Alderstead Fort

En un regard

Le château en bref

Alderstead Fort, also known as the East Merstham mobilisation centre, is a late 19th-century military work hidden in a wood on the chalk ridge of the North Downs, at Merstham, in the district of Reigate and Banstead. It is one of the London Mobilisation Centres, a group of fortified depots built in the 1890s to support the defence of London in the event of invasion. These centres were part of the London Defence Positions, a plan drawn up in 1888 in response to the growth of the French and Russian fleets. The scheme provided for a line of trenches some 115 km long, from the Surrey and Kent Downs to the Thames and then Essex, to be dug in an emergency by volunteers. The permanent centres were to serve as assembly points and as depots for tools, ammunition and equipment. Obsolete by around 1905, they were abandoned and then sold. Alderstead is considered the least altered of the series. The main compound retains a three-room magazine of reinforced concrete and brick, fronted by five casemates and covered by a crescent-shaped splinter-proof bank, beyond which runs a ditch up to 10 m wide. About 75 m to the north-east stands the red-brick, slate-roofed tool store. The door and window shutters and the magazine's vents are still in place.