There are many bunkers about dating from the Cold War. Many were built during or soon after WW2 and later modified for other uses. The Royal Observer Corps had an extensive network of posts of small size, with a network of larger headquarters sites. This is a 3 man bunker, now abandoned, of which there were close to 1600. This one is very close to a road and easily seen, others are on hilltops in more remote places.
The steel entrance cover opens onto a shaft with vertical steel ladder. It descends only a few feet to a small room where three men would have lived. They had only a chemical toilet and basic instruments to measure size and location of nuclear explosions. there would have been radio or telephone contact with a larger unit to pass this information on. I very much doubt if the occupants would have survived long after the initial attack! The second picture shows how close to the road this bunker is, it has its own lay-by.
The ROTOR project was an enormous effort to update Britain's radar cover after WW2. It consisted of many sites with huge underground bunkers to withstand conventional bombing. Many of these sites were taken over when they became obsolete in their radar role for local government bunkers. The site at Bawdsey in Suffolk has the distinction of being the place where radar was developed and went on to be part of the ROTOR chain. These pictures are of the surface works and the radio mast converted from a chain home radar mast. *News!* September 2000, this mast has been found to be unsafe and beyond repair, reportedly, and is to be demolished despite being a listed structure. See news page!
This building, a short distance away, was the emergency stand by generator building. Obviously the bunker would become uninhabitable fairly quickly without power.
One of the more sinister relics which is still to be seen on some of the airfields in the country is the nuclear weapon storage area. The early ones for the first generation of weapons, associated with the V bomber force and weapons such as the Blue Danube free fall bomb are called clutches. A few relics of these remain and are even put on more recent maps. The next generation of storage bunkers were made to American standards and are usually called igloos. Now that these too are obsolete for nuclear weapon storage they are either being used for other munitions or in some cases demolished. Some are still in obvious good order and some examples are shown here. The top one is at RAF Lakenheath. This particular site is notorious for an incident which took place in the late 1950's when a B47 bomber crashed into these igloos and caught fire. I am told that there was a rapid exodus of personnel! These stores contained Mk6 nuclear weapons at the time and they were exposed to the fire. However, no explosions took place. These weapons had seperate fissile cores, as with many early devices, but would have caused a large conventional explosion none the less.
It was perhaps not a good idea to use the old conventional weapon store site for these igloos as it is almost in line with the end of the runway. What you cannot see in this picture is the close proximity of houses in Lakenheath village, about 300metres to the left.
Shepherds Grove weapon store has been moved to Airfield remnants page. New pictures and more information! Click here to see!
Some of the biggest but best hidden remains are the huge bunkers intended for the Regional and National Government. The old Rotor system bunkers were converted in some cases for this purpose. The Regional Seats of Government were as follows; RSG 1 Catterick, RSG2 York, RSG3 Nottingham, RSG4 Cambridge, RSG6 Reading (The infamous Warren Row), RSG7 Dartmouth, RSG8 Brecon, RSG9 Kidderminster, RSG10 Preston, RSG11 Edinburgh, RSG12 Dover. There was also RSG NI at Armagh. This represents only one phase of a number of different uses for many of these bunkers. These pictures are of the well preserved bunker at Kelvedon Hatch which is now a museum (highly recommended, well worth a visit!) and show some of the features of the bunker. It is singularly difficult to describe an underground facility which was never intended to be public knowledge. You can only see it from outside as a hill covered in grass with a huge radio mast or from inside as a three storey building with no windows. Some of the specifications might give you a clue as to the scale of the thing. It is a three storey building designed to house up to 600 people (usual compliment would have been around a third of this figure) for three months sealed from the outside world. It was designed to withstand conventional bombs but like many other buildings would have been no match for nuclear weapons. This is achieved by burying it in a 40metre deep hole on a gravel bed. The walls are over 3 meters thick and were cast in a continuous operation to provide no boundaries in the concrete. Every few inches is a tungsten steel reinforcing rod about as thick as your finger. One corner of the upper section has been breached by cutting a doorway through the concrete to form an exit. This demonstrates perfectly how solid the place is, as you walk through this! There are something like 40,000 tons of concrete in this building. Yet it was built in secrecy and remained so from 1951 or 1953 depending on who you listen to, until 1993. Perhaps a quarter of a mile from the A128 road is a small copse. In it is a small fenced compound with what appears to be a bungalow. It is in not what it seems. Inside its concrete backed walls is the entrance to a tunnel that leads to the bunker. It is something of a giveaway when you see the seven CCTV cameras around the place. The huge radio tower behind the copse is suggestive too! Through the armour plate doors, shown here, is the secret place where local government hoped to survive the nuclear conflict.
The various rooms inside served to support the equipment to contact other areas and so on. There was a large canteen to feed the many inhabitants. There were medical facilities and a radio broadcast studio. The dormitory facilities were sufficient for the continuous "hot bed" system only. This picture gives some idea of the claustrophobic quality of the place.
The air within the bunker was drawn in via the emergency escape stair shaft which exits near the radio mast. The equipment to filter this air is outside the protected citadel of the bunker, and so is the air conditioning equipment. There is also a facility to pump sewage to the surface and away to a treatment plant. These doors are armoured like the entrance doors and lead from the bunker to this equipment. The next pictures show the filters and then the air conditioning plant.
Of course, if the positive air pressure in the bunker failed to keep the radiation out, or panic set in, or disease or any one of the inhabitants decided they had had enough, then there were plenty of body bags and coffins available.
In WW2 there was a war room which was supposed to beat the Government buildings in Brooklands Avenue in Cambridge. Nothing remains of this now and there is no publicly available record of it that I am aware of. During 1952 a much more substantial war room fit for the nuclear age was built on the site. This building was intended to be a regional emergency control centre. The H bomb made this system of war rooms out of date and a new system of Regional Seats of Government was built. In all but 2 cases (Cambridge and Nottingham) these were on different sites from the old set up. Many branches of Government and the military were to be represented here. These sites were secret and there was much fuss when the RSG's were publicly exposed in the 1960's by a group calling themselves Spies for Peace. The idea was that these places, like other bunkers, were not to be announced to the British people who would be treated as the enemy after a nuclear attack. This was never told to us for obvious reasons!
First a walk along this nice path...
until this heavily overgrown pillbox is seen across the water, Then a careful look to the right reveals this huge ivy covered building in its wire compound. Armoured ivy of course! (Why do government servants always seem to think ivy is bomb proof?) One entrance to the older war room is seen here.
The newer part of the building is to the right again and the join is seen here.
Further right is the later 1960's addition.
The government buildings site in Brooklands Avenue Cambridge is apparently to be redeveloped and a number of the buildings are empty now. The RSG has been empty some years and this shows in the unkempt appearance. These pictures are taken from the side of the compound in the government buildings area. They show air vents on the roof of the old building, and in the wall of the newer extension. The fuel tank for the equipment in the older building is also visible. The large white panel on the newer building is presumably for equipment movement in or out of the building and is a very heavy steel plate bolted in place. Note also the stainless steel covers on the upper part of the water downpipes from the roof. I assume this was to prevent climbing up to the roof and therefore access to the air intakes, etc.
For more detail about RSG's I would recommend War Plan UK by Duncan Campbell.
In the late 1950’s the original nuclear weapon stores were updated with two other types. Firstly, where American weapons were stored, were the US/ AM “igloo” bunkers. These are shown at Shepherds Grove in their US version and also at Alconbury. At British bases such as Honington, Marham, Waddington and others, these were built as part of the nuclear store upgrades and can be seen easily at Waddington, for example. The British idea was the D3 building, also on the same site as the igloos. This was an array of concrete cells, similar to the igloo, but in a block of from 12 to 24, with recessed doors, and the whole lot covered with an earth mound. Inside there is another difference between the single igloos and the cells of the D3 building. The single igloos have a manual crane, as shown here, but the cells have a power operated crane. Both are rated at 5 tons working load. The site included support buildings too and was considered suitable for airfields like Scampton which had previously not had a clutch. The one at Scampton is still visible. The one at Waddington, now not used for nuclear storage due to the withdrawal of all land based nuclear weapons here, is also visible and is, like a few others, just away from the main airfield site. This one is across the A15 road from the airfield. Interestingly the new aircraft viewing area is right next to it! This is the last type of above ground storage to be built here. At two bases, Bruggen and Marham, the final type of store built was inside the Hardened Aircraft Shelters, near to the planes that would have delivered the weapons. These were below ground in special vaults, which held up to 4 individual weapons. The bottom picture shows one of these vaults with a WE177 training round in place. 24 of these stores were built into HAS's at Marham and ten were built at Bruggen. These were purchased from the USA as being surplus when they reduced their WS3 (weapon storage and security system) program to 208 vaults at 13 locations and had 49 vaults unused. This multi million dollar purchase was completed in 1995 and this may seem odd considering the WE177's were removed from the active stockpile in 1998. However, it is likely the system was ordered when it was intended to keep WE177 operational until 2007.
From the left end of the storage area as seen from the road.
Some of the US/AM igloos.
Various support buildings.
The D3 building, note the lorry for scale. Note also the forest of lightning conductors.
A look along the front fence, to give real "cold war" atmosphere!
WE177 in underfloor storage vault from a HAS. This sytem used sophisticated electronic security measures and reduced risks associated with moving bombs around in times of crisis to arm planes.
