RAF Spadeadam RAF Spadeadam is a Royal Air Force station in Cumbria , England close to the border with Northumberland . It is the home of the 9000 acre ( 36 km² ) Electronic Warfare Tactics Range , making it the largest ( by area ) RAF base in the United Kingdom . History . Its primary purpose is to provide a location for teaching electronic warfare to RAF and other NATO aircrew . Spadeadam was remote and largely uninhabited until 1957 when the Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile Test Centre was built for the Blue Streak Project . The RAF took it over in 1976 and it became Europe ' s first Electronic Warfare Tactics Range in 1977 . The range contains ground - based electronics warfare equipment to act as a simulated threat to training aircrews . Some of the equipment was manufactured in the Soviet Union ; some simulates emissions from potential enemy systems . It also has real and dummy targets such as airfields , a " village " of portable buildings , tanks , aircraft and vehicle convoys . The site ' s role in Britain ' s Cold War nuclear weapons programme was made public in 2004 when tree - felling uncovered remains of abandoned excavations for a missile silo . A survey of the site by the RAF and English Heritage has attempted to record and interpret what was previously so secret that no plans from the period exist . Spadeadam was chosen as a launch site because of its isolation combined with nearby infrastructure capable of supporting it with such as a plentiful water supply , access to the National Grid and road connections . A stretch of the road to the site from Gilsland had to be bypassed to make access easier for heavy trucks and the abandoned section is still known as " half - shaft " due to its unfortunate effect on vehicle transmissions . Spadeadam was probably intended to be one of 60 launch sites along the east coast of England but these were never built and it was only used as a test facility for engine firings and testing electronics and ground installations . The Rocket Establishment , as it was called , was divided into five areas : an administration and assembly block , a British Oxygen Company compound for on - site liquid oxygen fuel manufacture , a component test area , the engine test area and the static firing stands . The engine test area at Prior Lancy Rigg consisted of four concrete stands into which the engines could be mounted for test firing . Three remain , copied from a Rocketdyne design used at their California Santa Susana Field Laboratory site ; the fourth has been demolished . This lost stand seems to have been built to a different design , using an innovative application of pre - stressed concrete to contain liquid oxygen spills . The area is now managed by GL Noble Denton , and used commercially for hazardous industrial tests . Two rocket - firing stands themselves stood at Greymare Hills and were large enough to accommodate a full Blue Streak missile . All firings were controlled from command centre bunkers connected to the stands by tunnels or surface cabling ducts . Construction of the site required hundreds of men , mostly Irish labourers who lived in a temporary settlement nearby which locals called ' Paddy ' s Camp ' . The outlying moorland landscape of the site is of increasing importance for its visual quality and for nature conservation . The area includes a pristine peat bog , populations of all three species of British newt and forestry habitat suitable for endangered red squirrel s .