Top Secret Werwickshire
Michael Layton & Androulla Christou-Layton
Punished 2025 Publisher: Brewin Books
https://www.brewinbooks.com/
ISBN 978 1 85858 763 3
356 pages, soft back
24cm x 17cm
Reviewed for Volume 4 Issue 3 Summer 2026
The Review
This is a fascinating book. OK the “Top Secret” seems like click bait as most people will have already seen some 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 Bramcote is (before it was an RN Station); it doesn’t mean people know why they are there or what the history actually was and what was actually done there? In many cases the “official” story was intentionally misleading
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, but as they had no runway and only temporary huts, many have no idea they were even in the midlands.
Pill boxes… these were part of Stop Lines that ran for up to 100 miles. They were not just isolated things dropped around randomly or a specific local need.
Having flicked through the book I thought, much like the authors book for the Top Secret West Midlands, this is something and nothing, places covered in a couple of sentences. This is true but this 250 page book would be 250,000 pages if it covered all of it in detail.
People write multiple books on the “listeners” system (page 63) and the Y Stations (page 74), 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. But you have to know about them in the first place and that there was one in your area of interest. Many were kept secret long after the war and long after they had been removed. As noted their official story at the time was usually something different anyway!
This is where this book really wins home: A line, or paragraph, that is the key to unlock the hidden library.
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 certainly for the Cold War period. It also puts things into context.
Also you will see thumbnails of the towns in the region across time frame you are interested in that will point to other things you didn’t know about that impact what you are looking for. It is one of those books that will be the start point for your interest in a particular place or event.
The more I look at this book I realised that if you are looking at Warwickshire from WW2 through to the Cold War it will be a start point and save a many of hours of preliminary research. Also unlike Google this book is accurate. This is an essential book for anyone looking at Warwickshire WW2 to now.
