The hangar is often the most interesting artefact on an aviation site: Belfast trusses, blast doors and sheds that are historic objects in their own right. If you were looking for the other kind of place, rows of retired airliners waiting to be scrapped, that has its own guide: plane graveyards in the UK.
Looking for a plane graveyard?
Britain has no desert boneyard. Retired airliners are taken apart at Cotswold Airport (Kemble) and St Athan, and neither yard is open to the public. The plane graveyards guide covers where old aircraft go, the BA 747 you can walk through at Kemble, what happened to Bruntingthorpe, and the museums where you can stand among rows of real aircraft.
Historic hangars you can walk into
The hangar is often the most interesting artefact on the site. These are gazetteer stations where the buildings are listed, original or both.
| Site | The hangars | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| IWM Duxford | 1917 Belfast-truss hangars plus the 1930s fighter-station buildings | The most complete surviving RAF fighter station of its era, still operating as an airfield. The aircraft fly from the ground they were flown from. |
| Hooton Park Hangars, Wirral | Three First World War Belfast-truss hangars, listed | Among the very few surviving WW1 hangar groups in Britain, restored by volunteers who will tell you more about roof trusses than you expected to enjoy. |
| Stow Maries Great War Aerodrome, Essex | 1916 home-defence station buildings on their original footprint | Not a hangar museum so much as an entire aerodrome preserved as landscape — the buildings are the exhibit. |
| National Museum of Flight, East Fortune | Wartime hangars on a near-intact WW2 airfield | Scotland's national collection lives in the sheds it was given, Concorde included. |
| Yorkshire Air Museum, Elvington | Original Bomber Command station buildings and control tower | A working wartime airfield estate rather than a shed of exhibits. |
| Spitfire Visitor Centre — Hangar 42 | A 1939 Blackpool factory hangar | The building is the collection's headline: aircraft production architecture still in use for aircraft. |
| East Kirkby / Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre | Wartime bomber-station hangar and control tower | Lancaster Just Jane taxis on the strip; the hangar and original station fabric are part of the visit. |
Cold War shelters: hangars built to be bombed
The hardened aircraft shelter is the other great British hangar type, and two gazetteer sites let you inside one.
- Upper Heyford Heritage Centre, Oxfordshire — a former USAF F-111 base whose hardened shelters, alert pads and support buildings survive because nobody demolished them. Access is by pre-booked guided tour, roughly three hours, and the airfield itself is the exhibit.
- Bentwaters Cold War Museum, Suffolk — the original USAF hardened command post on the old A-10 base, with the war room, battle cabin and decontamination showers intact. Open days are limited; the shelter tours get the strongest visitor reports on the site.
Neither looks like a hangar in the barn sense. Both are what the twentieth century decided hangars had to become.
Where preserved and stored airframes actually are
If you are trying to locate a specific type rather than a specific building, the gazetteer indexes it directly:
- The Compendium lists every aircraft type recorded across 119 museums, with links to the sites that hold each one — the fastest way to find where an airframe is kept.
- Individual museum pages list their inventory with serials, so you can check a tail number before driving four hours to see it.
- Aircraft under restoration are often visible in workshops rather than galleries. Ask — volunteer restoration teams are usually delighted to be interrupted, though the answer at weekends may be that the hangar is shut.
- Live military flying is a different search: see military fly-bys hub — eleven UK spotting guides including the Mach Loop, Lake District and RAF Lakenheath viewing.
Where are old planes kept in the UK?
In museum hangars, reserve collections and restoration workshops. Around 119 museums and heritage collections hold preserved airframes — see the gazetteer map or the best aviation museums guide to start.
Which UK museum has the most original hangars?
IWM Duxford, on the strength of its WW1 Belfast-truss sheds and intact 1930s fighter station, with Hooton Park the strongest surviving First World War hangar group.
Can you go inside a hardened aircraft shelter?
Yes — Upper Heyford runs pre-booked tours of its shelters, and Bentwaters opens its hardened command post on published days.
What about Bomber County hangars?
Start with East Kirkby and the Lincolnshire aviation museums guide for station fabric you can still walk through.