Why Aldershot? Before the establishment of the "Camp at Aldershot" no garrison or camp existed in the whole United Kingdom for the concentration or training of troops on a large scale. The British Army was stationed in long established garrisons most of which had been military centres from the earliest times and the soldiers occupied castles, forts or similar old defensive installations. Troops not stationed in such recognised garrisons were quartered in the main cities and county towns, for the most part in small detachments billeted on the civil population.

The Duke of Wellington died in 1852, having been Commander-in-Chief for most of the previous twenty five years. There had been little development or progress in the army since Waterloo, a situation which had been watched with increasing concern by the Prince Consort. So it was not long before Prince Albert was writing to the new Commander-in-Chief, Lord Hardinge, urging upon him the need to do something about the training of the Army.

In 1853 a summer camp was established on Chobham Common in Surrey and exercises were conducted for two "divisions" in succession. These proved an immense success and during the course of them Lord Hardinge rode over all the commons and heaths around Ash, Aldershot and Farnham to select a site suitable for a permanent training area. Strategically the need was to be within reach of the South Coast where the threat of French invasion intermittently loomed.

Lord Hardinge recommended that Aldershot Heath should be selected for the new permanent training area, the proprietors agreed to sell for £12 an acre and a tract of nearly ten thousand acres was purchased early in 1854.

Only a summer tented camp was first envisaged, but the need to accommodate the militia called out during the Crimean War led to the erection of two hutted camps, each for a division, north and south of the Basingstoke Canal. Construction began in February 1855 and the first troops moved into their huts in North Camp in May that year.

Subsequently plans were approved for the building of permanent brick barracks for another two brigades of cavalry, infantry and artillery close up against the village of Aldershot, which then had a population of about 850.

Aldershot was thus beginning to take shape as a major military station and although the two hutted camps were constructed only as temporary accommodation they soon became the permanent home of the troops returning from the Crimea.

In the 1880s and 1890s the huts were gradually replaced by permanent brick barracks with schools, hospitals, a reservoir, sewage works, gas works, power station, indeed everything, even its own bye-laws, needed to make Aldershot Camp the only complete military town built in the Kingdom since the Roman occupation.

Aldershot became the home of the 1st and 2nd Divisions comprising the bulk of the 1st British Army Corps, and it was from Aldershot that the British Expeditionary Forces set out for France in 1914 and again in 1939. Reviews, manoeuvres, sporting events, the famous Searchlight Tattoos and a military population of 25,000 had made Aldershot synonymous with "The Home of the British Army".

In the first forty years of this century Aldershot was to witness the complete transformation of the Army, from one which fought shoulder to shoulder in open fields to the mobile and armoured force of the type that we know today. The first military motor car came to Aldershot for trials in 1904, and the first aeroplane flew in this country in 1908, developed by S F Cody, an instructor at the Royal Engineers Balloon School at Farnborough.

In 1939 when the main body of the regular Army departed for France, Aldershot became the base for the Canadian Army in the United Kingdom for the duration of the war, while many British units and formations continued to use Aldershot as a transit area before embarking for North Africa, Europe and almost every theatre of war.