Wayne Cocroft and Roger Thomas, edited by P.S.Barnwell
English Heritage, 2003, h/b, £24.99
A very high-quality, well presented book that is considerably more appealing to look at than most of the unlovely structures which are illustrated between its large, hardback covers. It is partly because of the non-photogenic subject matter that the book is unlikely to find a home on many coffee tables. This is despite the fact that nearly everybody in the country will be familiar with, if not the sight, then the reputations of such featured icons as the ‘golf balls’ at Fylingdales and Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, the Greenham Common airfield in Berkshire, and the MI6 building at Vauxhall Cross in central London.
Many English landscapes particularly but not exclusively at airfields east of the Pennines, closest to our expected foes bear the imprint of the heavy government investment in militarisation on our behalf throughout the Cold War period.
Our taxes created all of this. Shame that nobody asked us about the aesthetics. But then it is clear from this book that function ruled form absolutely in the edifices that were created for the defence of the realm. Engineers, not architects ruled, OK? So, don’t expect a visual feast although the many photographs, plans and other illustrations which are featured on every single page of this book are both clear and informative.
Do expect a book which does exactly what it sets out to do. This is to take stock of the physical legacies of the Cold War and to create the context for their appraisal, principally in Britain but internationally, too. Its ambition is to start the ball rolling in other countries also, and for them to record and consider their own legacies. Let us hope they respond.
Like it or not, these features are as culturally significant to the history of both Western and Eastern Europe as the perhaps more aesthetically pleasing medieval castles that still pervade this continent centuries later; and which are now revered, looked after and recycled as major tourist attractions.
We are, of course, unlikely to see that happen to this collection of control towers, runways, missile pads, command posts, watchtowers and other assorted redundancies. But who would have thought back in 1962 that the then heavily defended Thor Missiles Main Base at Hemswell, north of Lincoln, would 30 years later have a regional pull as an immensely successful antiques centre? You never know.
This book is aimed mainly at professionals in the field archaeologists, conservation officers, and much maligned local authority planners. As such it is scholarly, comprehensive and readable.
The book ranges over the military and political background to the Cold War, MAD Mutually Assured Destruction, the United States ‘umbrella’, early warning and detection systems, ballistic missile attack warning installations, the air defence response, observation and monitoring equipment and civil defence. Geographically it ranges from Cornwall to the Orkneys. Most parts of the country have been touched in some way by these decades.
The photos include FIBUA (Fighting In Built Up Areas) the mock German village constructed in Wiltshire, the USAF concentric ringed ‘elephant cage’ at RAF Chicksands in Bedfordshire 369 metres wide and the platform tower at Purdown, Bristol, probably the only structure in the book to have received the approval of the Royal Fine Arts Commission. There are also a number of our very own WMDs Blue Danube (the first British nuclear bomb), Bloodhound, Thor and Blue Streak. Wonder where they’ve ended up?
The book concludes by suggesting that in the nineties, the disarmament decade, we were moving away from vulnerable fixed installations to more mobile equipment and to superbases such as Brize Norton, Mildenhall, Lakenheath and Waddington.
Unfortunately it seems to me that not a lot of this continuing massive investment will be of much practical value against our new ideological opponents. But that is not the point of this book. It is excellent, informative and a worthy initiator of the debate it seeks to promote.