Most people go to the beach to swim in the sea, build sandcastles, sunbathe, and enjoy the warm weather. But this is the UK. It's only recently stopped raining. What brought me here was this nuclear monitoring bunker.
If you live in the UK, then you probably live within 20 miles of at least one of these. It's basically a trap door into the ground which the average human will walk past without even glancing at, and there's over a thousand like it scattered across the country. Each one was built identical, but history has given them each a measure of originality. While the basic layout is the same, I never quite know what to expect. It's also a bit of a gamble if I can even get in. Many are locked, some are welded shut, and some are even flat-out demolished. This ones hatch just happened to be held shut by the big rock that you can see on the floor next to it in the picture. And yes, we put it back afterwards.
After World War Two, the world had to very quickly come to the realisation that nuclear weapons were a thing now, and not all of them belonged to trustworthy people.
In fact even today, almost none of them do, but back then total obliteration by nuclear war was a very real and probable outcome and everyone was very tense but not actually wanting to do anything provocative, which led to the term "Cold War."
Some of my older (than me) readers will remember the old pamphlets and infomercials about what to do in a potential nuclear war scenario, and now in the modern era we all know just how ridiculous those safety precautions were. Some of these pamphlets describe propping a door horizontally against a wall, and having the entire family live under it until the nuclear fallout was over. Anyone who has ever been responsible for two or more children simultaneously will know how impossible this would be to do. In case the pamphlets don't make it clear, nobody knew what to do about the whole nuclear weapons thing, but they knew that they had to do something, if anything just to keep people from losing their minds.
These nuclear monitoring bunkers came about as a defence measure. They were built underground throughout the 1960s, and filled with communications equipment and all the doohickeys one would need to measure the force, and distance of a nuclear strike, and communicate it across a wider network. It was also designed to be lived in if a nuclear strike did indeed occur.
This particular bunker was built in 1965 but it was decomissioned relatively quickly in 1968, meaning it's been rotting here on the British coast for just over fifty years. Its fifteen feet deep and there will be no phone signal. Only an idiot would climb down that ladder!
Oops.
Well, at least it's not flooded down here!
In the floor is this grate, designed to catch rain water, which would then get pumped back out by a hand-pump in the wall.
The wall still shows where the pump used to be, but it has long been removed.
The bunker is a tiny little room, oddly immaculate for something half a century unused. There's absolutely no graffiti or vandalism down here at all.
I still find these very surreal. Once long ago, coats would be hanging on the hooks, the walls would be covered in
At the back of the bunker is a singular bed, and if you think it looks like a tiny living area, you'd be surprised to know that sometimes these bunkers have bunk beds or even a third bed lengthways down the bunker. These were quite cramped living conditions. Imagine being stationed down here with your most annoying work colleague in the event of a nuclear strike.
I'd probably end up adding mine to the food rations.
There's still a few remnants on the shelf, and over on the wall it's still possible to see where all the communications equipment would have been.
At the back of the bunker is an openable air vent, although this has rusted shut.
But also littering this bunker were dozens of little skeletons, which I think are likely rats. They certainly have the front teeth of a rodent, but they're too small to be a rabbit, too big to be mice, and have too much cranium capacity to be Telford folks.
It's quite tragic, really. These are concrete walls, so any animal that falls down here can't dig out. They have no choice but to slowly starve to death.
In this little cupboard there once would have been a toilet, which was little more than a bucket with a seat. It's still, even now as a vacant filthy cupboard, in better condition than the toilets in some pubs and clubs.
And there's a whole rat skull here, including the bottom jaw!
Located next to the bunker is this little brick construct, which I assume is an aircraft monitoring post. While these are commonly found in one set design called an Orlit, of which there are two variants, one on ground level and one on stilts, it wasn't at all unusual for aircraft monitoring posts to have completely unique designs.
In the post-war era, aircraft monitoring posts were built in an attempt to revamp Britains air defence, given that we'd just had our cities routinely bombed for half a decade. The posts were basically used to monitor aircraft and predict their trajectory, while communicating with other posts. However most of them became obsolete when the bunkers were built, seeing as monitoring nuclear blasts was a greater priority.
There's a nice little view of the bunker and sea from this structure.
It has two rooms, one with a roof, and one lacking one. The one lacking one likely had a retractable cover, much like an Orlit has. There probably would have been a central post with a circular chart on it used to monitor the distance and trajectory of an aircraft back when this place was manned.
But given that this aircraft monitoring post is a unique design, everything I say here is speculation.
Stairs lead down to this teeny room.
There's a nice little observation hole pointing out to sea.
And here we have the rock back on the bunker hatch, and our friendly giant nuclear fireball doing something pretty with the clouds over there. But that's about all I've got for today. The bunker continues to rot away in a field by the sea, and given its historic significance, that is kinda sad.
One aspect of the cold war that I always found curious was the contrasting lack of tension around nuclear weapons today. And while this may seem like a very silly thing to find odd, given that the obvious cause of the tension lifting was the collapse of the soviet union, I still don't trust any government, and the fact that the technology still exists in the hands of a bunch of lunatics should worry me. My father used to say as casually as he'd order a coffee that the future wars would be fought from offices with computers, and that they'd be over in minutes. That should be quite a horrifying thought but as a small child I quickly came to terms with the fact that if the world ended, there was probably very little that I could do, so it was best just to plod along with life anyway. So I don't know for sure, but having been raised in an era where nuclear weapons are an accepted part of existence, I do wonder if we're desensitised to the possibility of instantaneous annihilation. The world will end and the last thing on peoples mind will be "Now I'll never see that season finale of Love Island, dammit."
Personally I'll be out living life, rather than existing in a simulated death awaiting death, but that's just me. I think we've established that I'm differently sane.
Next time I'm checking out an abandoned hotel, and then I'm going to a gorgeous derelict chapel. It's by far the prettiest yet, and shortly after we explored it, it was blown up after someone called God a slut. Everything will make sense.
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