- Visitors to the Lake District today, seeing the quiet and peaceful Lake Windermere, never guess that this was once the site of a factory building military flying boats. But in the early 40s a factory was built from scratch to produce Short Sunderlands, along with a complete village to house the workers. The fascinating story of this forgotten factory is told in this book, alongside the history of the big planes built there, which served with the RAF and other air arms until the 1950s.