Grove Business Park has a new owner – The Oxford Endowment Fund, part of OU Endowment Management (OUem).

OUem is an Investment Fund of approximately £6 billion investing the assets on behalf of the collegiate University.

Although most of this money is invested in the stock market, they also invest in property and that now includes our local business park.

Established about 30 years ago, the 33-acre mixed-use Business Park sits on the former Grove Airfield between Wantage and Grove and is accessed from what used to be the Airplane Roundabout.

The site was originally agricultural land until the early 1940s when it became part of a World War II airfield used by the RAF and the US Air Force.

This area, to the west of the runways, was home to the Library, Canteen, and Control Tower, and included hangers, maintenance units, workshops, a pyrotechnics store, a bulk oil installation and an oil compound.

After the war the site was used by the UK Atomic Energy Authority for research and development, and later by a variety of research organisations.

In the 1990’s the storage tanks, barrels and laboratory chemicals were removed and a variety of businesses moved into the buildings.

In 2016 it changed ownership and at the Wantage and Grove Campaign Group AGM in 2016 the then owners came to explain to us how they planned to expand the site, building up to 40,000 square metres of floor space including offices, light industrial units and a new “Incubator” block designed to attract start-up businesses on short-term contracts.

Not all of these ambitions have been achieved and now OUem have plans to improve and expand the existing layout, landscaping, amenities and infrastructure of the Park to create a sustainable campus environment for the future.

The marketing material states that “this will build upon the Park’s undoubted potential and reinforce its key status as an allocated strategic employment site in the Vale.”

The master plan has not yet been submitted but the layout looks remarkably similar to that submitted in 2016.

The difference is that the proposed nursery has been removed and the balance of proposed uses is moving more towards the Life Sciences and Technology sectors.

Given that the Airplane has been removed, it would be good if there was some link to the history of the site as part of one of the most important USAAF supply hubs in World War II.