It was essential that all Board of Ordnance Depots had easy access to the major transport routes so that, in times of emergency, large quantities of weapons and ammunition could be transported quickly away to wherever they were needed.

Remember, this was a time before the railways and motorways.

Weedon would have been chosen as the site for the first major inland ordnance depot because of its proximity to the:

• network of Turnpike roads which criss-crossed central England.

• newly emerging canal system which would soon connect the major navigable rivers - the Thames, the Mersey, the Severn and the Trent - and many of the country’s important towns and cities.