How many nuclear bunkers are there in Britain… and who would get in?
As fears over Putin’s intentions grow, eyes are once again turning to the network of underground shelters built in the Cold War
As befitting of a secret underground nuclear bunker, Kelvedon Hatch has a fairly inconspicuous opening. Every day at 10am, Mike Parrish unlocks a few gates, keeps near the phone and waits to see who’d like to visit his Cold War relic. Sometimes he will post on Facebook, but generally the place sells itself. It may be secret but, every year, 60,000 visitors manage to find it.
“Untouched and unspoilt,” Kelvdeon Hatch is one of the largest subterranean shelters in the country. It was built by the Government beneath a fairly nondescript-looking bungalow in the Essex countryside in 1952, after they requisitioned the land from Parrish’s farmer grandfather, who played his part by hiding all evidence of it from spies flying overhead. It has three floors and can accommodate 600 people.
“This is the London bunker,” Parrish says, meaning it was designed for the Government to keep running if the capital was under threat. The prime minister would have been whisked to Kelvedon Hatch or to another major government bunker in Corsham, Wiltshire, before calling the shots from below ground for as long as it took.
Radio equipment, air conditioning, its own water supply and phone network – it has the lot and, despite being decommissioned in 1992, remains as serviceable as ever, thanks to Parrish’s caretaking. Lately, as the war in Ukraine has made the threat of nuclear attack more pronounced than at any time since the Cold War, he has been taking a lot of phone calls.
“Yes, quite a lot of interest. And emails, mainly from people saying: ‘Money is no object, how much would it cost to rent the place for a year, or five years?’ The same thing happened after 9/11…” In 2001, he had over 200 people make enquiries, though he also got death threats from people who thought he was cashing in on the tragedy.
So far, Parrish hasn’t been tempted, but he doesn’t rule it out – “if someone like the Beckhams rang up” – and estimates that with his loss of income, the inconvenience (that’s putting it mildly, given he’d have to find a second bunker) and whatever else, it would require an offer of at least £500,000 for long-term rent.
But is it ready? “Oh yes.” It wouldn’t need updating for modern standards? “Quite the opposite: valve radios, the telephone exchange, they’d all work without the systems your mobile phone need to keep going. It’s completely ready.”
Over the past 20 years, the bunker has hosted events, scout group stopovers, role play parties, paranormal evenings, and allows filming. It has been used for far more things than it was ever built for, but that can only be a good thing. In 1992, when it was costing the Government £3 million per year to keep running, it was mothballed for the same reason given for decommissioning almost all our other nuclear bunkers: it was no longer needed. But is now the time for a
We are “closer to a Third World War than at any point since the Seventies,” Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge and a former British Army chemical and nuclear weapons expert, told this paper last week.
That was before Russia – which holds a greater stockpile of nukes than any other country on the planet – invaded Ukraine, and before Vladimir Putin put his nuclear forces on high alert on Sunday. Two days later, president Biden was asked if Americans should be worried about nuclear war. “No,” came his matter-of-fact response. But still concern grows about what a desperate Putin could be capable of.
De-escalation is urgently required,” says Tom Unterrainer, chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. “To date, all confrontations involving the risk of nuclear weapons being used have been diffused by one side or another finding a ladder to climb down, followed by serious diplomatic efforts. Can the West help President Putin find a ladder? This is a key question in terms of nuclear tensions.”
It is rumoured that Putin has hidden his family in an “underground city” within a luxury hi-tech built in the depths of the Altai Mountains, safe in Siberia, northern Russia. But if the understanding is that a missile is far more likely to be fired
his forces, what about us? The basic question of where would be safe carries a little more urgency.
The short answer is that it depends how important you are. In the grip of post-WW2, Cold War anxiety, Britain had a network of underground shelters, from Bridgend to Argyll, to house key personnel and run communications from. But these have mostly been sold off or fallen into disrepair.
Some have become farms, others museums. One, in Wiltshire, became a cannabis factory. Another is Europe’s largest wine cellar. A third, in Somerset, was turned into a five bedroom eco-house – on the market for £700,000 in 2015. And they still come up on the market. As recently as the end of January, a 5,300 square ft above ground military bunker in Watton, Norfolk, was sold for £260,500.
Unsurprisingly, being underground and having 3ft thick walls means demolishing them is more trouble than it’s worth. It’s likely there are now dozens of habitable “proper” bunkers, rather than hundreds.
“The country is littered in abandoned bunkers now, absolutely littered,” says Nick McCamley, a publisher and author of Cold War Secret Nuclear Bunkers. He adds that the notorious sprawling Wiltshire bunker was built for around £110 million in the early Eighties, but was sold by the MoD for about £40,000 roughly two decades ago.
“Virtually all Britain’s Cold War infrastructure, as far as we know, has gone,” McCamley told The Telegraph. In the Eighties, all county councils and local authorities had their own bunkers – many “built below the office car park”. But since the mid-Nineties, “the philosophy has been to get rid of them, and the memory of the Cold War entirely,” McCamley says. “Defence strategies didn’t envisage a realistic risk of nuclear war, so why keep these things on?”