Underground 'Cold War City' For Sale

Hogwash McFly writes "A huge underground complex that was built as a nuclear refuge for the British Prime Minister in the 1950s has been put on the market. Code-named Burlington, the bunker now has a population of only four maintenance workers, yet sprawls over 240 acres and accommodates 60 miles of roads. Underground power stations supply energy for 100,000 street lamps and amenities include a railway station and a pub called the Rose and Crown. Among ideas suggested for the £5,000,000 bunker include a data centre, wine cellar, rave club or fifties theme park. It is not clear whether a tank for keeping laser-equipped sharks is included, however."

Comments

Re:Canada has something like that.

[ergo98]

I recall some Canadian relatives discussing a bunker called the Diefen Bunker. I think they said it's a tourist attraction now. They give tours as if it were a museum.

Good research.

http://www.diefenbunker.ca/

Bullshit

[John Hasler]

> ...sprawls over 240 acres and accommodates 60 miles of roads...

60 miles of 30 foot wide road covers 218 acres.

> ...100,000 street lamps...

That's 417 street lamps per acre, or one for every three feet of your 60 miles of road.

Re:Bullshit

[skatingloon]

Actually, it's not bullshit. If it's the place I'm thinking of (I'm pretty sure it is), it's called Monkton Farely, and like one of the comments says, everyone in the town of Bath knew it was there.

About 15 years ago, the place was bought for a nominal sum (5 million pounds is a hell of a lot more than they bought it for!) by a family who had the idea of creating a tourist attraction down there. They didn't do too well, but while they were in business we did manage to get down there. It was barely an 'attraction', but incredibly interesting, nontheless.

It's a truly amazing place. A lot of the infrastructure was decommissioned, so we had to use hand lamps - it was pretty spooky since it's obviously completely dark down there, and your head lamp doesn't do a whole lot to penetrate into the deeper bays and tunnels. Some of the major tunnels are indeed 30ft wide, and the lights are actually low wattage bulbs strung along the way.

One funny thing is that they stored a *whole lot* of ammunition down there just prior to D-day (I believe), and the only fire management equipment was a bucket of sand under each light - every few feet. I guess they figured that if there was a problem, all the fire extinguishers in the world wouldn't deal with it!

The there are a few things I remember particularly: The built-in power plant, air conditioning system (three huge stations with 30 foot fans) and the indentations left in the concrete from the bigger ammunition.

Apparently the train station intersects with the Box Tunnel outside Bath, Wiltshire. Every time I travelled from London to Bath I used to look out of the window of the train to see if I could see it, but no luck unfortunately. Apparently it's possible to find old quarry workings which lead you into the complex, but that sounds a bit dicey to me!

Here's an article about it - I'm not sure if this was the original one, but it might give you a flavour of what it's like down there.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/the_exchange/connec t/bunker.shtml

Photos of this bunker 'Burlington'

[thrill12]

Here is a report on the bunker with many photos. It is actual the "Burlington" bunker in Corsham, declassified by the MOD (==DOD). More photo's here.

Re:Very cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

The Times carried this story during the week with an excellent quote.

Jock Fraser, chairman of Corsham Town Council, said: "For years the Government denied it was even there but all the talk in local pubs was that if anything did happen, we knew where it was.

"The politicians might have built it for themselves but we were going to make sure we got there before them."

not necessarily

[no reason to be here]

60 miles of 30 foot wide road covers 218 acres.

umm...yeah, you see, in the middle of the american heartland, in the south, southwest, and west, 30 foot wide roads are pretty common place. However, in places that are really cramped for space (New England and old England, for example) you have roads that are noticably less wide. Some one way roads in my neck of the woods (Boston) are barely wide enough to accomodate 1-way traffic. The street on which I live, on which it is permitted to park on both sides of the street mind you, is about 12 feet across. There are even some "roads" in Boston's oldest neighborhoods that really are just narrow alleys that could never accomodate a car.

By road here, they could mean a series of very narrow one way roads and well-paved footpaths. Or maybe everyone in the underground city was supposed to be riding a vespa (a very logical idea, I'd think), or something similar, in which case all of one's roads could essentially be well-paved footpaths. In fact, in such a situation, electric scooters would be the ideal vehicle (low-power requirements, non-polluting, not very loud).

Image tour of Burlington bunker

[Animats]

Here's a tour. It's a huge installation. Not in bad shape for a bunker, but will need considerable work to be usable.

indeed

[subtropolis]

Which is why the Yamantau Mountain complex in Russia, some 1 300 km from Moscow, has raised so many eyebrows.

I can't believe..

[ezzzD55J]

That nobody has mentioned this:

"Hundreds of swivel chairs delivered in 1959 are still unpacked."

Frickin' rotating chairs!

Re:First a mine, then a WW2 ammo dump

[steve_l]

I know the place they are talking about; I live about 30 miles away. The whole area is near the village of Box: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=Box,+Wiltshire,+SN 13&spn=0.062548,0.158512&hl=en

-It was a sandstone quarry, not a mine. The sandstone that was used to build my house (and many others in bath and bristol) came from it. The way the sandstone deposits were the quarry was at the same height as the London-Bristol railway tunnel, so they built a special stop off the tunnel to get the rock and transport it to bristol, bath and london, which, back in 1850, pwas the main long haul transport.

-It just so happened that before WWII the air force grabbed it to be an arms store from conventional air attacks; it was used as that and later there were underground airplane factories nearby.

-when the cold war came along, it became the secret seat of government, though not that secret after a while, which, with better precision weapon delivery, meant it was not that useful.

Post cold war, a lot of the quarry has been abandoned. the local cavers know this and pop down the old shafts sometimes. Security used to rely on above-ground troops with guns, but as that has been rolled back, things are more accessible. Even then, the main burlington "citadel" is something they have always been scared of going to.

I think it survived till now as an underground seat-of-government is often useful, even outside a full-blown east-west nuclear exchange, where the place would last only a few minutes into the conflice. For example, after 9/11 dick cheney went off to the US equivalent to run the country (!), but I guess eventually the operational costs are too steep.

interestingly, the area has very good transport (railway, nearby motorway) and communications infrastructure. A lot of the main telecoms lines go through those railway tunnels, probably because the govt. told them to.