Ludlow had its own bunker in the event of nuclear holocaust

A survival bunker in the event of a Cold War nuclear attack was built under the former South Shropshire District Council offices at the bottom of Corve Street.

Long since converted into a storage area, the presence of the bomb shelter has been revealed following the lodging of plans to knock down the former council building to make way for town centre housing.

It is not known how many people would have been accommodated in the shelter and who had been earmarked a place in the underground refuge.

But Shropshire Council has revealed that the underground structure was built to Ministry of Defence standards and contained stores, a shower and toilet as well as an engine room that would presumably have housed a generator.

While it is thought unlikely that Ludlow would have been on a Kremlin hit list, the bunker could have been designated to national or regional chiefs to sit out a nuclear raid.

Although Ludlow would have survived physical damage even from thermonuclear weapons used against key centres like Birmingham and Cardiff, people in the town would have been vulnerable to radiation and so it is more likely that it was intended as a shelter from radiation rather than a blast.

A Government report dating from the 1970s suggests that Kidderminster may have been on a Russian target list as it is believed that it was considered as a possible ‘regional centre’ if major cities were obliterated.

The three elements of a nuclear bomb are blast, heat and radiation. Those who survived the blast and heat could still be caught by fallout but the impact of radiation degrades quite quickly and so sheltering even for several days would markedly increase the chance of survival. However, people would ideally spend at least a fortnight under cover.

What is surprising is that it seems that the shelter was built at the same time as the council building in 1989 which was at the tail end of the Cold war.

There is no evidence of a shelter in Ludlow in the 1950s, 60s and 70s when the Cold War and threat of nuclear war was at its greatest.

Andy Boddington, who represents Ludlow North on Shropshire Council, is intrigued by what the bunker might have been used for and wants its historical significance fully explored.

“So what did this bunker contain?” he asks.

"Iodine tablets? Emergency rations? Did it store official papers to ensure that, even if nothing else survives, our bureaucracy outlives mutually assured destruction to await the archaeologists of the future?"

Iodine tablets were one way of limiting the take-up of radiation by the thyroid gland.

There were a considerable number of bunkers built around the country during the 40 years from 1950 when a nuclear war was considered a real possibility but it seems there was no clue that one of them was in Ludlow.

“We built a lot of these bunkers around the country in the 1960s and 1970s,” added Andy Boddington.

“The idea was that civic leaders would squirrel themselves into a shelter and command centre. They would then emerge after the madness of mutually assured destruction and take charge of whatever was left of our world.

“I remember my parents talking about four-minute warnings in the early 1960s. I have learnt since that people across the country were advised to hide under tables and put newspaper on windows if the missiles came. I am too young to remember the word tipping towards destruction in the Cuban missile crisis.

The Cold War is a big and sometimes forgotten part of our modern heritage. It is nevertheless a bit of a surprise to find a small piece of it in Ludlow.”