Bunkers Under Bath

bath | miscellaneous | news report Monday November 10, 2003 15:43 by Tony Gosling/Phil Chamberlain tony at gaia dot org

Phil Chamberlain, onetime Bath Chronicle reporter, takes a peep down the various military rabbit holes in the Box and Corsham area.

ccc4.jpg

Bunkers Under Bath
by Phil Chamberlain

For conspiracy theorists it is Britain\'s own Area 51. The American version has become such a fixture on the cult circuit that there are burger bars selling alien snacks and motels offering the best viewing points to see America\'s secret aircraft take off and land. But Britain\'s secret base has no such post-modernist trappings, just a few dedicated enthusiasts swapping tit bits on the web and a typically humdrum Ministry of Defence location.

The warren of tunnels around Corsham and Box near Bath have been home to a number of military bases since before the Second World War. Most utilised the quarries which fed the stone that made the city famous and was exported across the world. The mine workings link up in some cases with the military bases and the whole network spreads for miles with entrances dotted around the hills - some quote large and others no more than a rabbit hole in the ground.

Stop off and have a drink at The Quarryman\'s Arms near Box and you will be able to buy a map put together by University of Bath cavers which gives a guide to the mine workings. Be warned though that it is easy to get lost only yards from a tunnel entrance and much of the workings have not been rendered safe.

For the military, the tunnel\'s position was far enough away from London not to attract attention yet still only a few hours from the capital and with good rail links and the Bristol port all within easy reach. Indeed the rail links remain with rumours of secret sidings on the mainline route as it passes through various tunnels connecting military gauges with the public network.

The tunnels were home to a number of stores, mostly ammunition, during the last war. Local author Nick McCamley has charted the development of these underground works in his book Secret Underground Cities. And cities is an apt word.

The sites beneath the hills included an underground aircraft engine factory, operated by the Bristol Aeroplane Company. It was home to 18,000 workers, covered three million square feet between Corsham and Box and contained around 60 miles of subterranean tracks.

Another, the Central Ammunition Dump at Corsham was the biggest of its kind in the country. One of the three parts of the CAD was actually nearer Bradford on Avon, and based at Monkton Farleigh Quarry. The biggest ammunition store in the world at the time, it covered 45 acres of underground space and had a maximum capacity of 120,000 tons of ammunition.

Also making up the CAD was Tunnel Quarry, a 40 acre air-conditioned ammunition store on the north side of the Box tunnel, while the third quarry, Eastlays, occupied 30 acres near Gastard, south-east of Corsham. The security of the sites can be gauged by the fact that many important works of art were shipped there for safe-keeping during the war.

Go for a drink at the Cross Guns at Avoncliffe and look at the hill above. During the war, inside that hill, sat the Crown Jewels, the Elgin Marbles and various other treasures from London museums.

The military works provided employment for thousands of local people before, during and after the war. Little was officially known about them because, in that typically reserved British way, the sites were secret.
Local gossip certainly gave clues to the scale of the operations and many people have their own urban myths about the tunnels. One is that all the cellars under Bath\'s central Milsom Street link up and a direct route - past the former Admiralty headquarters in the city - went straight to Box.

But apart from tall tales told in pubs the sites remained secure - a few air vents and vehicle entrances the only outward sign of their existence. There was a price to be paid for some of those workers who toiled underground. Asbestos was used to line the walls of the undergrouns offices. An inquest held in 1999 into the death of 81-year-old Ada Harding from Corsham found she had died from a cancer caused by inhaling the deadly fibres. Coroner\'s officer Douglas Hills told the inquest: \'The entire complex was piped, the piping neing lagged with asbestos. Very large quantities of blue asbestos sheeting were used.\'

Mrs Harding\'s daughters both worked for the MoD in their underground facilities. One, Carol Boon, said: \'People liked working underground and they had all the facilities there. They really enjoyed it.\'

One of the more astounding secrets the government kept hidden was that one part of the network was identified as a Cold War government bolt hole in case the bomb ever dropped.

Called Burlington, the bunker was equipped to house 5,000 people and had a hospital, bakery and laundry. It replicated Whitehall down to a version of the famous Red Lion pub which sits on the corner of Parliament Square in London. That bunker was finally decommissioned in 1989 and various other sections are gradually being sold off of retired.

Indeed a science park is planned for one above-ground section at Rudloe and Spring Quarry is being turned into a film studio. Other parts are used as warehouses for storing senstive items in the temperature-controlled vaults by a private company. But parts of the rest of the site remain in government hands. It is this part, and specifically the Corsham Computer Centre (CCC) near the former RAF Rudloe Manor base, that has attracted attention from conspiracy theory minded investigators.

On the one hand you have mainstream groups interested in mapping and documenting the military history of Britain and they work with the tacit approval of official agencies. Then there are the more esoteric groups which believe much remains hidden and still active beneath the hills.

The RAF\'s involvement, it used to have signal facilities at Rudloe, has led to suggestions that it was Britain\'s UFO headquarters and that the staff based at Rudloe were on alien-watch.

Meanwhile investigative journalist Duncan Campbell paid a visit to the CCC which be believes is a secretly-funded NATO nuclear command centre. Less a base for friends from outer-space more your old-fashioned \'black\' project - built away from the prying eyes of Parliament and one of a number of Cold War nerve centres.

Various enthusiasts have made life less humdrum for the military police at the CCC by attempting to get into the base which is officially no more interesting than its name.

Much of what remains underground is, pardon the pun, buried from official scrutiny and since Campbell\'s original claims there has been little hard evidence to show that anything too elaborate is going on. But then it took decades before anyone found out about Burlington. And there are still plenty of rumours being told at the pubs around these Wiltshire hills.


Secret Underground Cities, Nick McCamley
Take an Underground Tour of Monkton Farleigh
Truthseekers guide to RAF Rudloe Manor
Richard J Challis page on Monkton Farleigh Concise
History of Bath Stone Quarries in the Corsham area