The man who spent 40 years building a Lancaster bomber cockpit in his garden shed was an absolute legend
Right. We talk about shed projects a lot on here. We’ve covered the bloke who built a pub. The woman who turned a lean-to into a pottery studio. The retired teacher has the full-size cinema in his garden. We love all of them. But every now and then a story lands that makes all of those look, if we’re honest, a bit modest. This is one of those stories.
Photos from Metheringham Airfield Visitor Centre
Léon Ellison was a retired electronics engineer from Binfield in Berkshire. In 1955, aged about nine, he watched The Dambusters at the cinema, and that was essentially that. His brain latched onto the Lancaster bomber and never fully let go. Most of us have done this with a film — but most of us don’t spend the next six decades acting on it. Léon did.
He spent roughly twenty years just doing the research. Not messing about with a few YouTube videos and calling it a day — he tracked down surviving aircraft, got hold of original engineering drawings where they existed, visited every single Lancaster still in existence, and photographed every detail he could get his hands on. His son Adrian described it perfectly: he bought every book on the subject, made models as a kid, “and I guess he’s built the biggest model you could build.”
Then, with two decades of homework done, Léon started actually making the thing. In his garden. In a hangar he also built himself. From scratch. He fabricated the entire forward flight deck of an Avro Lancaster – the instruments, the throttle quadrant, the control column, every gauge, and every panel – by hand. The only components he didn’t make himself were the struts around the top, which had to be laser-cut by a specialist company. Everything else: Léon. Oh, and the sound of four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines? He built a frequency device to simulate those too, because of course he did.
“We thought he was mad when he started building the cockpit from scratch. But he was actually a genius.”
— Adrian Ellison, Léon’s son
Léon died in June 2024, aged 77, before he could see the cockpit turned into a working flight simulator — which had been his dream all along. He wanted people to be able to sit in it and, in his words, “fly” the Dambusters raid of 16–17 May 1943. The plan was always to donate it somewhere it could be used, not just admired.
And that’s exactly what’s happened. Earlier this month his family watched as a crane winched the cockpit out of its garden hangar — Adrian described it as “bittersweet” — and it was transported up to the Metheringham Airfield Visitor Centre in Lincolnshire. That’s the old RAF Metheringham, which from 1943 to 1946 was home to 106 Squadron’s actual Lancaster fleet. It’s hard to imagine a more fitting place for it. The centre has taken it on and is now working to complete it as a proper simulator, so visitors will eventually be able to strap in and have a go.
The staff there called it “an absolutely fantastic piece of engineering”. Which, yes. Obviously.
There’s a JustGiving page if you want to help with the restoration costs — for Léon’s Lancaster or check the Metheringham Airfield Visitor Centre website. If this story doesn’t make you want to go out to your shed this weekend and start something ridiculously ambitious, frankly, nothing will.
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