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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."
Imagine the killer bud you could grow in that place.
as stated before, we really need to filter out these damned ad articles.
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/
I think it's worth spending that money just so you can say you live in motherlands basement.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'd like to turn in into my own British Bat Cave. Kind of like where a combination of James Bond and Bruce Wayne would live.
Do I get the "four maintainance workers" with the city? Is slavery illegal underground? Oh, and I welcome our new underground mole-people overlords (couldn't help myself)
public class null extends java applet { System.out.print ("Tabula Rasa"); }
For a time, the massive bunker's only inhabitant was Margaret Thatcher's previously unknown geek son, who wasted away his days coding, playing D&D with his online friends, and playing scrabble against himself while sheepishly avoiding the opposite sex.
He is noted to have posted on many USENET boards, "oh yeah? Well you should see MY mom's basement, where I live. It's soooo much cooler than yours."
I've been there it was quite interesting. Apparently the start of the movie The Sum of All Fears was filmed there.
Sorta makes you wonder what kind of place they replaced it with.
> ...sprawls over 240 acres and accommodates 60 miles of roads...
...100,000 street lamps...
60 miles of 30 foot wide road covers 218 acres.
>
That's 417 street lamps per acre, or one for every three feet of your 60 miles of road.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The history of the place has to be put together from different parts of the article. At first glance it seems that it was created from scratch for government officials but read the whole thing: First it was a mine which was worked out. The mine was converted into an ammo dump for WWII, at which time it became a military installation. And then in the 50's, before ICBMs and missile submarines, it was finally made into a bomb shelter. Fairly reasonable then when nuclear warheads numbered in the dozens worldwide. The only real question is why it wasn't decommissioned in the 70's (when ICBMs and subs made getting there from London unlikely) and turned into something else instead of waiting til now.
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.
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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
But I just could not find an aerial photo! WTF!
A guy walks into a bar... well, I forgot the joke, but the punchline is that he's an alcoholic.
They should make it into a real life Half-Life theme park. That would kick ass.
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).
my pet machine
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
SOLD
I hear some company by the name of, The Umbrella Corporation, just bought it.
When work feels overwhelming, remember that you're going to die.
and i've got just the name for it...
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
Here's a tour. It's a huge installation. Not in bad shape for a bunker, but will need considerable work to be usable.
Which is why the Yamantau Mountain complex in Russia, some 1 300 km from Moscow, has raised so many eyebrows.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
General "Buck" Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
Ambassador de Sadesky: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.
How about 'the worlds largest library?'
Not only would it have tons of books (literally), it would also act as a time capsule when the zombies come.
If I purchase it will they deliver it to my Texas ranch?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
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
"Hundreds of swivel chairs delivered in 1959 are still unpacked."
Frickin' rotating chairs!
It's value as a bomb shelter went away when slow flying bombers were no longer the weapon delivery mechanism. As the article says, once the warning time dropped to 4 minutes, evacuating to the shelter became impossible.
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.
With the state of modern military intelligence, I'm sure they would never find it.
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
Imagine the possibilities!
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.
Or... you could put a house on top of the main entrance and have your mom live in the house while you live in the "basement".
Geez, if you're going to post on
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela