It started as a private venture as there wasn't any requirement whatsoever.
The first draft appeared in an internal brochure of the Armstrong Whitworth company dated back from November 1952 and described the aircraft as a supersonic fighter that would be the first of a family, being the other ones the AW.166 and AW.169.
As the latest generation bombers relied on their higher speed and altittude to evade the interceptors, Armstrong Whitworth thought that a good interceptor should sacrifice range in order to achieve great speeds and service ceilings, that's why, when they designed this aircraft, they would have limited the speeds of this airplane to mach 1.0 or 1.2 as it felt adequate to catch the latest bombers.
Initially it was considered by the designers of the company as a replacement for the Gloster Javelin, the equipment required by a two-seat all-weather fighter ruled out a small aircraft. The layout was conventional bar heavy sweep back on wing and tail but a high lift for maneouvrability at altittude was achieved by means of wing fences. Low speed performance was also achieved by fitting plain trailing edge flaps. It would've been powered by two Sapphire Sa.7 engines delivering each of them 11000lb (48.9Kn) of thrust power mounted in tandem using a common air intake which divided internally in order to feed both engines.
Upper nose would house the interception radar scanner, which was considered a handicap for supersonic airplanes but, back then, there wasn't any other way of locating airplanes in battle.
Undercarriage would have retracted into the fuselage because the wings would haven't been depth enough. An all-moving tail was mounted on a special ring which encircled the rear jet pipe and all controls were power operated using a system that was fully duplicated as long as one of the engines continued to function.
It would've been armed with two wing-root mounted 30mm Aden guns or two batteries of 40 unguided rockets in the fuselage and/or two underwing Blue Jay missiles. The design was used for private aerodynamic research and it was completed well into 1954 in spite of the lack of support from mid-1953. According to some source, the MoS lacked interest on it as it viewed it as 'too short a step in performance and too large and complex compared to the then official concept.
Source:
1. Midland Publishing - British Secret Projects - Jet Fighters since 1950
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