Approaching Rugby by train 20 years ago, what you'd have noticed out of the window was a vast array of very tall masts clustered across the fields to one side. They were even more prominent from the A5 on the far side of the site, equally visible from the M1 and perhaps best seen by those chugging past on the Oxford Canal. This was Rugby Radio Station, Britain's pre-eminent Post Office wireless station, which over the best part of a century sent electronic transmissions across the world. Its first long wave transmitter was switched on on 1st January 1926, and the second a year later brought the start of regular transatlantic communications. Calls to America cost £15 for the first three minutes, a fortune at the time, and the price only dropped substantially after the introduction of short wave telephony, facilities again exclusive to the station at Rugby.
The site proved vital to the wartime effort and was later extended across the border into Northamptonshire to cover 1600 acres. At the height of its influence in the mid 1950s Rugby had a total of 57 masts and was generally considered to be the largest transmitting station in the world. In 1950 it also became the chosen site for broadcasting the MSF Time Signal, a hyper-accurate synchronisation tool, one manifestation of which was the cold cathode clock pictured above (currently on display in Rugby Museum). However the spread of long-distance telephone cables and satellites inexorably curtailed demand, with the original GBR transmitter turned off in 2003 after BT lost a defence contract. In June 2004 most of the remaining masts were demolished, and after the Time Signal moved to Cumbria in 2007 Rugby Radio Station fell silent.
That's the two-paragraph version, all of which can be researched from home without a site visit. If you'd like more detail, including precise frequency values, the Concorde connection and the troublesome rabbits, here aretwo sites devoted to telling you more. What drew me here is that you can now visit the site, indeed you can even live here, because Rugby Radio station has inevitably been given over to housing.
This is the original transmitter building, later called 'C' Station, construction of which began in 1924. Its cavernous shell proved unsuitable for conversion to flats so has instead been transformed into the heart of a new secondary school, necessarily subdivided into a sports hall, dining area and two teaching blocks. Additional facilities were added in modern blocks alongside, the whole thing opened to pupils in 2021, and the clever architectural balancing act (listed building/tight budget) won RIBA's inaugural Reinvention Award. I worried that turning up in termtime with a camera would look gauche, but thankfully it's a free school so takes no notice of local authority holiday dates and was quiet as the grave. It looked most impressive.
The new neighbourhood is called Houlton and when finished will have over 6000 homes, enough to increase the population of Rugby by more than 10%. In a nice touch the name comes from Houlton in Maine, the American town at the other end of that very first transatlantic radio message in 1927. The school is thus called Houlton School, and at present sits completely alone amid an expanse of scrappy grassland and churned-up future building sites. Its destiny however is to become the focal point of the new community, just as soon as the advancing wave of housing washes up the hill and surrounds it.
Houlton's much too large for one housing developer to cover, nudging two square miles, so multiple housebuilders each get their own series of small plots which'll eventually merge to form one contiguous neighbourhood. Directional signs point towards the names of housing developers if the sector's not yet complete (Lovell Homes, Redrow) and final area names if they are (The Beacons, The Pioneers). One day people will neither know nor care that three adjacent houses on Maine Street were showhomes, but for now the parking spaces across the street are solely for potential residents (Morris Homes Visitors Only), not for those who've already moved in (Strictly no parking for visitors to the park).
The new houses are quite varied, very often detached, and with a Londoner's eye are remarkable value for money. Three bedrooms, a garage and a garden for under £400K would be heaven in Harrow but is more par for the course round here, with 4 and 5 beds available for those who want more. The houses are also intermingled with stripes of interconnected greenspace with ponds to aid drainage - somewhere to take the dog - with a much larger area of parkland left clear at the highpoint on Normandy Farm. The masts up there may be gone but the historic rolling ridge and furrow landscape has been preserved.
A former farmhouse has been converted into a community centre alongside a Co-op, a shared work centre and a pub called The Tuning Fork, because references to communications are par for the course in Houlton. It's no wild social hub but it's a lot better than the big fat zero most new developments seem to merit. Plenty of work is available close by, with part of the old radio station having been adopted as a huge logistics zone called DIRFT, as befits a key location on the West Coast Mainline and the M1. Its long sheds and capacious warehouses loom across the fields - before long across the rooftops - and beyond that the wind turbines kick off in earnest.
The planners struck a bum note by naming one of the early streets Station Avenue, because plans to add a new station called Rugby Parkway on the Northampton line have since stalled and it now looks terribly presumptuous. Instead the public transport offering is a half-hourly bus into Rugby, which for now tours unbuilt streets before zipping along a brand new connector road into town. You can try your hardest to create a sustainable community but in reality the car remains king. A mile along that connector road a separate stripe of development has begun, still years away from coalescing, and if you follow the lone cycle track along the radio station's former access road you swiftly find yourself somewhere very different indeed.
These are Hillmorton Locks on the Oxford Canal, the last hurrah of engineer James Brindley. This flight of three was apparently once the busiest in the country, a proper bottleneck, so each was subsequently doubled up to create a 'duplicate' lock allowing twice the traffic. They weren't in any way busy on my visit, it being February and the coal trade having dried up, but the model railway shop in the old barns was open and a couple of narrowboats were belching out woodsmoke up the Engine Arm. I'd really wanted to walk the towpath to here from Houlton, but didn't dare risk a mile of uninterrupted narrow squelch after all that rain.
Behind the locks is the 14th century church of St John The Baptist, originally built by Hillmorton's Lord of the Manor and since cut off from the rest of the village by the West Coast Mainline. Socialite Unity Mitford lodged in the vicarage during WW2, which some say is the reason Hitler spared Rugby from the heaviest bombing. I hoped to see inside the church, not least because it was still chucking it down outside, and was encouraged to see a sign on the door saying it was always open during the day, just push. Alas this was not the case so I missed out on the oak box pew, the Green Man boss and the double-sided lectern, not to mention the chance to dry off. Instead I sheltered in the long dark tunnel under the railway, the trains a constant presence but never stopping, and downed a welcome thermos of tea.
The Observer's architecture critic wrote a glowing review of Houlton in 2022, calling it "a new town that's sending out all the right signals", and having visited I can see what he means. The housing's not overly regimented, the build quality's better than most and the central school edifice ensures the town is distinctive. In truth it's only the fact the former radio station complex could be designated as brownfield that's permitted development at scale, and nimbyism generally prevents anything like this from being built elsewhere. But if next time you look out of a train window near Rugby and wonder why the forest of masts has been replaced by a sea of rooftops, perhaps it's not entirely a bad thing.
