When war ends, the areas affected usually fester as bombed-out piles of rubble or are demolished then remade as a new chapter of history begins. Neither was the case when the US air force 351st Bomb Group departed Polebrook Airfield at the end of the second world war, however. In fact, not much has happened on this 36-hectare site in Northamptonshire since 1945, when the requisitioned land was returned to its owner, the pioneering natural scientist Miriam Rothschild. She made a conscious decision to simply leave it … and leave it … and let nature reclaim the land, its three concrete runways and air force buildings that were home to nearly 3,000 American airmen during the war, Captain (and Hollywood superstar) Clark Gable among them.
Give or take a failed forestation scheme in the 1970s, it’s barely been touched by human hand since, and the former airfield slowly evolved into the private Polebrook Airfield nature reserve. Rothschild began this rewilding scheme half a century before the term was invented and became fashionable. In the 77 years since, a variety of habitats have taken hold on the flat, formerly featureless land: woodland, dense scrubland and open grassy areas in between.
