FOR SALE: 28 BUNKERS

Isabel Wolff reports on

the property market's latest casualties: nuclear shelters

AS A CHILD growing up in the Seventies I knew exactly what I wanted to be. I didn't want to be a social worker or a neuro-surgeon, I wanted to be Swiss. This had nothing to do with cuckoo-clocks or bedtime readings from Heidi; it had every- thing to do with civil defence. I had learnt early on that, when the nuclear siren sounded, the Swiss were all going to be whisked off to subterranean safety while the rest of humanity fried to a crisp.

At that time we were all bonkers about bunkers. The nuclear warriors were gear- ing up for Armageddon: we were all going to be carbonised in a blinding, blue-white flash, or left to rot from radiation sickness. The planet would be plunged into a frozen nuclear winter and the dark ages would descend again. At school a copy of Protect and Survive was passed round, samizdat style, and its pathetic instructions were studied with fascinated horror. We regu- larly tested each other on what to do with mattresses and sandbags, and held long and earnest discussions about the best way to tape up windows. Caught out by the holocaust in the High Street? Easy. Put your satchel over your head. In our pre- teens we already knew all about Nato and the Warsaw Pact, about geiger-counters, overkill and mutually assured destruction. World War Three was coming. The only thing for it, in the absence of a Swiss pass-

port, was a bunker — but, of course, they cost a bomb.

Barely one year after the demise of the Soviet Union, it requires an effort of the imagination to remember the abiding ter- ror of those days. Today we all feel safe as houses with superpower antagonism no more than a grim and distant dream. This means that there is unlikely to be much use for the nuclear bunkers built by the cau- tious-minded and the frankly terrified dur- ing the 1970s and 80s.

By a fine irony, some are now being used to grow mushrooms. Others have become wine-cellars and workshops. Some people have even been getting rid of their shelters, so confident are they that the world is now a safe and reasonable place. One bunker- owner in Surrey told me that he had filled in his fall-out shelter so that he could re- landscape his rockery. The Government are at it too. This week the Home Office gave a property company instructions to sell off 28 — Regional Emergency Centres, as they are euphemistically called. The bunker, it seems, is going underground.

'I think it's incredibly short-sighted,' says John Whittaker, a retired Emergency Plan- ning Officer for Berkshire. The post-nucle- ar world is far less stable than the world of détente and the Cold War. There are all these second-hand Russian SS24s knocking about. The Iranians have just bought three 'This is where the human species migrates to mate.' nuclear submarines from Moscow and you can buy a slightly used MIG fighter these days at any Farnborough Air Show.'

'What about Chernobyl?' says Colin Croft of the Federation of Nuclear Shelter Consultants and Contractors. We were sit- ting in his blast shelter, 12 feet below ground level, at the bottom of his small garden in Hertfordshire. 'There are six nuclear power stations outside Calais,' he continued. `If one of those goes up and there's an easterly wind the radiation could drop on Kent within an hour.' He flicked a large switch and the Geilinger Ventilation Unit started up with a loud whirr. 'That will filter out radiation dust and all known gases,' he explained. 'We could survive down here for months if we had enough food.'

'What about water?' I enquired. 'We built the bunker over a well,' he said, 'and the pump is carbon-filtered.' And how much would this cost to build today?' 135,000.'

We moved through to the decontamina- tion chamber, swung the steel and con- crete door shut, and clambered up the steep steps to ground level. The twittering of chaffinches and sparrows seemed espe- cially loud and joyful after the hermetic stillness of the shelter. `If there was a nuclear strike, I think I'd really rather per- ish,' I said, philosophically.

'That's so British,' Mr Croft replied vehemently. 'I've never understood it, the British are all so fatalistic.' He handed me a copy of his book, Your Nuclear Shelter — How to Build and Equip It. 'Why die if you can get yourself some protection?'

This seemed unanswerable. Where the Swiss and the Swedes have shelter space for every man, woman and child, the British have never really taken the bunker to their hearts. Even during the most arc- tic episodes of the Cold War, barely 1,000 private shelters were built in the UK. Today the industry has completely col- lapsed.

'There was never any encouragement on the part of the Government to build them,' says John Whittaker. 'There were no grants on offer, and no prospect of a rates rebate if you did install one, so only the very wealthy could do it. And then, of course, if you did build yourself a shelter you were regarded as a complete nutter by your neighbours.'

'People did think I was a bit peculiar,' says John Emin, whose huge bunker at Balcombe in West Sussex is the demier cri in shelter chic. Built in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, it is the Rolls-Royce, the Ritz, of nuclear bunkers. It can accommodate up to 75 people and has two showers, a fitted kitchen, a quadrophonic sound system and a tasteful- ly carpet-tiled floor. The three-foot-thick ceiling weighs 150 tons, and could with-

stand the blast from a one-megaton bomb dropped only two miles away. 'This shelter will last for ever,' he said confidently as he showed me round. He tapped the rein- forced concrete walls. 'It will outlast the pyramids. If the world blew apart tomor- row and this corner of West Sussex went spinning through outer space, the Bal- combe Bunker would survive.'

John Emin is a builder, and he had a commercial end in view when he set to work on his shelter, which is now almost complete. He hoped that local authorities would be so impressed by its design that they would commission him to build similar ones as part of their civil defence pro- gramme.

In the event not a single order was placed; fears about fall-out faded away with glasnost, and today the shelter lies emptY and unused, except for the occasional drinks party. It has cost him almost £200,000 to construct. 'I suppose it's been a complete waste of money,' he says cheer- fully. 'With hindsight I think I can say that I certainly wouldn't spend that kind of cash again today.' He paused for thought. 'But then we don't know what's going to happen in the future, do we? We don't really know what Colonel Gaddafi and Saddam Hus- sein are up to. If they do get their hands on a nuclear device, then I think we'll sudden- ly find that the Balcombe Bunker will come into its own.'