Erskine Barracks
Open-knowledge reference entry

Erskine Barracks was a military installation at Fugglestone St Peter, in Wilton parish some 2+3⁄4 miles (4 km) northwest of Salisbury in Wiltshire, England.
History
The site, which had been farmland until used for temporary army buildings during World War II, was acquired by the British Army for use as a headquarters for Southern Command in 1949. The establishment was centred on Fugglestone Farmhouse and an Ordnance Survey map of 1958 labels it as Fugglestone Camp.
The barracks were later named after General Sir George Erskine, who had been GOC Southern Command from 1955 until his retirement in 1958. The site went on to become in 1968 the headquarters of Army Strategic Command, which was renamed UK Land Forces in 1972 and Land Command in 1995. On 1 April 2008 Land Command amalgamated with Headquarters Adjutant General under 'Project Hyperion' and became Land Forces. Land Forces moved from Erskine Barracks to the former RAF Andover site now known as Marlborough Lines on 23 June 2010, and the site became vacant.
At time, that the site covered 9.6 hectares to the north of the railway line and 3.8 hectares (less fully developed) to the south. The former farmhouse had been demolished by 1968 and all standing structures were from 1950 or later. In 2014 the headquarters building was described as "an impressive example of brutal modernism".
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This entry incorporates text from “Erskine Barracks” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.