Michael Parrish has a “wedding guest list” of people he will allow into his three-level, 125ft (38 metre)-deep concrete bunker in the event of a nuclear attack. Situated below an inconspicuous bungalow in Brentwood, Essex, the Kelvedon Hatch bunker was built on Parrish’s grandfather’s land in the 1950s and maintained as secret regional government headquarters throughout the cold war. After it was decommissioned in 1992, the Parrishes bought back the bunker – for more than 20 years, it has been a tourist attraction and a sleepover location for Boy Scouts. Today, it is also potentially a lifeline.
“We have our own water, we have our own electricity, we have our own toilets, because one day I may need it,” says Parrish, 75, wearing a burgundy jumper with the words “secret nuclear bunker” embroidered in yellow on the left breast. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, 15 people have inquired about hiring a space in the bunker in the event of nuclear war, but Parrish wants to charge £500,000 a head (a bargain, he says, if you spend 10 to 20 years down there avoiding nuclear fallout). Who will he bring in for free?
“What it amounts to is a wedding list: you have your family, you have your sister. Do you have your sister’s boyfriend? Probably. Do you have his parents? No,” Parrish says. He has light brown eyes, coiffed grey hair and a serious mouth that betrays no hint of a joke. The last 20 or so spaces in Parrish’s bunker, he says, will be reserved for “young, 25-year-olds – of either sex, before you think I’ve got this all wrong. Because you’ve got to think of the world.”
Once upon a time, not all that long ago, operational nuclear bunkers were dotted up and down Britain, from sprawling complexes like Parrish’s to underground “monitoring posts”, which were less than five metres long and were used by the Royal Observer Corps (ROC) during the cold war. What has happened to all of these subterranean safe havens? In an age of renewed nuclear threat, what is the bunker status quo? How many have been maintained and how many have fallen into disrepair? More pressingly, what chance do you and I stand of getting in?
With help-yourself audio guides and an honesty box ticketing system, it is easy to feel like the last woman alive in Parrish’s bunker. When I visit in early November, I initially don’t see another soul (unless you count the waxworks – a toothsome Maggie Thatcher sits behind real radio controls). It’s an eerie time capsule with a musty tang in the air. You might technically be able to survive for years down here, but would you want to? “My wife is quite adamant that she wouldn’t,” Parrish says.
In Cheshire and in St Andrews, two other former secret nuclear bunkers have also become visitor attractions. In Wiltshire, billions of pounds of wine is stored by a private company in a former MoD bunker, while an old command centre in Essex has been converted into luxury flats. The Kingsway telephone exchange, a second world war air-raid shelter and cold war communications facility built under the tube in London, is still owned by BT, which tried to sell it in 2008. A spokesperson said the building is not operational and is not being used for anything, not even storage.
More than 1,500 ROC monitoring posts were built across the country from the mid-1950s. Designed to house three people, these mini-shelters were places where volunteers could measure nuclear fallout and broadcast messages to the public after an attack. Many of these bunkers have fallen into disrepair, but some have been bought by members of the public – in March, a bunker on sale in Norfolk for £25,000 received 200 inquiries in three days. Russ McLean, owner of the listings website Unique Property Bulletin – which features numerous shelters for sale – says: “Sadly we have seen a significant uptick in the demand for nuclear bunkers,” since Russia invaded Ukraine.
But Luke Bennett, associate professor of natural and built environments at Sheffield Hallam University, describes these bunkers as “tiny underground sheds” and says they are difficult to renovate into appealing spaces. “You wouldn’t really want to sleep in a cold, dank, windowless, underground shed.” He says these buildings are mostly bought by “bunker hunter” hobbyists (one in Perthshire was briefly converted into a holiday home, but guests had to do without electricity or running water).
“There aren’t really any facilities in the UK that are ripe for reactivating,” says Bennett, whose former work as a lawyer saw him selling off old government bunkers. Beyond the ROC’s “underground sheds”, Bennett estimates that there were no more than 50 regional government bunkers in the UK. In 2021, he traced the afterlife of four that had been built in the late 80s and found that only one – in Ballymena in Northern Ireland – would be somewhat usable in event of a modern attack.
“The nuclear bunkers constructed in the cold-war era have fallen pretty much into ruin,” he says. “Even the most recently built ones are pretty much beyond use now because they’ve had their life support equipment stripped out or they haven’t been maintained over the years.”
Bennett believes most people would be surprised to learn how few shelters the government built during the cold war. While countries across the globe constructed shelters after the detonation of the first nuclear weapon in 1945, some invested in infrastructure more than others. A programme of “bunkerisation” in Albania between the 1960s and 80s led to the construction of more than 750,000 military bunkers. In 1976, Switzerland completed the largest civilian fallout shelter in the world, the Sonnenberg tunnel, which could house 20,000 people. Since 1963, Switzerland has been constitutionally obliged to provide shelter space for every citizen, meaning that, by law, apartment blocks must be fitted with shelters. Today, the country has more bunker spaces than it does residents: its population of 8.6 million can access 365,000 shelters that have room for nearly 9 million people.
In the US, iconic black and yellow shelter signs sprung up around the country after the second world war, signposting where citizens could shelter during a nuclear attack. In 1955, the Federal Civil Defense Administration instructed people to construct fallout shelters in their own homes and gardens, and there were more than 200,000 private shelters in the country by 1965.
Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin allegedly has a hi-tech bunker in Siberia complete with an energy substation that could power a small city. It is rumoured that wealthy Russians are buying and building nuclear bunkers, while in October, what appeared to be a leaked document showed an order for a bomb shelter-turned-car park to be cleared out and brought up to scratch. The country purportedly has just under 17,000 bomb shelters.
By contrast, “the UK never really had a big, sincere commitment to spending a lot of money on building voluminous underground facilities that large numbers of people could sit out a nuclear war in,” Bennett says. The ROC’s 1,500 shelters were built from 1956 onwards, but they were only designed to house Royal Observer Corps volunteers, not regular civilians. Although new shelters are undoubtedly being constructed, this is on a need-to-know basis, so it is difficult to gauge the extent of recent bunker building.
Of course, the country’s VIPs would always have a place to stay. While it is unclear who exactly will go where to survive nuclear Armageddon, the civil defence historian Nathan Hazlehurst says: “Key members of central government, the military and royal family will have access to bunkers, along with those staff needed to run the country post-attack.” Hazlehurst, who works as an emergency preparedness manager in the NHS, says the MoD has maintained “a number” of bunkers across the country, although naturally information about them is top secret.
Some snippets of information have leaked out. An underground bunker at RAF Boulmer, in Northumberland, was renovated in 2002. A journalist gained access to an RAF bunker in Buckinghamshire in 2015 and described it as “a functional and complex building”. The government’s permanent joint headquarters in Northwood, north-west London, has its own bunker that is permanently staffed by security. Below Whitehall is the £126.3m defence crisis management centre known as Pindar, which is believed to be connected to Downing Street via tunnels.
David Moore is a London-based photographer who was permitted access to an underground government crisis command centre in the early 00s. Many have speculated that his resulting photograph collection, 2008’s The Last Things, depicts Pindar, though he is not at liberty to say.
“It’s quite a surreal environment in some ways and ordinary in others,” Moore says. Among other things, his photographs depict a concrete entrance way with a small, green “To bomb shelter area” sign pointing down some stairs; an emergency briefing room that – bar a lectern – could be any other office; a document shredder; a green-screened broadcast studio; giant red metal doors; and some art and ornaments that were seemingly placed to make the whole thing feel more homely.
“It’s a very functional space which is difficult to navigate and was at the time sparsely populated,” Moore says. He says “everything was sort of humming” on standby. At various points on his visit, Moore says, the air quality was “not so great” (incidentally, most of the complex had no smell, though some areas near generators smelled “industrial”). “The thing about the space is even when you’re in it, you don’t know specifically what it’s for,” Moore says.
Others who have gained access to special and secret spaces are members of exploration society Subterranea Britannica. In the 1950s the government built an alternative seat of power in Corsham, Wiltshire, but the so-called Burlington bunker, or central government war headquarters, was decommissioned in 2004. In 2013, Martin Dixon, a 40-year member of Subterranea Britannica, was allowed to visit. (The MoD still manages much of the underground space, but for security and health and safety reasons, the public are no longer allowed access.)
“It wasn’t in tremendous condition, it really wasn’t maintained,” says Dixon, 67, who has visited more than 1,000 human-made underground spaces. At Corsham, he was able to see ventilation systems, standby generators and a telephone exchange. “I think because the cold war never happened it isn’t as chilling as visiting sites that were active during the second world war,” Dixon says. “A parachute that hasn’t been used is a parachute, whereas one that saved someone’s life somehow acquires a greater poignancy.” It remains to be seen whether Corsham will earn that poignancy in the coming years.
In March, a senior adviser to the Cabinet Office told the i newspaper that the UK is “totally unprepared” to advise the public about nuclear attacks; the government website currently says that a new “emergency alerts” system is expected to launch in autumn 2022. Hazlehurst says that if threats become more tangible, then there needs to be greater education of the public, although he does not believe the government should build any more bunkers.
“Though having infrastructure is important, it should only form a small part of the whole. Having trained personnel and coherent, workable plans across the country is more important,” he says. He adds that the pandemic has prompted some form of preparation: local authorities took on roles – “such as food distribution, body storage, and liaison with health and uniformed services” – that would be similar in the event of nuclear war. “Covid and other incidents have shown the real value of letting local authorities coordinate the response locally with central assistance,” Hazlehurst says.
Does that mean nuclear survival is yet another postcode lottery? Hazlehurst says some councils have teams of emergency planners while others leave emergency planning to staff with additional roles. If you don’t live near a former bunker – and don’t have £500,000 spare to bunk with Parrish – then your best bet after a nuclear explosion is to stay inside and if possible get down to a basement, he says.
Perhaps – somewhat damningly – the smartest thing you can do to prepare for a nuclear war right now is make friends with someone like Parrish – good friends, that is, the kind he would invite to his wedding. Still, you might have time on your side. “One of the first school groups we had, 20-odd years ago, one of the little kids described it as an upside down Norman castle,” Parrish says of his Kelvedon Hatch bunker. “And I thought that was absolutely right: it’s not going to fall down. It’s 10ft-thick reinforced walls, there’s no rot. It’s going to be here in a thousand years’ time.” If Parrish does manage to survive a nuclear attack, he jokes – although, actually, it’s hard to tell if he is joking – he may emerge from his bunker as king of Essex.
