Bishopwoods Camp, Sonning Common

Bishopwood Camp Ruins - Sonning Common/Gallowstree Common

A Former WW2 evacuee camp, in the photo below is the steps which would have lead to the wooden huts which have now rotted away due to neglect over the decades.

On the site several steps still remain in place, two chimneys still standing strong, a sunken air raid shelter which has been burnt out by vandals and a sewage works building for the camp just on the other side of the footpath which runs in between the former camp.

At Bishopwood Camp in the 1960s early 1970s they cleared a lot of the huts eventually but six were still standing with people living in them for quite a long time.

The concrete steps which remain on the site till this day are apparently not the original ones, they are replacements as the wooden ones rotted away when the huts were still being lived in 10-20 years after World War Two. (Basically had to replace them)

Students from a London orphanage were moved to Bishopwood Camp before it was relocated to Camberley in 1945 and the site was disused by 1959.

During 1939, Thousand's of school children were evacuated from busy cites to greener areas when plans were being made to deal with aerial bombardment from the Luftwaffe.

The camps were said to have been thrown up like boarding schools, with two built around the village of Sonning Common, these are Bishopwood Camp and Kennylands Camp (Now demolished).

On the other hand Kennylands Camp was very much similar to Bishopwoods with wooden shack huts scattered across the fields.

These days not much remains of Kennylands Camp except a Air Raid Shelter which is filled from floor to ceiling with junk dumped, and a building further back on the fields which is now known as Kennylands Gym.

A burnt out and flooded underground small Stanton Shelter (With what looks like part of the escape ladder still standing and parts of a partition wall)