Top Secret West Midlands
Michael Layton & Androulla Christou-Layton
Punished 2025 Publisher: Brewin Books
https://www.brewinbooks.com/
ISBN 978 1 8585 8789 9
304 pages, soft back
17 × 24 cm
Reviewed for Volume 4 Issue 2 Spring 2026
The Review
This is a fascinating book. OK the “Top Secret” seems like click bait as most people will have already seen many of the things in this book. However seeing a pill box in your area that has been there forever or that “everyone knows” where RAF Pershore is; it doesn’t mean people know why they are there or what the history actually was and what was actually done there?
The thing is many are no longer there for example RAF Lichfield! Yes, an airfield in Lichfield. There are 41 RAF stations mentioned including one I served on (it’s still there) and one that is now home to the Pilgrims. Most of the RAF stations are long gone, some are now housing estates or industrial parks, others farmers’ fields with a couple of strange out buildings.
Of course the Prisoner of War camps have also gone now, many have no idea they were even in the midlands.
Pill boxes… these were part of Stop Lines. Not just isolated things dropped around randomly. Then there are the Y Stations that were very secret until long after the war. So many have no idea they were even there or only know the “cover story” of a requisitioned house in WW2. E.g. “logistics planning”.
Then there are the WW2 decoys for bombing set in the countryside, unless you know what you are looking for they are invisible now.
There are comments on K sites and Q sites that you have never heard of that start to put things in to perspective.
Having flicked through the book I thought, this is something and nothing, places covered in a couple of sentences. This is true but this 300 page book would be 300,000 pages if it covered all of it in detail. People write multiple books on Royal Ordinance Factory and the English Electric Company, both mentioned in this book, along with any of the nearly 100 military and other installations…
In fact most things in mentioned in just a paragraph in this book warrant several books and a documentary.
That the authors are former Police officers with a connection to the military and intelligence based policing shows in the way this book is put together. It is the preliminary investigation you need for anything connected to WW2 and onward. It also puts things into context. It is one of those books that will be the start point for your interest in a particular place or event.
Also you will see thumbnails of the region and time frame you are interested in that will point to other things you didn’t know about that impact what you are looking for.
The more I look at this book I realised that if you are looking at the midlands from WW2 through to the Cold War it will be a start point and save a lot of hours of research. This is an essential book.
