Name: York Cold War Bunker | 10 Places That Made England with Dan Snow
Uploaded: 2025-10-27T18:18:49.000Z
Duration: 8 min 18 s
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Tucked away on the edge of York is a place of vital link in the chain of Britain's covert defenses.

It's a Cold War bunker buried underground.

But luckily you don't need security clearance anymore to get in.

There were 31 bunkers like this in England.

Their story begins after the USA detonated the world's first atomic device in 1945.

In August 45, the US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan.

First Hiroshima and then Nagasaki three days later.

These two bombs alone caused the death of over 200,000 people.

The Second World War was over, but there wouldn't be much peace dividend.

By 1946, Britain and the Soviet Union were effectively enemies.

The Soviets detonated their first hydrogen fusion bomb in 1953.

Britain followed suit, creating their first atomic bomb in the same year and launching a new research program focusing on nuclear warfare.

By 1961, the possibility of nuclear war made bunkers like this essential.

1 Political miscalculation and the world could be plunged into catastrophic nuclear exchange.

But the people operating in the bunker down here would have known exactly what to do.

In 1957, the Home Office set up the UKWMO, the United Kingdom Warning and Monitoring Organization, which was to give the military and government vital information on the magnitude and strength of nuclear attacks on British soil.

As part of this, bunkers were set up, managed by the volunteer Royal Observer Corps, the ROC.

The Royal Observer Corps was formed in 1925.

Their job was to literally look up at the skies to observe, identify any enemy planes, then report that information back to bunkers like this, to control rooms like this, where it could be plotted on a map.

They that information in turn was then sent to the relevant governmental or military authorities.

The Royal Observer Corps was now concerned with the possibility of nuclear strikes on Britain.

The bunker was run by three paid officers and hundreds of volunteers who trained for three evenings a week to be part of the team.

I've come into the heart of the bunker, its nerve center, the technical operations room.

This room is a direct descendant of the operations rooms used by the RAF during the Second World War.

Back then, they were used to track enemy aircraft that were coming to British airspace.

This room was designed to track the impact of enemy bombs, massive nuclear bombs detonating across, well, in this case northern England.

You can see one here outside Lincoln, one here outside York.

After that detonation, they'd also try and estimate how the weather, the wind and the rain would affect that radiation fallout toxin.

Once the team down here heard the code word toxin, that was it.

The doors to the bunker would be bolted and it was time for the people sitting here, for example, to wait and listen in to the satellite stations for news of a nuclear strike.

Can you imagine what it was like for these operators, focused on their work, but

also inevitably, thinking of their family, their friends, their community, wondering what was happening to them above the ground?

The bunker had only been operational for a year before in 1962, the team down here found themselves on high alert as the Cuban Missile Crisis unf.

Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island.

The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.

The Soviet Union stationed missiles on the Caribbean island of Cuba capable of striking the USA directly.

Had the prospect of nuclear war finally become a reality?

Luckily, US President Kennedy and Soviet leader Khrushchev managed to negotiate the removal of the missiles.

The Cold War thawed a licking reliably informed that the dismantling of the missiles and their installations was already in progress and that this process should be completed by Friday.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, the Eastern Bloc began to democratise and a 40 year stalemate was broken.

But the ROC didn't officially stand down this bunker until two years later in September 1991.

Thankfully, the Royal Observer Corps never had to deal with the actual fallout from a nuclear strike.

But the hours, the days they spent training and preparing is still literally written on the walls of this bunker.

It's an astonishing relic from a time when the British government found itself having to plan for the possibility of nuclear devast.