A semi-sunken 1960s bunker in a York suburb built for volunteers who would have tracked nuclear fallout across Yorkshire after an attack
In a quiet corner of York called Holgate, a mostly underground building went up in 1961 to watch for nuclear attack. It served as the regional control centre for the Royal Observer Corps, a volunteer organisation that had spotted enemy aircraft during the Second World War and was given a new Cold War job, tracking the location and power of a nuclear blast and following fallout as it spread across the region. Reports reaching this bunker came from more than 40 small monitoring posts across Yorkshire.
Inside, the rooms held banks of monitoring equipment, a dormitory nicknamed the ‘hot bed’ where staff took turns sleeping in shared beds, and enough filtered air, water and supplies to support around 50 to 60 people for 30 days. Full-time staff and volunteers trained here several evenings a week, though the bunker was never fully activated, not even during the tense fortnight of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
The Royal Observer Corps was wound down in 1991, and this bunker closed the following year; English Heritage restored it between 2000 and 2006 before opening it to the public. You can only get inside on a guided tour, which takes in the control room, the dormitory and the plant rooms much as the volunteers left them. York Minster and the rest of the city centre are a couple of miles east.
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