Military Tank Repair Shop

By Angela Gooch on May 15th, 2008

corrugated metal sides of a WW2 tank repair shop at Gibraltar Point Skegness

The second WW2 relic that we encountered on out trail was about five minutes walk into the nature reserve at Gibraltar Point. The location is plotted as a blue dot on map B It was a tank repair and machine workshop.
During the war it was necessary to make spare parts for the military vehicles onsite.

It was impossible to photograph the building in its entirety because of its location in cramped, overgrown surroundings.
The building is about twentyfive to thirty feet long and is partly overgrown with shrubs. The photo shows the left side, towards the bottom right of the photo is the entrance to the building and there is a small window to the rear high up in the wall.

corrugated sides of WW2 tank repair shop

Above is the same side of the construction taken from the rear aspect. Unavoidably, this perspective involved shooting straight into the sun.
The side of the machine shop is made of corrugated zinc tinplate and the top is concrete.

looking inside of a machine repair shop

The entrance to the workshop was a wooden door above which was an unglazed window.

view of inside a WW2 tank repair shop

The interior is divided by a brick wall. One side would have been used to store spare parts for the tanks and the other would have housed machinery to engineer new parts.

brickwork on WW2 tank repair shop

Here is the rear wall of the building. It is made from brick and has a small window high up towards the roof. This window could only be accessed by laying on the roof of the building and pointing the camcorder inside.

This is the result. The point of light at the top middle of the image is the window through which we obtained the interior shot above.

interior of World War 2 machine repair shop

The brown area is the wooden entrance door.
In the foreground, the corrugated zinc tin is evident. There are two layers of this metal both inside and outside the walls. This was presumably to give protection against the elements to stop rust.

Steve finds some graffiti and traces the letters I Porter East Yorkshire. - no date.

graffiti on tank repair shop

About twenty feet in front of the whole building is an engineer’s pit. The only visible evidence of this today, due to the overgrowth, is the concrete platform in the photo below. Roan has excavated this area in the past and has found large concrete slabs each side where the tanks would have been run above the pit to facilitate easy access to repair their undersides.

The top of the tank repair shop is concreted, now eroding.

WW2 tank repair shop