By Finlo Rohrer BBC News Online

Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon's modernisation plans for the armed forces mean the closure of RAF Coltishall in Norfolk and serious cuts elsewhere.

RAF Coltishall... will it suffer the same fate as Trecwn?

Communities that lose their base have an uphill struggle to rebuild and regenerate themselves after such a blow.

Trecwn, near Fishguard in west Wales, was once the home to Europe's largest ammunition storage facility.

It closed in 1995 with the loss of 500 jobs, and on the abandoned 1,000 acre site, hundreds of sheep now graze by the well-hidden entrances to the 58 bombproof tunnels.

The adjoining village is almost a ghost town, its school gone and the staff of the base scattered all around the country.

'Trecwn is dead'

County councillor Alwyn Luke is blunt: "Trecwn is dead. The school I went to and my mother and grandmother went to is closed and overgrown. The post office is closed. The heart of the village is gone. There's 25 people left out of 400.

"When the base closed people were offered jobs all over the country. My daughter was offered a post in Edinburgh, but was lucky enough to find a job here.

"It has been a great blow to the whole economy of Pembrokeshire."

It has been a great blow to the whole economy Alwyn Luke, county councillor

The site is now owned by a London firm, the Manhattan Loft Company, who specialise in swish housing developments.

They plan to build executive homes and hope they can use the depot itself as underground storage for valuable such as wine or jewellery, or for bank files.

This is a relief to people in the region who were outraged after former owners had briefly floated plans to store low-level nuclear waste in the tunnels of the depot.

Training school flattened

The closure of RAF Locking, near Weston-super-Mare in Somerset in 1999 has also damaged a community.

Radar operators were trained at RAF Locking for 50 years

Home to the Number One Radio School, which trained air force radio operators and radar technicians for over 50 years, it has now been flattened.

Only one building remains, the base's church, and former workers on the base are fighting to keep it.

Pauline Skellon worked on the base for 21 years at its nursery school.

She says: "The nursery is closed. The school is still going although its numbers did go down a lot. The shops in the village suffered.

"The only remaining building on the base is the church.

"They have lost everything they had on there - a fully-equipped medical centre, a post office, a gym. All those things have been demolished."

The only building remaining on the base is the church Pauline Skellon, base worker

The site is being redeveloped by the South West Regional Development Agency and English Partnerships, who purchased it for �10m. Some form of mixed commercial, retail and housing development is planned, but no details are yet concrete.

But the base's married and officers' quarters are already being sold off, meaning a new influx of families is coming to revitalise Locking once again.

Mrs Skellon's husband, a former RAF bandsman, wants the church to be the home for his band, a mixture of ex-servicemen and others from the community.

"A lot of the community have moved away but there are a few still in the area. It would have been nice to have had the base's bandroom as our music centre, but they bulldozed it," she says.

Success story

One much larger community that has turned itself around is Rosyth, formerly the site of a huge naval dockyard and base.

Built at the turn of the century to combat the threat from the German fleet, it was brought into service again in World War II and by the end of the 20th century was specialising in refitting submarines and employing thousands.

In 1986 it began preparations to refit Britain's Trident submarines, but after spending millions, the Tory government in 1993 decided to switch the work to Devonport in the south of England.

Critics dubbed it "the upside down decision" and said then Defence Secretary Malcolm Rifkind made it for political reasons.

Workers protested over the Rosyth closure, but the town survived

Bill Livingston, editorial director of the Dunfermline Press group, remembers the rancour.

"It was a political decision and that is still resented by the labour force at Rosyth," he said.

The last warships sailed out of the naval base part of the site in 1995 and the dockyard was fully privatised in 1997, diversifying into surface ships and still employing 1,800 people.

It now has work on a few destroyers to tide it over until a major role in the assembly of Britain's two new super-carriers.

The area has benefited from developments elsewhere, with the naval base regenerated as a business park.

Mr Livingstone added: "A number of blue chip companies are there. It has Scotland's only direct ferry service to mainland Europe."

Price hikes in Edinburgh have driven an influx of housebuyers to the area around Dunfermline and nearby Rosyth has benefited.

Mr Livingstone believes the future is rosy: "Rosyth has made a decent fist of a renaissance."