The history of Bawdsey Manor is well documented: William Cuthbert Quilter, a local landowner and MP, bought the land in 1873 to build a Victorian gothic ‘seaside home’. Over the next twenty years he added towers and facades in Flemish, Tudor/Jacobean, French chateau and Oriental styles to accommodate his growing family and lavish house parties. His wife, Lady Quilter, set about creating extensive formal gardens, a vast walled kitchen garden and most notably the Cliff Path, using an artificial rock called Pulhamite.

In 1936 Bawdsey Manor was bought by the Air Ministry. Sir Robert Watson-Watt and his small team of brilliant scientists moved from nearby Orford Ness, working in utmost secrecy and under great pressure to develop new radio direction finding technology before the feared outbreak of war. Stables and outbuildings were converted into workshops and the first receiver and transmitter towers were built.

The work of Watson-Watt and his team is widely credited with being a major factor in winning the Second World War, particularly in the Battle of Britain but also during the Blitz and in subsequent phases. Sadly, their inventions and the dedication of thousands of radar operators – many of them women – are now rarely celebrated, and are certainly far less widely recognised than the code-breakers of Bletchley Park. Radar later developed into microwave technology, which has thousands of applications in everyday life today, such as speed cameras and air traffic control, as well as in space.

When war broke out, the scientists were moved inland and RAF Bawdsey became the first of dozens of radar stations operating along the south and east coasts of Britain. It continued as an RAF base throughout the Cold War when Bloodhound missiles were sited on the cliffs.

All around East Anglia are the remnants of wartime airfields, none more chilling than the top-secret RAF Woodbridge (the official name for Sutton Heath), just a few miles inland from Bawdsey. Known as a ‘crash ’drome’, its specially wide runways were designed for use only by aircraft in trouble and it was fully equipped with extra-bright lighting, emergency medical facilities and heavy-lifting equipment to remove the wrecks. More than four thousand planes crash-landed on this airfield during the war, and many lives were saved.

Felixstowe, one of the most easterly towns in Britain, has always been on the front line of war. At its southern end, Landguard Fort – now overlooked by the giant cranes and gantries of one of the largest container ports in Europe – has its origins in the sixteenth century. The coast is ringed with Martello towers built to defend Britain against Napoleon.

During the First World War a flying boat squadron at Felixstowe played a critical role in tracking German U-boats and later became the first Marine Aircraft Experimental Establishment for flying boats and seaplanes.

All of this history, plus my early childhood love of the place, made it the perfect setting for Under a Wartime Sky. I hope you agree.