (navigation controls, autopilots, air traffic control) and not really about building a robust business case for inter-city routine helicopter services. Our preliminary research suggests that once the flights out of Hay Mills ceased, there was no further progress in developing a centrally-located heliport in Birmingham in the
1950s. The Birmingham City Corporation was much less active in this regard than itscounterparts in Liverpool and Manchester.

There is reference to a heliport as part of speculative plans in the early 1960s for a £21m redevelopment for the then moribund Snow Hill railway station. The scheme was being advanced by City Wall Properties Ltd. with the intention “to develop the 20-acre site over and alongside Snow Hill station, which would be transformed into the most modern railway station in Europe with the
hotels, sport stadium, heliport, offices, shops and flats above the tracks” (The Guardian, 1961, p. 4). This renewal project was not realised.


Odd how history turns full circle, re-introduction of trams in Birmingham and emerging technology to develop unmanned passenger drones

View attachment 124614
Click to expand...
 
I was 14 in 1951 and still at school when I entered a competition in the "Eagle" comic in which you had to name the five advantages and disadvantages of a helicopter in comparison with an aeroplane - and I was one of the three winners - the prize being a helicopter flight from Hay Mills to London, and they also took us to the Festival of Britain. I remember the Skylon - which everone joked at the time resembled Britain as a country "because it had no visible means of support"!

I day to remember, even though it was seventy two years ago!
 
AnnS said:
Wasn't the Royal Navy version known as a Dragonfly?
Click to expand...
Yes. There is a sign next to the wheel on the photo that calls it the Westland Dragonfly, so they dropped the Sikorsky, (American company, originally Russian founder) name too. Politically sensitive sounding name ? Westland is associated with Yeovil (although maybe not at that time), so comfortably British. The Dragonfly entered service with RN in 1953. Westland licensed the S-51 from Sikorsky as the Dragonfly.
Andrew.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top