Monument record LWT 297 - World War Two Naval Base, HMS Myloden

July 2014. Lothingland, Lowestoft and North Suffolk Coast and Heaths National Mapping Programme.
The site of World War Two Naval Base, HMS Myloden, to the south of Lake Lothing Lowestoft, is visible on aerial photographs (S1-S3). The base, which undertook Landing Craft Training for RM Commandos and Combined Operations, was located within the site of the old Silk Factory which is located alongside the waterfront. According to (S4) practical training was carried out at sea with craft regularly in transit on exercise between the base, Great Yarmouth and HMS Wolverstone, another landing craft training establishment on the Orwell.
The main features of the site are several groups of operational buildings and numerous pairings of huts, set within blast walls and arranged at angles to one another. These are likely to have provided accommodation for the Naval troops, but also given the positioning and blast walls, may have contained ordinance, such as torpedoes, shells and small arms. Due to inadequate time available, other than two examples of hut arrangements, only the walls surrounding these huts have been mapped. In addition numerous air raid shelters are also visible, including a large area of entrances to subsurface shelters (mapped as an ‘extent of area’) to the north of the site. The large earthen covered shelters on the edges of the site may have served the local population and/or factory and dock workers. To the east of the main site are a pair of structures, or potentially entrances to subsurface structures, which are surrounded by substantial blast walls – the function of these structures is not currently known.
Also included within this larger site is a barrage balloon site, which would have been operated by the RAF and would have been separate to the Naval site. The huts immediately surrounding the balloon mooring are likely to have related to the operation of this facility.
The modern Ordnance Survey mapping and recent Google Earth suggests that some original components of the site survive within the industrial complex, in particular some of the blast walls that originally surrounded the arrangements of huts and a few of the individual huts. A ground survey of site would be beneficial to establish what level of structural remains survives intact.
S. Horlock (Norfolk Historic Environment Service), 23rd July 2014.