[3] The support base for the rocket range at Woomera was at Penfield (34°44′31″S 138°38′10″E / 34.742°S 138.636°E / -34.742; 138.636), on the northern side of the Adelaide-Port Augusta railway line, where a large munitions manufacturing complex had been built in 1941, 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) from the small rural centre of Salisbury.

As with the munitions complex at the beginning of the war, in 1949 the location that was to become known as Salisbury North, immediately to its south, was no more than wheat paddocks on a flat alluvial plain.

There had been a post-war lull when munitions manufacture ceased, but as the new Anglo–Australian weapons project established in 1947 gathered pace, the need to recruit large numbers of employees increased.

Every kind of worker was in short supply, and the project had to compete with electronics and engineering firms that were tooling up and taking on staff to meet the heavy demand for consumer goods.

The original concept had been that houses for the LRWE employees would be scattered through a wider community to avoid Salisbury North becoming a ghetto.

But these advanced notions did not persist, for the economies inherent in making it an estate development were too great to ignore when both money and housing materials were in short supply.

With the absence of anything better to go to, every class rubbed shoulders there, from the men of the Commonwealth Investigation Service to graduate Experimental Officers to toolmakers.

[6] Salisbury North's reputation was adversely affected when it was revealed in 1999 that the leader of a group of four serial killers, John Bunting, had lived for several years in a rented house in Waterloo Corner Road.

Expansion of the Adelaide conurbation has resulted in Salisbury North now being part of the capital's continuous northern suburbs, no longer a single-purpose estate bounded by farmland.