Yarnfield Village

Yarnfield Village

Yarnfield Park is the site of a large training and conference centre, Yarnfield Park, originally established using three of the seven hostels built to serve the vast Second World War Swynnerton munitions factory. Of the other hostel sites, Raleigh Hall is now an industrial estate, previously having housed Ugandan Asian refugees thrown out of Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972; Drake Hall is a women's prison; Nelson Hall and Frobisher Hall have been replaced with housing estates, as has Duncan Hall, one of the three camps which formed the training centre later developed as Yarnfield Park.

The General Post Office (GPO) Engineering Department Central Training School opened in Yarnfield in 1946. It occupied buildings at Howard Hall, Duncan Hall and Beatty Hall, which had all acted as transit camps for United States Air Force personnel during the Second World War. These sites were adjacent to each other in the village of Yarnfield. Many teaching staff and their families were initially housed at Raleigh Hall, some miles away. The GPO became the Post Office Corporation in October 1969, and in October 1981 Post Office Telephones became British Telecom. The training centre had a further change of name in 2002 when it became part of Accenture. It remained a British Telecom training centre until the summer of 2010, after which it became a commercial conference and training centre with over 40 event spaces and 338 bedrooms, making it one of the UK's largest centres, although Openreach, which is a part of BT still has a training centre there. The centre is now privately owned and is known as Yarnfield Park Training & Conference Centre.

SOURCE: Wikipedia

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