Article – Father buys £20,000 Cold War bunker

A father who is so determined that his children do well in their school exams has splashed out £20,000 on a nuclear bunker in the Essex countryside so they can revise in peace.

Raymond Sturgess purchased the bunker, which is 12 feet under ground, so that his four children aged between seven and 16 are free from distractions when it comes to studying.

The Cold War relic, which only measures 13 feet by nine feet in size, was part of a former army base but is now a nature reserve in Chigwell.

A 13’x9’room ain’t a whole lotta space. Matter of fact, its about the size of your typical bedroom.

I’ve seen articles from time to time about tiny little observation bunkers coming up for sale in the UK. Usually they’re rather tiny affairs that don’t amount to much more than this one.

The more I read about military bunkers and shelters, and see what is being done by other countries, I’m becoming less a fan of the underground ones and more a fan of the partially-buried, and the above-ground varieties…especially as done by our friends the Swiss.

Bunkers of this sort don’t come up in the US very often, although I did read about some organization that did a land swap with the feds and wound up owning some awesome NSA-grade bunker facility out in the woods. The closest thing you might find to these Swiss style above-ground concrete bunkers are the old AT&T relay bunkers that dot the countryside. But, thats another post altogether…………

6 thoughts on “Article – Father buys £20,000 Cold War bunker

  1. I love our swedish command bunkers, paricularly those that arebuilt into a montainside so thatwater drains out by itself, you “only” need dehumidification and heat (to the tune of 7-25000$ a year, depending on its size) the most common type on the market are basically a 50-70 meters long tunnel with a door in the side about 2/3 of the way down it, there you have a clean up station to get rid of radioactive dust,nerve gas or anything else you may have been exposed to. Inside of this you have a cavern of about 300 square meters with a well, two large dieselgenerators, and a two floor villa.
    Basically all you need ho do to live there is pay the electricity, check for Radon gas, ventilate that gas out, and put in more comfortable furniture (there are usually bunkbeds for 25-40 people in these command posts). There were many hundreds of these (and also many larger). Fifteen years ago they decided that there could never again be a war in europe and most of these were just emptied and plugged with concrete. Some remain in use or in mothballs, and quite a few has been sold, many are used as serverhalls. I would love to own one within 100 kilometers from uppsala. In addition to common shelters there are at least four of these bunkers within 10 kilometers of my house, all of them sold, in addition to those we have at the airbase (they have an underground hangar, how cool is thar, google “aeroseum göteborg” to see a similar one that is decomissioned and used as a museum) which are for tje most part in use.

    • “they decided that there could never again be a war in europe”

      And history says: bwaahaahaahaahaa…

      (“history” being the recording of human nature and the consequences of ignoring it)

      • To paraphrase rand, “you can ignore history, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring history”.

  2. Oh, i was into one of tne bunkers, 5 kilometers from home, on ge outskirts of town, quite a bit outside of town wen it was built in tne early fifties, 4000 square meters of bunker,divided into a few different halls, 1000 square meter command bunker for the military district, vault that was used for part of the swedish gold reserve. 800 square meter pharmaceutical factory, 1000+ square meter military storeroom, probably for one battalion or two, minus vehicles and heavy weapons
    And 1000+ square meter archive and storeroom for the university. Really cool place that was decomissioned and emptied, but still being dehumidified. It was sold a couple of months later to tne tune of 700 000 dollars.

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