Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker

Entry: £7 adults / £5 children (5-16 years) / £16.50 family (2 adults + 2 children)

There's a secret nuclear bunker about a 45 minute drive from my home.

The Kelvedon Hatch Bunker near Chipping Ongar was initially built in 1952 as part of a programme to improve Britain's air defences. Later on it became a Regional Government HQ – had there been a nuclear war the UK government and a team of military and civilian personnel would have sealed themselves inside it for three months to run the country from a position of safety. It was decommissioned in 1992, when it was decided that a nuclear war probably wasn't going to happen any more and that the bunker cost too much to maintain.

These days the bunker is privately owned, (by the family who originally owned the land it was built on), and is a museum to the bunker's Cold War period. It's set up roughly as it would have been in the past, though with more awkwardly posed mannequins than you might have expected. Tours are self-guided – you pick up a handset and type in numbers at specific points along the route. The narrator is a cheerful, well-spoken and quite morbid man who seems unduly pleased about the idea of dying slowly from radiation sickness. There's also a children's version of the tour, which is apparently very different.

The tour takes at least an hour; the bunker has three floors and would have housed 600 people, (though probably not very comfortably), so it takes a while to get around it all. There are also public information films, like this one, playing in some of the rooms and there's a spot where you can dress up in costumes from the period. There are no people supervising the bunker, instead you pay for everything except the canteen via honesty boxes, which are accompanied by threatening signs about CCTV. The bunker is full of threatening signs; my personal favourites where the ones that periodically warned you that “if you have not yet heard about X on your audio guide then you are going too fast”.

In addition to being a museum, the bunker can also be hired as a location for filming and photography, (though the only feature film that I can find that's used the bunker as a location is S.N.U.B!, which sounds hilariously bad). The land around the bunker contains more tourist attractions, (such as paintballing, go-karting, and a tree-top obstacle course), so I suppose the idea is that you take your kids and have a lovely family day out consisting of outdoor activities and Cold War paranoia.

I definitely recommend visiting the bunker if you find yourself in the area. It does an amazing job of showing the mixture of naïvety, optimism and fear that people had about the atomic age, and is a pretty fascinating place if you're interested in 20th century history or, like me, just obsessed with the question of how the world will end.