Bunker mentality

SECRETS REVEALED: It’s not your average tourist attraction, but with this month marking the 70th anniversary of the birth of the atomic age, York’s Cold War Bunker could experience a bumper summer. Stephen McClarence joins the queue.

ITH “Australia” emblazoned across his T-shirt (it’s a clue to where he comes from), Larry Zanker is well into his three-month Grand Tour of the UK.

Today he has reached York. He’s got the Minster and the National Railway Museum pencilled in for later, but first he’s come to see a nuclear bunker a mile or so from the city centre. Why?

“Well, mentally I’m all castled out,” he says. “And I’ve got a great interest in technology and wanted to see what it was like here at the height of the Cold War.”

He’s in the right place at the right time. This summer sees the 70th anniversary of the birth of the atomic age. It was a major factor in the Cold War, the state of military and political tension between Western and Eastern bloc countries that lasted for decades after the Second World War.

In August 1945 the USA dropped an atom bomb, ironically codenamed Little Boy, on Hiroshima, to devastating effect. Three days later, it followed it up with another bomb, Fat Man, at Nagasaki. The bombings led to the Japanese surrender, on August 15. It hastened the end of the war, but left a legacy of global fear and suspicion.

That legacy is explored at the York Cold War Bunker, one of English Heritage’s more enigmatic, more “alternative” properties.

Sited just off the Acomb Road, it was the Yorkshire headquarters for government monitoring of potential nuclear attacks. It’s a curious structure to find in the middle of a housing estate – brutally angular, made of reinforced concrete, painted dark green and rearing out of a grassy bank.

“It’s on a road called Monument Close,” English Heritage’s site manager Rachael Bowers points out. “But I don’t know if it’s the sort of monument people are expecting.”

It certainly took householder Rachel Craven by surprise when she signed up for an apartment just across the road. “I thought at first it was a power station; I didn’t realise it was a bunker,” she says. “It’s a bit weird: you get loads of tourists in the car park.”