Lighthorne Heath is a village and civil parish in Warwickshire, England. It is located some six miles to the south east of Leamington Spa and is very close to the M40 motorway. The village began life in the 1950s, situated to the north of RAF Gaydon it housed the married airmen and officers (those unmarried lived in barracks). Before that time the site was just farmland between Gaydon and Lighthorne with a few isolated buildings. After just over thirty years of active service most of the smaller houses on the base were sold off to Stratford District Council between 1976 and 1981. Throughout the 1980s the larger houses were sold on the open market by the Ministry of Defence. The runway and RAF buildings were taken over in 1978 by British Leyland, and became a proving ground for its cars. This evolved into the Gaydon centre (where Land Rover has its headquarters) and the Heritage Motor Centre, a museum of many British cars. More recently Aston Martin built a factory here for its car production. The village got its own parish council in 2003. Before 2003 it shared a Parish Council with Lighthorne, a village 800m to the west. According to the 2001 UK Census the parish has a population of 1,225 living in 517 dwellings.