Visiting the link and scrolling down reveals a list of "similar properties". They're not that similar; they're all much better disguised as ordinary buildings.
For sale: One 236-bed nuclear bunker
Readers looking for a spacious pad with plenty of accommodation, plus "male and female WCs, commercial kitchen facilities, BBC audio visual broadcasting facility, conference facilities, air filtration systems, conference rooms, decontamination chambers, plant rooms and oil storage", are directed to the sale of a former nuclear …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 2nd February 2016 16:48 GMT MyffyW
I know that buildings serving similar purposes are littered around the UK.
And most seem to have been decommissioned.
This leads me to speculate that in the event of Putin pressing the red button we'd be left with no regional government. I leave it to others to speculate whether this would be a bigger deal than the fact we'd also be left without food, water, shelter and Scooby Doo repeats.
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Tuesday 2nd February 2016 19:18 GMT x 7
"we'd also be left without food, water"
FYI the emergency food buffer stores were all closed around 25 years ago, so the only food reserves now are what the supermarkets hold. Previously there were a number of large stores dotted around the country. One for instance was at Claughton near Lancaster - that was converted to making window security shutters some years ago
Likewise the portable emergency large-scale bread bakeries (there were five in total, again regionally based) were all scrapped around the same time
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Tuesday 2nd February 2016 15:41 GMT Peter2
Re: "Security could be racked up if needed"
I was looking at that ending sentence and wondering what exactly you could do to make a bunker designed to literally survive a nuclear apocalypse more secure.
Presumably the original owners considered that in case of a nuclear apocalypse the locals might want to hang the leaders inside off the nearest standing lamp post and installed a door that would laugh at attempts to smash it in. It's not got windows, and it's largely buried underground. The nuclear bunker in Essex appeared to have a door with more armour than the main belt of an old fashioned battleship, and I suspect this one would be at least as secure!
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Tuesday 2nd February 2016 15:55 GMT Doctor_Wibble
Re: "Security could be racked up if needed"
Zombie-proofing requires a lot of internal segregation too, otherwise you just end up as part of a sealed-in ready meal...
Also, the article is a lie in any case - a bunker does not have everything needed until the larder is properly stocked with a thousand crates of pork'n'beans and at least twice that amount of pot noodles. And water obviously but you can get that by mulching down the zombies in a condenser, possibly even adding some spare politicians if you get really desperate but that would need extra sterilisation.
And obviously lots of beer. Because it's beer. And the more the better, just in case we prefer to drink ourselves to death after looking outside once all the dust has settled. Also, as a secondary water supply. Actually it's looking like beer is pretty much the ultimate survival thing, second only to to the in-flight magazine with the Robert Morley interview and a slice of orange peel.
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Tuesday 2nd February 2016 16:38 GMT Lee D
Re: Ughh... I would stay away
Most schools that your children go to are teeming with asbestos. I know, I've been working IT in schools for the last 15 years.
So long as you don't disturb it, it's absolutely fine. And the cost of removal/replacement is virtually twice as much as just building whatever it is again (e.g. kitchen ceiling, doors, etc.).
Every school I know has an asbestos register (even if it's minimal and not in child-occupied areas), and all the larger contractors ask to see it if they need to drill holes.
Next time you go to a school, look in the corners of the ceilings for little stickers or other markings. Very few ever pay to get rid of it, and it's only really damaging to contractors (who tend not to be allowed to do such work while children are on-site, asbestos or not).
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Tuesday 2nd February 2016 15:44 GMT Erik4872
Interesting
Looking back on the Cold War era, it's pretty amazing to see facilities like this. The assumption that anyone important could get to them in time seems quite absurd. You would need to start moving everyone at the first sign of a potential launch. That, and it would have to be maintained 24/7 to be fully ready. I can't imagine how much that cost.
There was a very famous bunker in West Virginia that was decommissioned after the location was leaked, but it was built into the basement of a luxury mountain hotel. Getting even a few key people out of Washington DC and all the way across Virginia in the middle of a panic, even in military helicopters wouldn't seem to be possible to me.
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Tuesday 2nd February 2016 16:10 GMT TheOtherHobbes
Re: Interesting
The plan was to move VIPs (as they thought themselves to be) to the bunkers while hostilities were still simmering, well before any danger of a launch. I think the UK had a plan staged over a couple of weeks.
The problem was that none of the secret bunkers were really all that secret, so they might as well have had giant bullseyes painted on them.
Even if not, a bunker full of useless little shits who made a career out of ordering people around but were unlikely to be good at anything practical would have made for some grimly dystopian moments as food, water, and fuel started running out, and the surviving military began to wonder if perhaps there ought to be a reassignment of critical resources.
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Tuesday 2nd February 2016 22:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Interesting
That's a good plan. Presumably there would be some communications links with those inside. Just send them "wow that's a bright flash....I think I'm blind....oh god I think its over for the human race" then pull the plug on all communication links.
They'll think it is over for us poor bastards on the surface and won't even bother checking the door - if they found it welded shut they might have cutting tools that would allow them to get out given enough time so you want them to WANT to stay inside!
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Tuesday 2nd February 2016 23:41 GMT 9Rune5
Re: Interesting
If you shut them all in and convince them the world has ended... Then there is a chance that any females present might let some of the politicians breed. Eventually they'll run out of food, and you will be left off with the mutant spawn feeding off eachother.
Then, if the welds fail after a few decennia, we run the risk of a new breed of politicians emerging that are even more despicable than the ones we locked in the bunker to begin with. Sure, they might all perish inside, but even the remotest chance of survival (and subsequent escape) sends chills running down my spine.
I would rather live next to a nuclear dump site that glows in the night.
Of course, replacing the females inside the bunker with transvestites could work. A bit cruel perhaps, but all for a good cause.
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Thursday 4th February 2016 12:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Interesting
Funny thing was a lot of the people who were destined for the bunkers didn't know they had been selected to be buried underground in a bunker. When a few people found out after the thawing of the Cold War that they'd been picked most said that they wouldn't have bothered and would have preferred to stay with the family instead.
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Tuesday 2nd February 2016 15:57 GMT Martin Gregorie
One obvious drawback
I visited the nuclear bunker in Ongar, Essex a year or two back, one May. One of my main memories was that it was rather cold inside, so I think it would be a safe bet that the heating bills for this one, or any other underground nuclear bunker for that matter, would be astronomical.
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Tuesday 2nd February 2016 17:22 GMT Duncan Macdonald
Not very well protected
The structure is only covered by 1 metre of earth so it is only usable if there is no nearby attack.
(If you want a REAL nuclear bomb shelter - look at Dinorwig power station - given its location in the heart of a mountain it could probably withstand a direct hit by a megaton nuke.)
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Tuesday 2nd February 2016 17:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
I have to say.....
If I were in the eye for a property opportunity for a new home, I'd buy it without a seconds hesitation.
It'd be a fantastic place to live, and you would easily make back your costs by organising 'survival simulation packages' where you could offer a simulated experience of a nuclear attack for, say, two weeks. Each person attending for the two weeks would be given the role of a government RHQ bod, and tasked with ensuring their job was handled as best as they could.
Get a couple of scripts written and have problems passed to them via the VHF / HF sets for them to deal with, put them through the rationing experience, and watch how quickly things start going wrong as the 'outside situation' starts deteriorating.
Fuck.
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Tuesday 2nd February 2016 19:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
preserving government
If you can find a copy, 'Beneath the city streets' by Peter Laurie makes sense of a lot of the bunker network. He did some great detective work on bunkers, hardened telecoms networks and exchanges and various tunnels. At the time (1972) the general accuracy of missiles led to the conclusion that a nuclear attack on the UK (given an escalating lead-up) would be largely survivable and after around 10 years would leave the country better off.
Improvements in targetting and target locating (Uncle Vanya on a walking tour with his gps) made it all nonsense. So the secret investment in things that didn't exist could be redeployed to buying elections, rewarding friends and trebles all round.
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Wednesday 3rd February 2016 00:00 GMT allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
Re: preserving government
At the time, the general "accuracy" of ICBMs was what prompted the drive for hydrogen bombs in the multi-megaton range. If the yield is high enough, "close enough" is close enough.
(Anyone remember Dr. Strangelove? I'd like to have one of those "World Targets in Megadeaths" ring binders. And if you think Kubrick made up stuff like that for a laugh, think again.)
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Wednesday 3rd February 2016 12:57 GMT theOtherJT
Re: preserving government
I had the misfortune to work on digitising the catalogue at my local library around the turn of the millennium. This involved actually pulling everything off the shelves and making sure it matched what it said it was in the card catalogue before updating the computer records.
One of the things I turned up at the time was a published collection of "survivability statistics" from the late 70s that it seemed everyone had forgotten about. Made for quite frightening reading. I seem to recall that given the high population density of the UK and locations of various "likely targets" the estimates were for about 98% casualties over the first year in the even of a "limited" (which they defined as "Not deliberately targeting population centres") nuclear attack. The initial casualties from the explosions/radiation weren't even the big numbers. What they expected to kill most people was starvation and disease after the national infrastructure broke down over the course of the first year.
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Wednesday 3rd February 2016 09:43 GMT JamesPond
£/ft2
That has got to be one of the cheapest properties in the UK in terms of pounds sterling per square foot (or m2 if you prefer). In my neck of the woods, which is one of the cheapest areas to live in the UK, the average house price is £175k for roughly 5000sq ft which is roughly 3x more than this bunker.
Not sure how much heating & lighting will cost, but at least you save on the window cleaner bills.
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Monday 8th February 2016 11:48 GMT old man
jwmurphymurphy15@gmail.com
Bunker near Stansted has got to be stupidest.It's based in a wooded area but entrance is hidden as a council house auxiliary generator is hidden in a mock ruined church on a nearby hill. Good so far
But then main power supply delivered by three separate strings of pylons diving into ground above secret underground bunker and if you still couldn't find it a 200 foot aerial tower on top. At its best in the 70s it was guarded by 700 troops with shoot on sight orders. It is well sign posted though with,this way to secret bunker, now they do guided tours so not a total waste of money.