We turned into a private road, off some remote B road, to be faced with.. a small farm cottage looking thing surrounded by rolling fields and woods. (if you ignored the military tat they've now dumped there for effect). Nobody could have prepared you for what you couldn't see. We went into the house and were presented with a wee shop with a nice older lady to greet us. We exchanged pleasantries and she then felt it necessary to point out that the cost was cos it wasn't a charity and the MoD don't own it anymore and that it couldn't be classed as a museum either. "When the MoD put these things up for sale they filled most of the others with concrete and sold the buildings above; here they advertised it as 'small farm cottage... with nuclear bunker underneath' anyway, see you in a couple of hours"!
A couple of hours! I thought. Aye right, I'll give it 30 minutes.
How wrong could I be? Well, very wrong.
It turns out that all those underground complexes you see in Bond films, and the like, are actually pretty accurate. This was fecking huge. You wander down a staircase in the shop, therefore already in the basement, to be presented with a very long sloping (down) corridor. Then after that there are big signs saying 'This way to the bunker'. What, I'm not in it yet?
Then through steel doors and 10 foot of concrete and tungsten that encases the whole site (imagine a two-story car park that starts about 30 feet underground). That's the top. It then has two floors underneath and is a veritable complex. The top bit was mostly living areas, a doctors office, a few cinemas, mess hall etc.
Then underneath that floor was all the Operations rooms, comms rooms etc etc.
Utterly brilliant.
So, if this is the Secret Bunker... where are the real secret bunkers? Cold War gone or not, if we have nuclear weapons, then they are somewhere, and I bet they don't look so 1950s'ish. I bet they have WiFi in every room.
Oh look, Goldfish!
