UK Cold War: A history of coldwar sites around the UK

This is the main entrance to the Dagenham Council Emergency Centre, the bunker is now disused and the council use a room in the main building. The bunker was built in 1953 and designated 51B2 reporting to the North East Regional War Room.

The bunker was purpose built beneath a grass mount behind the Civic Centre, and has its own communications mast which sits on top of the bunker. The photo on the right shows the stairs leading into the bunker.

Once at the bottom of the stairs you come to two wooden doors which act as an airlock, the doors have rubber seals which would have been gas tight but these a quite badly perished so would no longer work. As the bunker was not used much during the cold war it was not up-graded and so has no blast protection.

Before you go through the second door forming the airlock there is a notice board on the wall saying "Headquarters Control Centre Notices).

Having gone through the second airlock door you are now into the main bunker with the spine corridor in front of you and rooms off to you left and right. The first room on your left which is just behind the gas tight door was a small messenger room which is now used for document storage and is kept locked.

The next room on the left was used as the Message Room, It has now been divided into two rooms, the Voice Procedure Room and the Counter Room. The voice procedure room has been turned into the modern communications room, which was reused when the bunker was reactivated in the early 1990's for a short while.

There was quite a lot of equipment in that room including BT Junction Boxes, an old computer, Telephones and various other equipment.

Continuing around the next room is the control room which had various maps on the wall plus wooden Desks and cupboards, in the corner of the room is a small passageway leading to the emergency exit.

This is the doorway leading to the emergency exit, as you can see its used for storage and the emergency exit is difficult to reach.

In the communications room were also some manuals relating back to the 70's and 80's and some even going back to the 60's for emergency plans for Dagenham and other district control's.

This shows a Emergency Evacuation Card which I believe dates back to the Civil Defence Days, though there was no date on the card to back this up.

This is one of the maps in the control room, its quite detailed and covering East London if I remember correctly.

After coming out of the control room the corridor turns right and leads down a short passage towards the male toilets and on the right the Male dormitory.

This is another shot of the control room after we had set up the tables with the named blocks and some of the manuals, (just a bit of fun really).

The first room on the right by the main entrance is the plant room with the standby generator, ventilation equipment and electrical switchgear. The generator is run occasional and some rooms like the plant room have some heating in them.

In one of the rooms there were a number of Triangular wooden named blocks for the tables and desks. These included Signals Clerks, Operations Clerk, Signal Master, Assistant Controller (Ops), Specialist Advisors, Education Staff, Information Clerk, Messenger, Liaison Clerk, Operations officer, Information Clerk, Intelligence Officer, plus various others.

The Bunker was finally closed down in 1968 when the Civil Defence was disbanded, and apart for a short use in the 1990's it has not been used as an emergency centre for some years, though it would not be all that hard the turn back into one.

The visit was organized by Keith Ward and the other people on the visit were Nick Catford, Bob Jenner and Myself.