Military Tank Repair Shop
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.
Here 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.
The entrance to the workshop was a wooden door above which was an unglazed window.
Below is a photograph through this window.
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.
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.
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.
The top of the tank repair shop is concreted, now eroding.
Steve finds some graffiti and traces the letters I Porter East Yorkshire. – no date.
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 to the right. 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 ‘tank repair shop’ was actually used to house machinery that operated the mobile target system used on the wartime training range. The track leading to the now blocked entrance used to be a rail track along which the target was moved. The cinder ballast of the trackbed is still visible in places.
1946 aerial photos show the full extent of the military complex, including trenches, gun pits etc. The barracks and domestic buildings were at Sykes Farm on the other side of the road. Just the concrete bases remain.
In the ’70s I spent a lot of my youth exploring all the old bunkers, some since demolished, others now vanished into the undergrowth. I still have a piece of Heinkel 111 fuselage picked off the beach.
The so called tank repair shop did house the small engine driven trucks that pulled timber framed immitation tanks around a oval circuit near the sand dunes.These were fired at by guns situated on an elevated position near the wind pump mill.A rail track ran from the sheds to the oval track and joined the oval with a system of points (as kids we used to push a truck up the slight slope and ride on it back down the slope)At night flares were fired that camedown on small parachutes for night fireing and we kids went up GIB to collect them of the buckthorne bushes.Also next to the wind pump was a watch tower built on scafold poles.