Paddock

A paddock has two primary meanings in different parts of the English-speaking world. In Canada, the USA and UK, a paddock is a small enclosure used to keep horses. The most common design provides an area for exercise and is often situated near the stables. Larger paddocks may have grass maintained in them, but many are dirt or a similar natural surface. In those cases drainage and a top layer of sand are often used to keep a suitable surface in the paddock. In the American West, such an enclosure is often called a corral, and may be used to contain cattle or horses, occasionally other livestock. The word paddock is also used to describe other small, fenced areas that hold horses, such as a saddling paddock at a racetrack, the area where race horses are saddled before a horse race.

In New Zealand and Australia, however, a paddock is a field of grassland of any size, especially for keeping sheep or cattle. It is normally fenced and defined by its natural boundaries, or is otherwise considered distinct. In that part of the world, a "Back Paddock" is a smaller field that is situated away from the farm house; possibly land of lesser quality. The equivalent concept in North America and the UK is a pasture.

Paddock (disambiguation)

A Paddock is an enclosure for horses. It may also refer to:

People

Places

Other uses

Paddock (war rooms)

Paddock is the codeword for an alternative Cabinet War Room bunker for Winston Churchill's World War II government located in Brook Road, Dollis Hill, northwest London under a corner of the Post Office Research Station site. It was constructed in total secrecy in 1939 but only rarely used during the war, with only two meetings of the War Cabinet being held there. It was abandoned in 1944.

It comprises some forty rooms on two floors, is semi-derelict with original equipment abandoned and rusted, and a certain amount of water ingress which is kept at bay by an electric extraction pump.

Paddock has had various, intermittent uses since (including a brief period where what is thought to be the map room was used as a Post Office staff social club) but otherwise the site remains largely disused and empty as it was when it was decommissioned at the end of World War II.

The bunker is owned by Network Housing, the housing association responsible for the homes now occupying part of the former research station site above, and is open to the public two or three times a year, with free guided tours provided by volunteers from the Subterranea Britannica organisation. It featured on the Channel 5 programme, Underground Britain.