South Foreland Magazine

It's Blipfoto's Derelict Thursday and I went up to the South Foreland to take some photos of the magazine constructed for the battery of four 9.2 inch guns installed in 1940. Two of the guns were supplied from 'a huge twin-humped surface magazine protected by a very thick capping of reinforced concrete.' There are more photos and a bit of history here.

It was strange to be in the Magazine, eerily quiet and out of the fierce blast from the North-easterly outside. A whole load of school children went by and I could hear them saying things like, 'It's the dark cave where the monster lives.' If only they had known.

The South Foreland Battery was often the target of German gunners on the other side of the Dover Strait and although built with reinforced concrete it is unlikely the magazine would have survived a direct hit from a 16 inch shell. Luckily it wasn't hit.

The graffiti was disappointingly contemporary and little remains but the concrete shell, the rusting steel roof supports and the ceiling trackways used to shift the shells out of their bays.

As I left the magazine there was a spectacular view of the snow covered hills of France under a stormy sky across the narrow waters of the Strait. I rushed up to the headland and was met by a huge, towering squall of hail. I ran to the shelter of lone pine tree and set up by tripod. The advancing walls of hail and later snow over the sun-dappled sea was like something out of a Turner painting (see my blog).

It was bitterly cold and my hands were frozen. The East Kent coast really catches the wind when it swings round to the north east, which thankfully doesn't happen to often. But it has today.