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

On the 31st July 2001 a number of Subbrit members descended on Uttlesford District Council's Emergency planning bunker as Saffron Walden. The emergency centre is a single story bunker under the new extension of the council offices. Finished in 1990 at a cost of 375,000 pounds, the bunker was one of the last two be built in the county, the last being (we believe) to be Castle Point Borough council emergency centre at Thundersleigh.

Because of the grant system at the time the council received a 75% grant for the cost of the building, Essex has quite a good emergency planning system still in place with both Uttlesford and Castle Point councils still using their cold war bunkers, unlike most council's who have either sold them of or stripped them out and used them for storage.

Having descended the stairs down to the basement you come to the main entrance of the bunker and the heavy steel and concrete blast door once you pass through this you come to the lobby area of the bunker (this door being eight inches thick).

Inside the lobby area there are two more blast doors, one leading into the bunker itself and the other leading into the plant room, also in the lobby area is a shower for de-contamination. The generator in the plant room is still in place and operational. In the corner of the plant room is a small blast door which leads into another part of the bunker which holds further filtration equipment.

The generator which as I said is still in place and operational came from the older Saffron Walden hospital which is now part of the council offices, the hospital closed in 1988. The shot on the left shows some of the filtration equipment which is also in the plant room.

To enter the bunker itself you go through an air lock which consists of two blasts doors, these are both heavy steal and concrete doors forming the air lock. once through there you are into the main bunker, the room in the photo on the left is a sort of dinning/congregating area, there is a kitchen/serving area and a storage area with the emergency water tanks.

From this area you can access a further five rooms, one of these is the dormitory, which still has some of the steal bunk beds with mattresses, this room is also used now as a sick bay. At the back of the room is the emergency exist, again this is through a heavy blast door. Behind the door is a horizontal tunnel which is about four feet in diameter and runs for about 50 feet and bends to the left before coming to a vertical shaft leading to the surface. The hatch is in the bushes away from the building so if the building had of collapse after a nuclear attack you would still have had a chance of escape.

The second room you can enter which is opposite the dormitories is the toilets, there are three cubicles, these all have chemical toilets. The wash basins all have hand pump water supplies which runs through filters to clean the water incase it has become contaminated.

The next room along from the dormitory is the operations room, this is the largest of the five rooms and part of the back wall is of circular shape. There central pillars supporting the roof. As you can see from the photo there are tables and chairs in the centre of the room for the various agencies all with telephones. On the back wall is a large scale map of the district plus various other maps. (These can be seen in the photo on the right).

These shots show the entrance into the operations room plus the window between the ops room and the communications room. The photo on the right shows the comms room in more detail and the message passing hole.

There is one small room which can be accessed from the operations room and that is the controllers room, I suspect that in times of a major crisis when the Chief Executive of the council would be present this would have been used by him.

The communications room is L shaped and wraps itself around the controllers room, there are a number communications systems in the room including the SX50 ECN unit (pictured below) and a RAYNET system.

This is the last room out of the five, this holds the ventilation plant equipment again all this equipment is still in place and operational so it could be used if required.

Thanks should be given to Clive Copper the Emergency Planning Officer at Uttlesford District council for allowing us to look around the bunker. He and his team have done a great job in maintaining the bunker in such good condition. The centre is regularly used for exercises and unfortunately for really emergencies especially in the winter. The district still takes emergency planning seriously unlike a lot of councils, they look after Stansted Airport, a large part of the M11, and a large amount of rivers which last winter did flood so there responsibility is quite large.