I didn’t know this until I happened to go for a Sunday walk in east London recently and stumbled on the plaque and signage – the very first flight made by a British aeroplane, with a British engine and a British pilot was made here by Alliott Verdon Roe.
And look where it led – to some of Britain’s most legendary aircraft!
![](https://mechtraveller.com/wp-content/uploads/AV_Roe_Bulls_Eye.jpg)
Roe rented two railway arches under the LNER railway in 1909 – 6 years after the Wright Bros first flight – and started building his ROE 1 triplane. His first flight (15m) was on 5th June 1909 and over the next few weeks he made improvements resulting in a flight of 280m on 23 July.
A year later, having been evicted from the arches, he set up his new manufacturing business in Manchester; A.V.Roe & Company, which became AVRO.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Within two years (1912) he was building variants of his Avro 500 series biplanes for the army & navy. The Avro 504 was a particularly successful WW1 fighter and then trainer. Avro built ten thousand 504s from 1913 until production ended in 1932.
![](https://mechtraveller.com/wp-content/uploads/Avro504-1.jpg)
And a couple of decades later in the WW2 era Avro started designing and building some of their most famous machines: the Avro Anson, Avro Lancaster and Avro Lincoln.
![Avro Lancaster in flight](https://mechtraveller.com/wp-content/uploads/1024px-Lancaster_VR-A.jpg)
When the Cold War era came around, Avro contributed the Avro Shackleton and the Vulcan bomber.
![Avro Vulcan on static display at Yorkshire Air Museum](https://mechtraveller.com/wp-content/uploads/Vulcan-1.jpg)
And more recently, in civil aviation, Avro Aerospace (formed by BAE) produced the Avro RJ70, Avro RJ85 and Avro RJ100 regional jets.
![BAE Avro 146-RJ100 taking off](https://mechtraveller.com/wp-content/uploads/Swiss_BAE_Avro_146-RJ100.jpg)
Sadly, like all heroes, there is a ‘dark’ side. Roe was a member of the British Union of Fascists and a supporter of Oswald Mosley in the 1930s, but his company Avro, can’t be tarnished by that because by then he had sold his shares in Avro and formed a new company, Saunders-Roe… with another famous aircraft in its stable, the Saunders-Roe SR53 which first flew in May 1957.
Roe died a year later, aged 80.
Amazing to think he achieved all this… from this patch of grass!