Bunker mentality

I've never been terribly interested in History.

I seem to remember enjoying the really early stuff, when it was all about molten lava, dinosaurs and stone-age blokes living in caves and bashing each other with clubs etc. but once the school curriculum got past the Romans (Chariots and fighting) and the Greeks (Galleys and fighting), it just stopped being fun.

As the focus of the subject shifted from whole societies and how the general population lived their lives, to the way the leaders of our country governed the people, I couldn't get excited about it at all.

(I hope that 'Good King Hal' doesn't take this too personally.)

Now, of course, I'm old enough that I've actually lived through quite a lot of historical stuff.

I can remember John F Kennedy being shot; I was still at Junior school, but my mum made me wear a black tie.

I saw the grainy, black and white pictures as Neil Armstrong took 'that' step and yes, I did go out into the garden and look up at the Moon expecting to see something had changed.

I met guys who had fought in the Vietnam War and also guys who had dodged the draft to stay out of it.

What I didn't know I'd lived through, however, was several decades when we had secret nuclear fall-out shelters built in strategic parts of the country.

We went to visit one on Tuesday.

Blight-of-my-life and I had been down to Essex for a party.

My cousin Maureen was celebrating her 80th Birthday and, quite rightly, felt that a bit of a knees-up was required, so we'd trundled down to drink beer and try to recognise various cousins and second cousins that I hadn't seen for many years.

Rather than drive straight back home the following morning, we decided to do the tourist thing for a couple of days. While we were looking for suitable places to visit, we came across a leaflet about "The Secret Nuclear Bunker" at Kelvedon Hatch.

I think it is one of the strangest outings I've ever been on.

The strangeness started well before we got anywhere near the place, when we saw the helpful road-sign, directing us to the "Secret Nuclear Bunker".

Following the directions, we wound our way down a twisting farm road to a large, virtually empty, parking area at the edge of some woods. We left the Land Rover and followed a footpath through the trees until we arrived at a large brick bungalow.

The building looked a bit shabby. There was no sign of a pay kiosk or anybody to take our entry money and apart from a couple of dog-eared signs pointing to an open door in the front of the building, there was little to confirm that we were at the right place.

We went in.

There was still no sign of anywhere to pay, but there was an enormous rack of those audio guide hand-sets that look like oversized mobile 'phones, with a notice instructing all visitors to take one and follow the audio guide instructions. Other signs explained that we should pay at the end of the tour and that although we would not see any staff, we would be constantly monitored by concealed TV cameras.

We smiled for the hidden cameras, picked up our guides and set off down the long concrete passage into the bunker.

We probably spent nearly three hours exploring. The atmosphere of the place is extraordinary. At first we thought that there were no staff in the entire facility, but then we spotted one bloke dusting the exhibits and another who disappeared through a door marked "No Admittance" into a room with a bunch of TV monitors flickering in the gloom.

Even the Cafeteria and Gift Shop at the end of the tour was unstaffed. There was simply a place to return the audio guides, and an 'Honesty Box' to pay for the tour and anything you might buy in the cafe.

We almost had the place to ourselves, as we wandered through rooms filled with generators and air conditioning equipment, the dormitories, communal bathrooms, communications centres, sick bay and mortuary.

The audio guide talked us through the construction and early years of operation in the 1950s, followed by the change of use to a Regional Government HQ that would be used in the event of a nuclear attack on Britain, until it was decommissioned in the 1990s.

It seems extraordinary, but when it was decommissioned, they simply closed the (blast) doors and left all the equipment exactly where it was; desks, phones, waste-bins... the lot.

As well as the original equipment, there are video displays running some fascinating films. Some of these were actual government films that would have been broadcast to the general public, explaining how we were supposed to make our homes secure enough to survive after a nuclear attack, although our hand-held audio guide made it pretty clear that all the filling of sandbags and collecting enough food and water for 14 days per person was probably less about protection and survival, and more about keeping the population busy while the government waited for us to die.

"The Secret Nuclear Bunker" is a seriously interesting place to visit, but it is not Disneyland.

It is very shabby, with an air of threadbare seediness that is somehow entirely appropriate.

To give an impression of how life would have been in the bunker, there are recorded voices and tannoy announcements and a motley collection of mannequins posed in various parts of the facility.

These mannequins are not for the faint-hearted. Often missing limbs, they are slumped behind dead computer terminals or sprawled in dormitory bunks, with their chipped and scabrous faces peering out from beneath hideous, ill-fitting wigs.

There's even a dummy Margaret Thatcher in the BBC Radio Studio; now that is scary.

The place has musty smell, which is not so surprising for a concrete tomb under a hundred feet of Essex hillside. I struggle to imagine what it would have smelt like if it had ever been used in deadly earnest. The thought of 600 traumatized people shut up in a hole in the ground for weeks, waiting for the food and water to run out is not a cheery one.

This particular bunker is one of a whole network of similar installations throughout the UK, so if you get the chance to visit this, or any of the others, I'd strongly recommend it.

"Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess?"