The Cold War hiding place

So this is where world war three would have been waged. And this is the tub in which, in between ordering retaliatory nuclear strikes, the prime minister would have taken a bath. There is his toilet, and here, in the dead centre of a 34-acre underground bunker in Wiltshire, is the reinforced chamber in which preparations for nuclear winter would have been made. As you stand in the torchlit cold, with the doorframes collapsing from dry rot and with water dripping down incipient stalactites, the room seems to fill with the voices of Harold Macmillan, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher, and you find yourself shivering. But not from the chill.

Until two years ago, the existence of this complex, variously codenamed Burlington, Stockwell, Turnstile or 3-Site, was classified. It was a huge yet very secret complex, where the government and 6,000 apparatchiks would have taken refuge for 90 days during all-out thermonuclear war. Solid yet cavernous, surrounded by 100ft-deep reinforced concrete walls within a subterranean 240-acre limestone quarry just outside Corsham, it drives one to imagine the ghosts of people who, thank God, never took refuge here...