Sadly space is at a premium so some of our hardier exhibits have to stay outdoors!

You can see an Alan Williams Airfield Defence Turret, a cold war Pillbox, Range Shelter, a section of a 12,000lb “Blockbuster” bomb, and a wartime fire watchers hut…

Most notably, though we have the world’s last remaining Hawker Hunter F.Mk.2, and a Handley Page Jetstream 200 (currently under restoration).

Another unusual external exhibit is what might look like a dull concrete ball next to the museum building. This was actually a mockup of the internals of a Blue Danube atomic bomb – Britain’s first nuke. These early atomic bombs worked by surrounding a plutonium core with an explosive sphere made up of hexagonal segments that interlocked together and were wired to detonate simultaneously, focusing their explosive force inwards to collapse the plutonium globe in the middle until it reached criticality – and went boom. We think our concrete bomb was used to verify the correct alignment of all the explosive shapes before assembling them inside a real bomb.