Aircraft Hangars, Boneyards & Stored Aircraft in the UK

Where Britain actually keeps its aeroplanes: the historic hangars you can walk into, the sites where airframes sit in storage or under restoration, and a straight answer to the question everyone types into Google at midnight — is there an aircraft graveyard in the UK? Compiled from the gazetteer's survey of 118 museums. Last verified July 2026.

Two quite different searches land on this page. Some people want aircraft hangars — the buildings, the Belfast trusses and blast doors, the sheds that are historic objects in their own right. Others want the boneyard: rows of stripped airliners baking in a desert, which is an American image that Britain, being damp and short of space, has never quite produced. Both get answered below.

Is there an aircraft boneyard or plane graveyard in the UK?

Not in the Arizona sense. There is no British equivalent of Davis-Monthan, where dry air lets thousands of airframes be parked outdoors for decades. The UK climate rusts things, land is expensive, and the Ministry of Defence has generally preferred to sell, scrap or gate-guard rather than store.

What Britain has instead is a scatter of end-of-life and holding sites:

• Cotswold Airport (Kemble), Gloucestershire — the closest thing to a UK plane graveyard, and the site most press photographs of "Britain's aircraft boneyard" come from. Airliners are flown in to be parted out and dismantled here by a specialist end-of-life operation, so what is parked changes constantly. It is a working airfield, not a visitor attraction: the aviation you can actually visit at Kemble is the preserved hardware, including the Bristol Britannia XM496 and the British Phantom Aviation Group's collection.
• Military storage and disposal sites — RAF airframes awaiting decisions have historically been held at maintenance stations rather than in open parks, and surplus aircraft are disposed of by sale or scrapping. Access is not public, which is why the photographs you see of "UK stored aircraft" are usually taken over a fence with a long lens.
• Museum reserve collections — the real British answer. Airframes that are not on display are usually in a hangar somewhere with a volunteer and a parts diagram, waiting their turn. That is not a graveyard; it is a queue.

If what you actually want is to stand next to a large number of complete, intact aeroplanes, the museums below beat any scrapyard, and you are allowed in.

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.

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 all 118 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.