Went to Horseshoe Barracks today for a walk round. Cookhouse is gone, most of the place looks the same but could not locate the Officers Mess - where was it?. Did see The Beach House Garrison up for sale at £1.600.000. Also a two bed flat in the old Sjts. Mess for £379.995. The Guardroom is now a flat, which felt odd. Still the barracks looks the same in the main but smaller and the distance from Guardroom to Company Offices less. Outside the Shoebury Hotel has had a face lift but was not open, best I've ever seen it!.
Cannot play game on cricket pitch but loads of kids just laying about, my son thought that was cool. Not to sure what that means:).
if anyone has a plan of the Barracks when we were there I would be most grateful for a copy.
Like you I can't really remember where the Offrs Mess was.
Billy Netch,
I thought we walked DOWN the hill to the coy offices??
Surprised nobody mentioned the Armoury Compound Guard at the bottom of the hill? Over the gate, into the Cambridge, back over the gate.
Where me keys?
Where me radio?
What a camp. We even had our own ranges. They always seemed available and I loved them. No hassle. A patrol commander could take his section down there and take time over the things that mattered.
You cannot drive in by the main entrance. You have to drive in from the Armoury end, which has been demolished and they are building on that site, plus it looks like the ranges are next to go. The old Company Offices area is now gated and it looks like the buildings have been converted to make three bungalows around a garden area.
Support Company garages and the stores area have gone and again they are building new flats around there. Some of the ammo stores are sealed as when they tried to excavate one they found traces of mustard gas in the soil so they left that bit alone. It is fenced off and warning signs are about.
The only changes to the Coy. blocks that I saw were fire escapes and apparently they were allowed after some hassle as the Blocks have a preservation order on them. The Church is still up and running.
We (I also used to make this mistake) tend to use, as navigators, the term magnetic declination or magnetic variation (which is a synonym) when correcting a grid reference taken from map to a compass and vice a versa. Actually this describes the angle between true north and the horizontal trace of the local magnetic field and it is not the value we need to use in Great Britain when working with the British National Grid, as used on Ordnance Survey Maps.
True North tends to be mainly on global mapping systems, which project large areas of the curved surface of the earth onto flat surfaces. However, the level of spatial distortion across relatively small areas of the Earth caused by this, such as the British Isles, can be significant. As a result, we and many other countries have developed their own local rectangular grid systems to reduce this degree of distortion. Consequently the north meridian lines on OS maps do not point to True North, they instead point to Grid North.
The only North-South grid-line that actually points to True North is the one that coincides with the longitude meridian 358° making Grid North west of True North to the left of this line and east of Grid North to the right.
