One of the most shadowy and spine-chilling buildings in the county is now open to visitors. Chris Price went deep underground to uncover the secret history of Cold War Kent.

If the Russians had pushed the button to start a nuclear war 60 odd years ago, most people would have been left to fend for themselves while a lucky few would have been ushered in to the Cold War bunkers dotted across the county.

One of the 30 or so bunkers is just a short walk from the centre of Gravesend but contrary to many beliefs, wasn’t designed to be a refuge for the county’s great and good. It was actually a control centre, run by the volunteers of the Civil Defence Corp (CDC), to co-ordinate the emergency services in the event of a crisis.

“I remember coming down here when it opened in 1954 and doing a public open day to show people it was not just a hidey hole for civil servants,” laughed Laurie Coker, who conducted several training exercises as a member of the CDC when the bunker was potentially operational.

These days, he runs tours of the site in Gravesend’s Woodlands Park as a member of the Thames Defence Heritage Group. Ironically, when the bunker closed in the late 1960s, it was used as a store for council files for a long period but the heritage group has restored it back to its former glory to create an authentic as possible picture of what the site would have been like when operational.

The restoration work proved so authentic the bunker was used as a set for the Sean Bean and Danny Dyer movie Age of Heroes, where it became Admiralty HQ. Yet the irony was that by the late 1960s, should there have been a nuclear attack, the base would probably not have survived as technology had moved on tremendously since the bunker opened in 1954.

Today’s tour takes visitors through the debriefing room, plant room, communications room, scientists room and many others. “One thing we encourage visitors to do here is touch things,” said Laurie, 75, of Abbots Field, Gravesend. “We let kids have a go on the typewriters and they love it.”

In the operation room is the shell of an old nuclear warhead, which was 30 times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Interest in the bunker is as high as ever, as shown when the Olympic torch travelled through Gravesend last summer. With the route passing the entrance to the site, the heritage group decided to open for the day, charging £1 for admission. They welcomed 600 visitors.

The whole tour takes about 45 minutes to an hour. Only 25 to 30 people can fit in there at one time – roughly the number of CDC operatives who would have worked in there during a crisis.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the post was an outpost for the CDC’s headquarters in Maidstone, which this has long since been demolished.

Now, the Gravesend Cold War Bunker is a valuable window into a potential post-nuclear existence which, thankfully, never happened.

Sacrifices would have been made

Had a nuclear bomb been dropped near Kent, members of the Civil Defence Corp would have been faced with brutal, life-or-death decisions.

“Say you have only got three fire engines and two of them are already out,” said Sam Willoughby, 21, of Michael Gardens in Riverview Park, who is one of the tour guides.

“You get a call to say an engine is needed at both the hospital and the communications tower. Where do you send it?

“The answer is you would send it to the communications tower because being able to coordinate the engines is more likely to save more lives. The sad fact is, sick people would probably not survive a nuclear fallout anyway, so they would have to be sacrificed.”

Cold War timeline

1945: United States first used atomic bomb in war

1949: NATO ratified

1949: Soviets explode first atomic bomb

1950: Korean War begins

1953: Korean War ends

1955: Warsaw Pact formed

1959: Cuba taken over by Fidel Castro

1960: US spy plane shot down over Soviet territory

1961: Construction of Berlin Wall begins

1962: Cuban Missile Crisis

1963: President Kennedy assassinated in Dallas

1965: Announcement of dispatching of 150,000 US troops to Vietnam

1968: Soviet troops crush Czechoslovakian revolt

1969: Apollo 11 lands on the moon

1970: President Nixon extends Vietnam War to Cambodia

1975: North Vietnam defeats South Vietnam

1983: President Reagan proposes Strategic Defense Initiative

1987: Reagan and Russian President Gorbachev agree to remove all medium and short-range nuclear missiles by signing treaty

1989: Soviet troops withdraw from Afghanistan and the Berlin Wall falls

1991: End of Soviet Union

Tours of the Gravesend Cold War Bunker take place on Fridays, April 26, May 31 and June 28. Admission £4.50, children £3.50. Call 01474 337600.