Tatsfield Receiving Station


The Tatsfield Receiving Station – known formally as the BBC Engineering Measurement and Receiving Station – was a radio broadcasting signals-receiving and frequency-measuring facility operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation on the North Downs just south of London in the United Kingdom.
The station was in operation between 1929 and 1974.

Functions

The Tatsfield station’s work included:
The Tatsfield station played a different – though often overlapping and cooperative – role to that of BBC Monitoring, which received many of the same signals, but for the purposes of gathering news and open-source intelligence, from bases first at Wood Norton and then from 1943 at Caversham Park.
In short, Tatsfield’s work was technical monitoring while that of BBC Monitoring, undertaken in partnership with the US government’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, was content monitoring.

Location

The station was in the parish of Titsey near the larger village of Tatsfield in the county of Surrey, just outside Greater London. It was about 15 miles south-southeast of central London.
On Ordnance Survey maps it was listed as WT Sta. It was off the B269 road, north-east of the roundabout with the B2024, to the east of Pitchers Wood, now around one mile north of the M25 motorway.

History

The BBC set up its first receiving station at Keston in Kent in 1925, measuring the frequencies of BBC and foreign transmitters and picking up continental broadcasts to be relayed by the BBC.
The work of the Keston station was moved the short distance to the new Tatsfield facility in 1929, initially with a staff of three. The station expanded considerably during the 1930s and by the start of the Second World War had a staff of 20.
The war saw a further expansion in activities and staff. The number of personnel on the official BBC "establishment" for Tatsfield rose to 72 by 1945, though many of these were seconded to work at BBC Monitoring for the duration of the conflict.
Between July and November 1944 all of Tatsfield's staff and equipment were evacuated to BBC Monitoring’s outstation at Crowsley Park in South Oxfordshire because of the threat from V-1 flying bombs as Tatsfield lay on their flight path between northern France and London.
Tatsfield’s work continued during the Cold War. Signals from Sputnik 1 were received at Tatsfield in October 1957, and the station also monitored transmissions from subsequent Soviet space missions. In July 1958 it picked up signals from the US Explorer 4 satellite.

Closure

The Tatsfield station closed in 1974. Its functions were transferred to the Crowsley Park facility, which was expanded and renamed the BBC Receiving Station to mark the combination of roles.
Some derelict remains of the Tatsfield station can still be seen at its former site.