We're just mooring up at Hack Green on the Shropshire Union
Canal in Cheshire, and the reason we're stopping here is
that just a couple of minutes walk from the bridge is the Hack
Green secret nuclear bunker, a relic from the Cold War era.
There are brown tourist signs for it all over the place now,
so it's hardly a secret anymore, but as we've not been there
before, that's what we'll be doing in this episode of the
Water Rd. So I'm here at the secret
nuclear bunker with Jason, who's the general manager.
So just tell me, what is the bunker and what can people see
here? It's a historical museum about
the Cold War. The.
Soviet Union. About what it calls.
Dangerous provocations by American warships in the Gulf of
Oman. We started off as a radar
station during the sort of the early years of the Cold War, the
1940s, Nineteen 50s. We're still a radar station in
the 1960s, but by that time we were sort of dealt with.
Air traffic control closed for a long time, 15 to 20 year period
until the early 1980s. The government spent a huge sums
of money in 1980s terms, millions of pounds £32,000,000,
and kitted out the bunker to become effectively a command
centre in the event of a nuclear war.
So we would have become the capital wielding for the
northwest of England from here. So we would have decided how to
deal with survivors in Manchester, Liverpool, Chester,
Preston, Lancaster, basically that whole strip going all the
way up to Scotland. So why is it actually here in
this spot? Because we're kind of in the
middle of nowhere. We are as far back as World War
Two. There was a site here which was
called a Starfish site, which is basically a decoy for a crew
station. So the idea was that hopefully
it would fool German bombers trying to bomb crew station and
they would fly here and drop their bombs here.
Hopefully in World War 2 when they were developing radar, they
realised that this site here is is a very nice flat area in the
Cheshire Plain. And so they sited a radar
station here after that which watched the skies over the
Liverpool docks area in the northwest Manchester and so on
and so on. And the stuff was mounted on the
back of trucks in those days rather than being a permanent
site so it could be moved around if necessary.
After World War 2, then we, we became a permanent Cold War
radar station, a rota radar station, which was built at
again, great expense. And they, they literally threw
money at the project to get it built once the Soviets had
developed their own nuclear weapons.
So that's why the building was here originally.
Once it had been decommissioned as a radar station, you're left
with a concrete bunk head basically you're not really sure
what to do with. But in the event that it had
become useful in the future, they never like to throw those,
you know, sort of completely demolish these kinds of
buildings. So effectively it's just reused
and repurposed. And was it always secret or was
it not a secret when it was a radar station?
It it was critical infrastructure.
So you would have, if you were posted here, doing your national
service, you're working in A at a top secret site during the
1980s, though you're a reserve building for the running of the
country. So you can't get a whole lot
more secret than that, really. And in those days when it was
secret, was there a staff here the whole time or was it just a
a building that was waiting to be staffed if the need?
So there was. There was a cadre of people
working here all the time, sort of the the the day-to-day
running of the building. There would be war games taking
place here to plan around the best way to deal with a a
scenario like that. Other people had come in and to
put their skills from time to time, coming in once or twice a
week perhaps if it was say the the local BT engineers making
looking at their equipment. This is a routine British
Telecom emergency communications network test message for
regional government headquarters Station 10.
Two test message begins AQK2. Standby.
FDB8. They were very rarely fully
staffed. I think there was one situation
when it was fully staffed, which was during the minor strike,
which is when basically they decided the situation was so
dire that they needed to potentially move to disaster
planning. And you mentioned disaster
because when you go around the museum, there's the disaster is
quite a a theme, isn't it? It's quite frightening.
Indeed, as soon as you walk in through the building there are
decommissioned nuclear weapons completely safe to look at
nowadays. But yeah, the the sort of things
that were many, many, many more times powerful than the bombs
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
They were the nuclear deterrent basically for, for the UK in the
60s, seventies, 80s, 90s. We work with the atomic weapons
establishment at Oldham Mast and they loan us the decommissioned
warheads and we work with them to show the public the dangers
and the, the skills that are needed And you know, and
hopefully making people understand just how awful a
nuclear war could be in many ways.
It's not just the, the initial damage which is the problem.
It's all it's everything which comes after, up to and including
potentially the the total collapse of society.
We. Interrupt regular programming to
bring you a message from Her Majesty's Government.
Please stand by and await further information.
This is an emergency warning from the BBC.
Information of a possible nuclear strike against this
country has been received. And I think those of us who grew
up in the 80s and 90s probably remember that we all feared a
nuclear war, didn't we? That?
But that seems to have. That's gone away a bit, hasn't
it? Really?
It did. And then I started working here
just after COVID. And at the time, we used to make
a, you know, a little joke with the public about aren't we lucky
that the, you know, the nuclear war apocalypse never happened.
And basically we're dealing with with little germs, staying at
home, watching box sets on TV, trying not to be bored out of
our minds. But then, you know, as, as these
things often do, the world changed again and we had a
little war going on in the Ukraine, which has brought
everything back to very, very sharp focus for.
And it seems remarkable that we're so close to the canal and
yet the whole place was secret and people didn't really know it
was here. Indeed, apparently the personnel
posted here in the 50s and 60s during their their free time
would climb up onto the roof of the building.
There was a sort of an area where they could relax and have
a few minutes outside and wave to the boaters.
But not when it was probably. No, no.
So they must have known something was going on here.
But as to exactly what that was, I think they were they, you
know, they would be blissfully unaware.
And now everyone is blissfully aware because there's signs
about the secret you'd. Indeed, it's one of the little
jokes, isn't it? We get people coming in from a
far and wide who like to tell us about how it's not such a secret
bunker anymore because they followed the signs to get here.
Well, after that brief visit to reality, we're back on the move
in the world of the canals and just north of the bridge where
you can walk to the nuclear bunker from there are the 2 hack
green locks. Now we're in the Cheshire Plain
here, so the two locks only go down 12 feet between them, and
in fact the next lock on the Shropshire Union mainline is
almost 9 miles further on. Now at the top lock there's a
former stables and that's a reminder of when the horse drawn
fly boats used to operate on the canal.
They were often carrying perishable cargoes and they used
to run 24 hours a day. And there were regular stables
all along the route so that the horses could be changed.
And if you just look behind the stables, you can see the site of
the nuclear bunker. You can't actually see the
bunker itself because the trees have grown up.
But you can see one of the big radars and you can certainly see
the massive great communications tower, which is one of the
reasons that the mobile signal is so good.
Even though we're in the middle of nowhere,
we're down the locks. And that means that's all for
this episode of The Water Rd. The podcast is produced and
presented by me, Adam Porter. If you want to find out more
about the Hack Green Secret Nuclear bunker, there's a link
in the episode description. Thank you to everyone who's
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