RAF Wroughton

RAF Wroughton was a Royal Air Force airfield near Wroughton, in Wiltshire, England, about 4mi south of Swindon. It opened on 1 April 1940. At some point in time, control of RAF Wroughton was handed over to the Royal Navy, and it became RNAS Wroughton. Ministry of Defence aviation activity ceased in 1972. The airfield now belongs to the Science Museum Group and is home to the Science Museum at Wroughton, which houses the large-object storage and library of the Science Museum.It is now the home of The Grand Tour motoring series' test track.Science Museum at WroughtonThe large-object storage of the Science Museum has been at Wroughton since the 1970s.RAF Princess Alexandra HospitalRAF Hospital Wroughton was part of the station and stood near the eastern boundary of the site, about 1+1/2mi west of Chiseldon. The RAF General Hospital (as it was known) opened on 14 June 1941 and by the end of March 1944 its bed capacity was 1000. Wroughton continued as a General Hospital treating military patients, and from 1958 took NHS cases as well to relieve backlogs in the Swindon area.Following a visit to the hospital by Princess Alexandra on 4 July 1967, the Queen conferred the prefix "Princess Alexandra's" on the hospital on 4 October 1967. The hospital was the primary destination for returning casualties of the Falklands War in 1982. When the hostages from Beirut were released in August 1991, Wg Cdr Gordon Turnbull, a psychiatrist based at Wroughton, with his team, debriefed John McCarthy, Terry Waite and Jackie Mann and provided the counselling necessary to ease them back into freedom.