Nick Catford, Stiff laminated card covers, 210mm x 210mm, 224 pages,
Cold War Bunkers is the third volume in a series of high-quality photographic records of Britain's underground heritage. Other volumes cover the wide range of underground structures built during and in preparation for the Second World War, and also the surviving relics of the world-famous subterranean stone quarries of the Bath and Corsham areas of the West of England.
The large-format volume contains approximately 450 colour photographs accompanied by comprehensive captions and an authoritative text.
In many instances Nick Catford has been granted unprecedented access to many highly sensitive sites in order to compile the collection of images reproduced in this book.
Cold War Bunkers is a comprehensive photographic overview of all the underground, semi-underground and surface-built cold-war atomic and nuclear bunkers built in the British Isles to protect central, regional and local government, military organisations, the Civil Defence organisation, the Royal Observer Corps, UKWMO and the public utilities against nuclear attack by the Soviet Union between 1946 and 1989.
Amongst the sites represented in this volume are:
The Corsham Central Government War Headquarters (Burlington);
The Regional War Rooms built during the early 1950s and the network of Civil Defence bunkers that supported them;
The Regional Seats of Government (RSGs) of the 1960s, the SRHQs that were built at the end of that decade and into the 1970s, and the highly sophisticated and hugely expensive Regional Government Headquarters of the 1980s.
Also covered are the huge range of ROC bunkers from the very large Sector Controls to the tiny 3-man observation posts; the often complex and sometimes spartan County and District Council bunkers, bunkers built by the water companies, and the deep underground emergency telephone exchanges built by the GPO and BT.
The book also goes in great detail into the underground radar control rooms established as part of the RAF's Rotor radar system and also the hardened anti-aircraft gun control rooms which were integrated with 'Rotor' in the early 1950s.
Considerable coverage is also given to the cruise missile site at Greenham Common, specialist hardened structures at RAF Bently Priory and elsewhere, along with many other sites and structures too numerous to mention.