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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."
Actually I remember an episode of "The Avengers" where emma and steed were trapped in an underground city..
I've been there it was quite interesting. Apparently the start of the movie The Sum of All Fears was filmed there.
Starring Christopher Walker, Brendan Fraser, Alicia Silverstone, and Sissy Spacek. Oh, nevermind!
Click here or here.
The Federal Government of Germany tried to sell of its bunker some years ago.
Despite some more or less reasonable offers it never got sold as the potential buyers were not willing to accept certain obligations, such as equipping it with a new structural fire protection. It is now sealed and flooded.
Too bad, actually
Alex
Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder
In the plains east of Denver there are a number of abandoned Titan missile silos. They were built under land leased from farmers and ranchers, and when the missiles and classified equipment were removed the government returned the structures to the landowners. For many years, teenagers snuck into them at night to toke up and hook up, and the owners had little success trying to block the entrances.
Occasionally a developer would announce a plan to turn them into energy-saving underground homes, but none of those schemes got very far...by now, I understand most of the owners have sprung for a load of Ready-Mix to close the entrances for good.
rj
Ive actually spent a lot of time down in Burlington - its pretty easy to get into and several parts have housed private companies before.
Corsham (about 3 miles from me at the moment) is actually home to quite a few massive bunker complexes, including Spring Quarry, Box Tunnel, Monks Park Quarry, Rudloe Manor , Monkton Farleigh and they are all interconnected while maintained (or not) as seperate facilities. Good site for this.
Two things could be done with this complex. Turn it into a museum, say The Museum of the Apocalypse. Include a amusement park, a bar, a cannabis 'chill center', a dance hall for raves, etc...
Or sell it to modern billionaires who are more important than the British Prime Minister.
After all, it's not like the 10000 Hydrogen bombs and 1000 ICBMs actually went away. They're still around. Which means that an underground shelter might still be a wise precaution.
Better yet, turn it into an art museum. That way, if the bombs do go off and the urban center surfaces of the planet are destroyed, the great art masterpieces will be saved for the human survivors living a hundred generations after WarDay.
I quite like the 50s theme-park idea myself. Well, my version is not so much a theme-park as an 'alternate reality experience'. The fact that it is isolated from the outside world is perfect for a 'blast from the past' opportunity, and already containing a lot of 50s equipment is a bonus.
Imagine going on a weekend trip with your significant other and/or a group of mates. When you get to the bunker you are given a change of 50s clothes and assigned rooms. You are told that the year is sometime in the 60s and the that nuclear strikes have devastated England, forcing many underground. The country is at war, and some of our brave men are fighting on the Russian front. Reports of troop advancements are broadcast over the sound system, and even the 'Prime Minister', who is living in a secured section of the bunker, could broadcast morale-boosting speeches during your stay there.
There could be a cinema showing old movies, and short propaganda films could even be appended. The article states that there is already a pub there - build a few more, perhaps even a 50s nightclub (cabaret?) and similar amenities. Basically, there would be the normal level entertainment found at any holiday camp, but with a twist - it's a different time/dimension and you are 'living there', wishing that the troops fighting alongside the Americans will come home safely, even though it's all fictional. Actors could summon people at random to perform 'important tasks' like tending to wounded soldiers fresh off a plane or manning a radio station.
It could be like a LARP, but more mainstream and far less geeky, i.e. a theme-park that tells you it's not a theme-park.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
... and buy that thing for the slashdot community! It's only 5.5 £ / user.
/. servers, underground soccer, ...
We could do whatever we want with it. Put in a thick internet pipe and have some fun. Lan parties, new secure location for the
Indeed. We have a slightly smaller bunker in Chislehurst, in SE London, and our local estate agents went out of their way to let prospective customers know that Madonna had had a look (or maybe they had sent her a flyer). Not as good value as this one though. £3m was the asking price for our titchy bunker, which I spent many happy childhood hours trying to break. Some childhood friends advised that an old codger who wandered in as they were piling up the milk crates in the corridors, in preparation for a major fire attack, that it went 200 feet underground but the entrances had been concreted over. I do hope the swimming pool doesn't fall in.
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This site has some good info. http://www.subbrit.org.uk/rsg/sites/c/chislehurst
as do the Chislehurst Society
http://www.chislehurst-society.org.uk/publication
Not sure if it's sold now, but I'm sure the agents will be happy to advise
http://www.knightfrankglobal.com/glasshouse/propd
http://www.diefenbunker.ca/
Quite an interesting tour - when the military decided they didn't need it anymore, they initially put it up for sale. One of the only bidders was the Hell's angels - it would have been fun to watch the RCMP try to conduct a drug raid on a facility designed to resist a nuclear attack.
Eventually the local townsfolk in Carp Ontario decided it would make an interesting museum, and I was one of the first to tour it.
My rights don't need management.
That's 417 street lamps per acre, or one for every three feet of your 60 miles of road.
You do realize this entire location is underground? One lamp every 3 feet on the roads would probably be good enough to keep the road visible, especially if they're sodium vapor (vapour, in the spirit of the article) lamps. Seeing as there are lots of tunnels, there's probably 1 lamp per 6' on each side.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
It's an interesting place indeed... built in the Cold War under Prime Minister Diefenbaker (hence the name Diefenbunker).
From the outside, it looks like an unassuming shed, but inside is a blast tunnel that leads into the hillside and down to a four-storey complex beneath. First stop: the radiation decontamination chambers. Last stop: the gift shop, which offers official Cold War-era federal government publications—in English and French—about how to build a bomb shelter at home. Along the way are a room where federal leaders would meet, a room for the Prime Minister (cot-sized only—no spuose allowed), a room for the Governor General, backup headquarters of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a sizeable cafeteria, bunk beds (each shared by three people in eight-hour shifts), a filtration system for extracting radioactive particles from surface air, etc.. The transmitters are located something like 14 kilometres away to prevent locating the bunker through triangulation.
At the lowest level is the Bank of Canada vault that would store gold in the event of a disaster (radioactive gold is not so valuable); it has the biggest vault door I've ever seen, and has a rectangular hallway around it with a mirror in each corner so a guard standing in one place could see all the way around.
It's an interesting piece of history that may yet come in handy if the Chinese Communist Party deploys biological or nuclear weapons.
Well, if Joe Sixpack will dress up as Superman for Halloween then it's not that much of a stretch to wear some 50s garb and drink all weekend.
Think about Murder Mysteries, all sorts of people go on them and spend a weekend in a mansion pretending to be oil tycoons or hollywood actresses and getting involved in some huge charade. This is similar; everybody could be given a card detailing their own 'mission' and perhaps even their persona. Hell, you don't even have to have any participation whatsoever and just let people do their own thing and check out the facilities.
All it is, in essence, is a themed setting like the Aztec and Underwater zones you find in any theme-park.
At least in my idea there's regular entertainment like movies, cabaret and DRINKING DRINKING DRINKING. Furthermore, the British were reknowned for their war spirit and cohesion for the common cause in WW2, and this just gives the newer generation a taste of unity in cheering for Blighty, even if they know it's only tongue-in-cheek child's play.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
The slashdot community should band together and buy the city, and make a techno-utopia. Then we wouldn't need to bother with stupid people.
There's also the original "Western White House," an underground bunker built during LBJ's tenure about 45 minutes north of Dallas, in Denton, TX. Today it serves as the regional FEMA headquarters.
-WatchfulBabbler
Yamantau is quite close to central asia. Central Asia is considered the strategic core of the planet by a lot of strategists, politicians, reporters etc. The reason it is so important is because of the abundance of resources in the region. According to energy analyst Michael T. Klare "... the region, which stretches from the Ural Mountains to China's western border, has now become a major strategic prize, because of the vast reserves of oil and natural gas thought to lie under and around the Caspian Sea." I'd imagine Yamantau will be some form of future command centre for a major war in the area probably for a last dash for resources between the US (from Afghanistan), China, Iran and Russia themselves. And that's just the nation states fighting, it doesn't take into consideration the major ethnic conflicts that are in the region.
First, pictures? Please? Someone?
Second, think for a few moments: Great Britain, while a major world power, is hardly going to have been the only nation to think of this sort of thing. Moreover, I'd be a bit surprised if they built the biggest or even the nicest of the underground Cold-War cities. I'm not saying that the US did: Most likely some OPEC Sheik created something to make the brain stagger in the middle of some unknown desert.
Point is, how many of these things exist? How fancy do they get?
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
Does $5M strike anyone else as cheap? I mean, 60 miles of roads - that's only 15.80 per foot of road, even if the road is only 8' wide, less than 2 pounds per square foot for any constructed item is cheap, and amazingly so for an underground bunker. The place might be a maintenance nightmare, otherwise, it's the cheapest bat-cave per square foot I've ever heard of.