Hack Green

Hack Green Nuclear Bunker

This was originally an article published in the days out section of the Bolton Evening News. I was responsible for researching and writing the story as well as the photography.

The bunker has their own web site at www.hackgreen.co.uk if you fancy paying them a visit yourself.

I’ve had a fascination with ‘secret places’ since I was a teenager. It probably all started with a television programme in the 1980s that revealed that there was a secret tunnel that ran deep under Manchester from a telephone exchange near Piccadilly out to Salford and Ardwick. It’s strange how a secret world of fortifications grew up during the 1950s and into the 1990s without anyone really being aware what was going on. I remember cycling along a lane near Preston in the early 1980s and stumbling across the UK Warning and Monitoring Organisation bunker on Langley Lane. Blink and you would miss it!

Public interest in secret sites had two peaks, one in the 1960s at the height of CND’s membership and the Aldermaston marches and in the 1980s when The Thatcher government allowed the Americans to base cruise missiles at Greenham Common amidst great public protest.

Around the time of the Cruise Missile protests two books were published ‘War Plan UK- The Secret Truth About Britain’s Civil Defence’ by Duncan Campbell and ‘Beneath The City Streets’ by Peter Laurie. Between them they documented the plans to defend the country in case we should ever be attacked by atomic weapons.

The books detailed communication networks, telephone tapping facilities, hidden food depots, secret control centres, and plans to devolve national government out to the regions. Unfortunately there’s been no update on these books, and interest among the general public has lapsed.

In the early 1990s the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain collapsed and the threat of nuclear attack from the Eastern Bloc diminished to the extent that many of the secret sites were sold off to private owners. A few of these have been turned into museums. The nearest publicly open site is the former ‘ Regional Government Headquarters’ at Hack Green near Whitchurch in Cheshire.

The site has had a varied history, from 1941 it was an RAF military radar station. Following the Second World War it became a heavily protected ‘Rotor’ radar station designed to detect incoming Soviet Bombers. In 1958 it changed roles again by becoming part of a joint civilian and military air traffic control centre. In 1976 the site was purchased by the Home Office and converted into a protected regional government site at an estimated cost of £32 million pounds. It became operational in 1984 and remained in a state of readiness until 1993, before becoming a museum in 1998.

Before visiting the museum I checked out their address on the Internet at their excellent site at www.hackgreen.co.uk to obtain a postcode to use with my mapping software on the computer. Bizarrely when I entered the postcode into the laptop the postcode didn’t bring anything up, but adjacent postcodes came up with a map for me, did the map makers still class the site as secret? Perhaps finding a secret bunker wasn’t going to be easy- I printed off the instructions from the web site and resisted the urge to shred them for security purposes after memorising them.

Getting there by road was easy taking the A666 out of Bolton, then onto the westbound M62, then onto the M6 southbound leaving at junction 16 signposted to Nantwich. Once you are in Nantwich follow the very large brown information signs pointing to the SECRET BUNKER off the A530 road to Whitchurch. The total journey is around 60 miles, but is mostly motorway. There is excellent parking on the concreted area around the museum within the barbed wire compound. There are train stations at Nantwich and Whitchurch with the journey from Bolton taking around 2 hours.

On the way into the museum you pass an imposing sign informing you that you are at Regional Government Headquarters Hack Green Civil Defence Region 10. It was to be responsible for Lancashire, Cheshire, Greater Manchester and North Wales. Entrance into the bunker is via a concrete ramp leading up to the first floor through a set of steel blast doors. After passing a display of military vehicles you then enter the main canteen area where the souvenir shop is situated. You can buy a radiation dosimeter here or even an original attack-warning loudspeaker in the original British Telecom packaging.

The upper floor of the bunker is largely taken up with museum displays covering the activities it has been involved with over the years. There’s a decommissioned Nuclear Bomb, and displays of Geiger counters, radiation protection suits, and radar equipment and a Royal Observer Corps display. The observant will notice a teddy bear in its own survival suit carried by a child.

Across the corridor from the display rooms is what I found to be the most harrowing part of my visit. In the sick bay that was designed to treat the bunker’s inhabitants there is a display of a casualty being treated for radiation injuries. The make up on the dummy is pure Hammer Horror 1960s, but the sound track being played in the room is chilling. The voice of a narrator describes the effect on a female patient of a high dose of radiation and how she is dying from horrific internal bleeding. This is accompanied by the sounds of the whimpering groaning ‘patient’ fading away. Much of the museum is fine for visits by children- after all it’s just a 20^th Century version of a castle. If you’ve got primary school age children with you, give this room a miss, it left me with nightmares.

Downstairs in the basement you enter the real nerve centre of the bunker and the rooms that wouldn’t be out of place in a James Bond film. The plant room with a generator large enough to supply a small town, purifies all the water and filters all the air coming into the bunk. There are the communication facilities for the emergency services, the military and the home office and two telephone exchanges, one with manual backup. There’s a large office furnished pretty much as any Civil Service office of the period would be with desks for the officers responsible for all of the major government departments. The staff in true Civil Service fashion gave pride of place to a tea urn! There’s the attack warning centre crammed with red telephones and flashing lights that would have been used to sound the air raid sirens across the region. The civilian survivors would have been kept informed of events from a makeshift BBC studio. All of this was serviced by up to 140 staff who were accommodated in dormitories in shifts using a system known as ‘hot bedding’. The only person who would have had his own room was the regional commissioner, who would have had the full power of government over the region.

The museums prize catch must be the BMEWS, British Missile Early Warning System display from RAF High Wycombe that would have been used to alert the country to incoming missiles and to launch a retaliatory attack.

There are two cinemas showing a selection of public information films, some of which are felt to be unsuitable for children.

I was puzzled by the bright yellow décor of the staircase leading back up to the surface level. It turns out that the staircase was the only place in the building that a suicide could be attempted, and that psychologists had recommended that yellow would act as a deterrent.

From the top of the ‘yellow staircase’ picture. “If the next world war is fought with nuclear weapons, the war after that will be fought with bows and arrows.” Albert Einstein. A quote on a banner on the wall.

In the corridor between the lower rooms there is an excellent collection of Civil Defence Volunteer recruitment posters, which gives an insight into the thinking of the time. Perhaps we should remember that for many people at the height of Civil Defence in the 1950s and early 60s memories of the Second World War were still very fresh.

I found it fascinating how dated much of the equipment looked despite only being decommissioned in 1993. But then the events that Hack Green was prepared for have faded into the past only recently. The BEN in the 1990s carried a story of the grey warning loudspeaker being removed from premises in Westhoughton as it was felt that an attack was no longer likely.

If you look hard enough as you travel around you can still see the signs of preparation that were made. Shortly after leaving the site I found a sign pointing to a ‘buffer depot’ one of many warehouses used to store a reserve stock of vital foodstuffs in case of national crisis. The Green Goddesses were designed to be used by Civil Defence Volunteers to put out the fires following an attack.

On the way back up the stars I met Rod Siebert, the curator, he explained that the bunker attracts a wide range of visitors from school parties, families with children, historians and the plain curious. He also explained why I couldn’t find it on my computer-“ the address we give is our PO Box number, as we are closed a lot in winter.” I don’t suppose that there would have been much post after a nuclear attack anyway, and a letterbox on a blast door wouldn’t seem right.

Although the museum provides work sheets to be used on a ‘mouse trail’ around the site I would consider carefully how any children I took might react to some of the exhibits.

If you are curious about what a nuclear bunker looks like or to gain an insight into a little documented part of recent history it’s well worth the visit.