Jodrell Bank: travel content for the Boundless magazine centenary issue

Boundless is the magazine for nearly a quarter of a million members of Boundless, the travel, motoring and leisure club for the public sector.

The latest issue celebrated the centenary of the organisation and I contributed some travel features, exploring sites of major events over the decades — now turned tourist attractions.

One of them was Jodrell Bank [pictured above]. Read more …

When the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik One satellite in 1957, it lit the blue touchpaper for the international space race.

This paved the way for America’s Apollo space programme and fuelled cold-war tensions between Russia and the West.

But the new world order also made an unlikely hero of a science-loving boffin at a rural Cheshire outpost.

Sir Bernard Lovell founded Jodrell Bank after WWII to pioneer work on radar.

By 1950, his team had detected the nebula in Andromeda and, as the space race intensified, Jodrell’s landmark Lovell Telescope was charged with tracking Russian cosmonauts.

Today that Grade I-listed telescope sits at the heart of the Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre, the observatory and science park set amid Cheshire farmland.

Jodrell Bank has come a long way since its post-war origins, earning a place on the UNESCO World Heritage list and hosting the annual Bluedot music festival, but it remains true to Sir Bernard’s space-race vision.

Read more at Boundless, March/April 2023.

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