NHER 42505 (Monument record) - Site of World War Two barrage balloon at Great Yarmouth

February 2006. Norfolk NMP.
The site of a World War Two barrage balloon is visible on aerial photographs taken from March 1944 onwards (S1)-(S3), centred at TG 5173 0728. The site occupied what appears to have been a partially developed building plot: see (S1)-(S3) and the Ordnance Survey 2nd edition 25 inch map (S4). The ground-level structures associated with the balloon consisted of a square central tethering block (at TG 5172 0728) surrounded by two concentric circles of further tethering blocks, oval in the inner circle and circular in the outer. These were surrounded by parts of an further outer circle and other outlying blocks. Ancillary structures, which probably acted as operations buildings and provided shelter for the balloon crew, included a curved profile hut (perhaps a Nissen hut) supported on a concrete platform at TG 5175 0726, with a smaller hut or structure to its southeast, which again stood on a concrete platform. A square pad of concrete or masonry at TG 5176 0726 may have been the base for a further structure of some kind. A fourth structure at TG 5175 0729 may have been an operational building; its position in relation to the tethering blocks is mirrored by structures at other barrage balloon sites, for example the site 1.45km to the southeast recorded as part of NHER 43375, and NHER 27425 1.65km to the northeast.

The site was dismantled at the end of the war and has since been built over. No traces of it are visible on recent aerial photographs, for example (S5).
S. Tremlett (NMP), 13 February 2006.