Closure
Going Back to JHQ Rheindahlen
It's a strange thing to return to a childhood home and find it somehow changed. Walls repainted. The conservatory added, or gone. Hedges cut down, or new ones planted. Stranger still to find the place surrounded by razor wire fencing. Watched by surveillance cameras. Patrolled by guards in blue-light trucks. Not the house where you grew up, but most of the town.
To us, it was 'JHQ' — Joint Headquarters. Or simply, camp. The military base that served as a British–NATO centre in Germany from 1954 until 2013 was in most senses a town like any other. Among its 2,000 buildings were supermarkets, restaurants, several schools, three churches, a cinema, a bowling alley, a 50-metre swimming pool. All connected by twenty miles of roads, avenues, streets with names like Carlisle, Grenville, Londonderry. It was Little Britain. A world unto itself.
A strange place to grow up. But at the same time, it wasn't. At the time it seemed perfectly normal.
In December 2023, ten years after the site was closed and returned to German possession, my dad and I found a back route through neighbouring fields to enter part of the town, including to the house where we once lived. My childhood home. I wasn't sure I would ever see it again. I'm glad that I did, though the sight of the place today was not easy to take in.
The following photos were taken during an hour near the southern edge of the base.
A wet day in December 2023. 12:30pm.
We pull off the Hardter Strasse north of Rheindahlen onto a narrow track with a name that sounds comically out of place. Marlborough Road. We park up. Coats on. It's raining. That cold, German rain: not heavy, but uncompromising. A little way down the narrow track, the high security fences that we spotted from the main road culminate in a steel gate that means business. The gate was invisible from the road, shrouded by the dense woodland that covers large parts of the landscape here. DIESES OBJEKT WIRD ÜBERWACH, a sign declares. This property is monitored.
We skirt to the left of this checkpoint, into the field of a neighbouring farm. Along the tree line at the field's northern edge, glimpses begin to appear into the outermost houses of what was once a town. It's the town that my family — and countless others we'll never know — called home.
Pushing through the thicket under the tree cover, it's possible to cross the threshold. In its day, all that enclosed JHQ was a low chicken-wire fence of the kind that might surround a school playground. But here on the southern edge, even that fence has largely gone, collapsed through age or scavenged for scrap. A little way beyond it lies a shiny new fence about ten feet in height, topped with barbed wire and monitored by security cameras. Like a prison. A large part of what was once the camp is now firmly secured. But outside of that new perimeter, some of JHQ's residential areas remain accessible.
As we begin to push into the outer streets, the change is hard to comprehend.
What the Germans haven't reclaimed, nature has. Weeds grow up through cracks in the concrete streets. What were once two-lane roads are now single tracks, their edges lost in overgrowth. Only a narrow strip down the middle has been kept from nature's hold by the regular rolling of security vehicles. The pavements are completely invisible, buried under a continuous carpet of vegetation so thick that it springs under foot. As we walk further down the deserted streets and the hum of traffic on Hardter Strasse fades into the background, there is an undeniable sense of the post-apocalyptic about the scene. Wyndham comes to mind, or Ballard.
We keep ears tuned for the sound of approaching security vehicles.
But there's only a stark silence.
The House
Before long, we've found it. Carlisle Way. And there beneath the same old tree is Number Three. The house that we called home. Where I had my first birthday. My first Christmas, too, thirty years ago to the month. I recall the yellow front door the moment I see it. That particular detail had lain dormant in the memory. For decades, this house — or versions of it warped through the lens of childhood — have circled in my head. It’s always been the default place my mind wanders to when I daydream.
Now it looks like a dystopian themed paintball arena.
There's a panicked sense of overwriting my own memories; of replacing the JHQ of my childhood with this new, grimy wasteland. But young memories die hard.
Home, sweet home.
'Our house' is locked up and the windows are intact. There's no getting in. So I take a single frame through the glass. Our once living room, just as it always was. Blue-green carpet. Yellow walls. Now there are dried leaves on the floor, caught in the daylight from the patio doors. But next door, the neighbour's garden gate hangs open. She had a cat, I remember sponteneously. We go through into the back garden. The back door to the house is open too. At some time since 2013, somebody has broken in. We step inside and the floorboards give a little underfoot. This house — the other half of the semi-pair — is a mirror image of our own. I want to go upstairs, see my little bedroom in the Mirror Universe, but we decide upstairs is risky. Only later will Dad remember that the floors are concrete slabs. It would have been safe after all.
Sections of plaster have fallen from the walls and shattered on the floor in the living rooms. There's mould on the ceiling. But the bathroom fittings remain. Ceiling lights too, all decorative glass and mock gilt. A vestige of the eighties. What I'm most struck by are the curtains. In the little downstairs bathroom, a single patterned drape hangs in the window. It's immaculate, still tied neatly with a red ribbon.
In parts, the house looks as though its occupants left yesterday.
In fact it's been empty for a decade.
Around the corner, "our" playground is now a featureless clearing in the woods. Der Spielplatz. The swings and see-saw are no more, not even their footprints visible. The beloved 'cheese-cutter' (imagine a Medieval battering ram designed for children to ride on) has gone too. But the sign remains. The blue sign, bolted on top of the original beneath it. Plus two orange litter bins. These are the sum of the Spielplatz now.
As for the houses themselves, their utilitarian appearance has only been accentuated by vacancy. Where once window boxes of flowers and well-kept lawns battled to instil some limited sense of suburban domesticity, now only the concrete shells remain. Some are peachy in colour, some simply grey, others a grim shade of yellow. Vegetation grows out of control on the road-facing frontages of most: climbing flowers planted on trellises a decade ago, now run away. On a couple of the houses, solitary red roses still flower. Feels like a metaphor for something. Meanwhile the back gardens of many are totally impenetrable, retaken by nature, jungle-like from fence to fence. Machete territory.
Many houses in the southern streets have roof tiles that were newly replaced just days before the closure in 2013. Chimneys here look as if they could have been retiled yesterday. Most houses have a red 'X' in a circle painted near the front door, reason unknown. Maybe it meant the property had been vacated.
On Londonderry Drive, near the south-eastern corner of the site, a basketball ring remains fixed to a tree on a front lawn, the net tattered and moss-greened. I wonder if a teenager was given it for their birthday. I wonder how many hundreds of hoops they shot on long summer evenings, and whether they're now in their forties or fifties.
After an hour on the site, we decide to start heading back to the car. The rain is relentless and my favourite Timberland trainers have reached their limit of timbered land. They are caked in mud, and soaked through. As we step back onto Gloucester Road, I spot a security truck driving straight towards us. It's too late to do anything. We've seen them, so they've seen us. But they just drive on past as we duck into the tree line and out to the edge of the farmland fields again.
Back at the Marlborough Road gate the same truck sits waiting, though nothing is said. Possibly the driver has just stopped for lunch. Possibly they want to make sure we really are leaving. So, leave we do.
It's difficult to know what to feel now, looking at these photographs, just as it was difficult to gauge my feelings as we walked among the houses and down the crippled streets. Famously, photographers love abandoned places. Pictures of urban dilapidation raise questions. They feed our human hunger for entropic chaos. They remind us of the fragility of the worlds we build for ourselves. But when the place that has fallen to ruin is that of your core childhood memories — the sensory backdrop to your mind's natural resting place — any interest is paired with a kind of mourning.
These photos — and the taking of them — upset me, as they will many of the people who populated what Google Maps still call persists in calling NATO-HauptQuartier. But I'm glad to have them nonetheless. I think I needed to see the place once more.
'Closure' is a word not reserved for people.
All photos taken on a day in early December 2023. © Jamie Bellinger.
Permission must be sought before copying/using these images, including for JHQ history websites or blogs. Thank you.
View the full set of photos here.
Information for this story researched or verified from JHQ-rheindahlen.de (thanks to Fred Williams), Gov.UK and other sources.