Deep below the Wiltshire countryside lies the world's biggest telephone exchange of its type - and it has never been used.
It looks like the operators just upped and left and abandoned the exchange to its fate. Which is exactly what happened.
It lies 120 feet below ground beneath the former RAF Corsham – a 35-acre site that once used to hide a top-secret Cold War bunker designed to withstand a nuclear apocalypse.
The UK’s largest underground bunker – called Burlington – was for 60 years one of the best-kept secrets in modern Ministry of Defence history.
The Central Government War Headquarters (CGWHQ) was built under the former Bath Stone Spring Quarry but became outdated almost immediately afterwards due to inter-continental missiles being able to target it.
The eerie underground city deep below the Wiltshire countryside is big enough to accommodate up to 4,000 people for up to three months.
Government officials, and possibly the Royal family, would have been rushed there in the late 1950s amid fears of a nuclear attack during the Cold War between the USA and the Soviet Union.
As tensions rose between the West and the Soviet Union, nuclear war became a reality that was meticulously planned for. The bunker was built on assumptions the UK could be subjected to a nuclear attack by up to 132 atomic bombs.
Officials forecast the bombs would kill around 1.7 million people and injure a further million.
Members of the Urban Explorers group, who visited the site in 2010, said: "Among the exploring world, the main “attraction” in Burlington is no doubt the telephone exchange. Immaculately preserved and the biggest exchange of its type in the world, it takes your breath away.”
The bunker was commissioned in 1955 by the then Prime Minister Anthony Eden to become the government’s emergency command centre if the threat of nuclear war ever became reality.
The complex was known by various codenames including Stockwell, Subterfuge, Burlington, Turnstile, Chanticleer, Peripheral, and Site 3.
The bunker boasts some impressive ‘sections’ from a BBC broadcasting suite to a hospital, all accessible via 60 miles of roads.
Next to the bunker is more than 18.6 miles of tunnels and passageways belonging to the Box Freestone Quarry, part of which was taken over by the MOD and turned in to an air inlet.
In what would have been a nuclear apocalypse HQ, the bunker has its own hospitals, canteens, kitchens, offices and accommodation.
It even has its own telephone switchboard and electric buggies to transport officials and others through its maze of passages.
The Urban Explorers said: “Plates and cutlery all laid out make this area look like it’s ready to be used at the drop of a hat, or as if previous inhabitants just upped and left.
“As we walked through the canteen and took in the incredible, brand-new coffee makers we made our way into the kitchens where thousands of pounds worth of utensils, cookers and mixers sit having never warmed up so much as a tin of beans.”
Drinking water would have come from an underground lake, while 12 fuel tanks would power four generators to provide electricity.
These would be able to run for up to three months to keep the site temperature to around 20 degrees.
The site remained operational for 30 years and was maintained until 1991 until the upkeep became too expensive and it was finally mothballed.
The MOD finally acknowledged the site’s existence in 2004, saying: "A formerly secret Government underground site near Corsham in Wiltshire, which was a potential relocation site for the Government in the event of a nuclear war, was declassified at the end of 2004."
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