Penguin UK - Bollocks to Alton Towers

Uncommonly British Days Out - Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker, Kelvedon Hall Lane, Brentwood, Essex, CM14 5TL - 01277 364883

he Secret Nuclear Bunker at Kelvedon Hatch easily qualifies as The World's Most Terrifying Bungalow. At first sight an unremarkable 1950s farm cottage, this bungalow is in fact the tip of a government iceberg - a huge, three-storey bunker with 10ft thick concrete walls reaching 100ft underground. The local villagers knew nothing of its purpose, being the sort of people who could, back in 1952, remain unfazed by 40,000 tons of cement trundling up the road to Parrish Farm.

This is where the select few government leaders, military commanders and civil servants would have been whisked twenty miles from London to run the country in the event of a nuclear strike.

Walk through the front door of the bungalow now, and you enter a world where the clocks strike thirteen. There's nobody in a customised baseball cap to take your money. There's nobody there at all. You're utterly alone. Your mobile phone will have cut out. You're walking into a Faraday cage - the MI6 building at Vauxhall Cross has one - where radio signals are kept at bay. Echoes bounce off the cold walls: sirens and static from a crackling PA system. Something has happened. The place is alive with fear.

It would have been easy to pick off intruders. And which visitors would they have wanted to shoot in the days following a nuclear strike? Unfortunately, the unpalatable answer is you. Imagine all the people you'd voted for running away while your country went up in smoke. If you discovered them a few days later, hiding in a hill in Essex, you'd want a quiet word. Sadly, they'd shoot you before you trod any of that nasty radiation in on your shoes.

The assumption is that survival depends upon never going outside. Your resources are limited: you can't flush the toilet, because that would waste some of the 24,000 gallons of stored water, so there are chemical loos. Fresh food is perishable and there isn't enough room for freezers, so you eat dry stuff and tinned things. You can't open the window and it's going to get sweaty down there with the heat of 600 human bodies and tons of equipment, so the air is cooled, cleaned, scrubbed, de-humidified and recirculated every two minutes.

According to the ludicrous Protect and Survive pamphlet which would have been distributed seventy-two hours before an anticipated nuclear attack, on hearing the four minute warning, Joe Public was expected to do the following: extinguish his cigarette, turn off gas, electricity and water, tape up the handles of the lavatory cistern, fill his bath with water and cover it with a door, ensure he had enough tinned food and water to last fourteen days, and retire with his portable radio, torch, blankets, tin opener, bucket, first aid kit, box of dry sand (for cleaning crockery), notebook, pencils, cleaning materials, toys, magazines, clock, calendar, wife and children to the Inner Refuge he had constructed from mattresses, tables, bags of clothing, books and heavy furniture. It was a good way of ensuring Britain was fussing about safely indoors rather than running out into the street screaming 'we're all going to fry' or robbing banks or attempting sexual intercourse with that dishy type over the road, or whatever it is that people say they'd do if they knew the world was coming to an end.

The place may be a post-apocalyptic Marie Celeste, but it's scattered with dark wit. The clocks have stopped. You can buy a souvenir jar of Bramley apple and mint relish with a radiation warning symbol on it. Every sheet of toilet paper in the washroom is stamped 'Government Property - Use Both Sides.' (Parrish does this personally - about 20 sheets a week, because people nick them.)

Kelvedon was decommissioned in 1992. Presumably the powers that be have a bigger and better bolt-hole now. Actually, we know they do. The Wiltshire town of Corsham 'may' (i.e. does) house Hawthorn, the 'mother of all bunkers', which should have remained a well-kept secret, except that the government sold some of it off, rather giving the game away.

Perhaps we'll be able to visit Hawthorn by 2032. In the meantime, Kelvedon Bunker is a thrilling piece of history, a blend of the terrifying and the banal.