Socialized Stories

Socialized Stories
Mixed Media / Site specific installation
Underground Art : Dean Hill Project
at Salisbury
2007

History of Dean Hill Park, Salisbury
The Royal Naval Armaments Depot Dean Hill began life in 1938 as Britain prepared itself against the threat of war with Germany. The Ministry of Defence requisitioned more than 500 acres of farmland on the edge of the villages of East Dean and West Dean near Salisbury to build a centre to store heavy weapons for the Navy fleet based at Portsmouth. Over three years, bands of Irish miners and Scottish fitters, aided by local labourers, hewed vast bunkers into the chalk hillside and built dozens of sturdy brick and concrete workshops, laboratories and offices across the site.
The MoD opened up a rail link running behind East Dean’s ancient church to bring weapons in and out of the site and the depot was opened in 1941. After the end of World War II, the Dean Hill depot continued to process and store the Royal Navy’s conventional weapons and provided overflow storage for more sophisticated weapons for RNAD Gosport. In 1994, the MoD closed the rail link and thereafter weapons were moved in and out of the site by road.
In 1999, the depot began storing and processing weapons for all three military services and it was renamed Defence Munitions Dean Hill. Then in 2001, following a review by the Defence Munitions Rationalisation Study Team, the government concluded that Dean Hill was surplus to long term requirements and, in early 2002, the government announced that it would close. Explosives from the site were transferred to other military storage depots and RNAD Dean Hill closed on March 31st 2004.
The Ministry of Defence sold most of the Dean Hill site, along with the bunkers and buildings, to Harving Ltd, a company that specializes in bringing redundant rural buildings into use to help generate employment in the countryside. The new owners renamed the site Dean Hill Park and began the process of demilitarisation, converting buildings for civilian use, removing hundreds of signposts and other military hardware and returning most of the 385 acre site to conservation and agricultural management.