York Cold War Bunker

Hi, I’m Elliot Blair and I’m a first year History student at the University of Huddersfield. As part of the ‘Historical Sources and their Interpretation’ module I went to the Cold War Bunker in York to learn of the conditions the volunteers lived in and to find more information about the cold war period. The information I found will also be put into an assessed presentation on buildings as historical sources which I am creating.
The Cold War Bunker in York, first of all is a tough place to find and when you do get there from the outside it doesn’t look like much, but that is to be expected of a place that from 1961 to 1991 was a secret from the enemies. The bunker housed sixty people of the Royal Observer Corps at a time, both men and women who had volunteered or been forcibly volunteered, these men and women were kept in the bunker for thirty days. They were separated into three groups who worked eight hour shift patterns. One group were placed in the dormitories, another placed on standby in the canteen and the others were working in the plant room. The canteen is quite small for twenty people placed in there for eight hours, the people in there were only allowed to read books, play cards or dominoes or just chat. No radios were allowed in there or anywhere else, only the Commandant was allowed a radio. This was so that the workers wouldn’t get distressed, with hearing about things that were happening outside as they would most likely start to worry about their families. The Commandant would filter through some news though, only which he felt necessary.
The plant room is reminiscent of army based movies with a high ranking officer looking over the map and other things with a cigar in his mouth. The plant room is where the twenty people would be working, assessing nuclear bomb threats as well as mapping them out on the maps. In this room is AUDREY who is a machine that works out coordinates of possible bombs and filters through the information on paper for people to tear off. AUDREY does have her limitations though; she was built in America as a lightening detector and then brought over here and developed. This meant that when a thunder storm was nearby she would send the coordinates for it, even though there was no threat. The same thing happened when loud noises went off so bonfire night and any night when fireworks were being set off in her radius sent AUDREY crazy. Before the people entered the bunker they had to sign a disclosure form, this was to protect AUDREY and the map in the centre on the plant room which showed all of the bunkers across Britain. The bunker shares a lot of information about the Cold War and how the people felt about it. The bunker also shows how technology has developed as around the bunker there are old computers and phones.  The bunker however really does showcase how tough the times were, with having rationed army food, to being in cramped rooms for eight hours, it offers an insight into how emotional it must have been inside the actual bunker during the Cold War.