We're just mooring up at Hack Green on the Shropshire Union Canal in Cheshire, and the reason we're stopping here is that just a couple of minutes walk from the bridge is the Hack Green secret nuclear bunker, a relic from the Cold War era.

There are brown tourist signs for it all over the place now, so it's hardly a secret anymore, but as we've not been there before, that's what we'll be doing in this episode of the Water Rd.

So I'm here at the secret nuclear bunker with Jason, who's the general manager.

So just tell me, what is the bunker and what can people see here?

It's a historical museum about the Cold War.

The.

Soviet Union.

About what it calls.

Dangerous provocations by American warships in the Gulf of Oman.

We started off as a radar station during the sort of the early years of the Cold War, the 1940s, Nineteen 50s.

We're still a radar station in the 1960s, but by that time we were sort of dealt with.

Air traffic control closed for a long time, 15 to 20 year period until the early 1980s.

The government spent a huge sums of money in 1980s terms, millions of pounds £32,000,000, and kitted out the bunker to become effectively a command centre in the event of a nuclear war.

So we would have become the capital wielding for the northwest of England from here.

So we would have decided how to deal with survivors in Manchester, Liverpool, Chester, Preston, Lancaster, basically that whole strip going all the way up to Scotland.

So why is it actually here in this spot?

Because we're kind of in the middle of nowhere.

We are as far back as World War Two.

There was a site here which was called a Starfish site, which is basically a decoy for a crew station.

So the idea was that hopefully it would fool German bombers trying to bomb crew station and they would fly here and drop their bombs here.

Hopefully in World War 2 when they were developing radar, they realised that this site here is is a very nice flat area in the Cheshire Plain.

And so they sited a radar station here after that which watched the skies over the Liverpool docks area in the northwest Manchester and so on and so on.

And the stuff was mounted on the back of trucks in those days rather than being a permanent site so it could be moved around if necessary.

After World War 2, then we, we became a permanent Cold War radar station, a rota radar station, which was built at again, great expense.

And they, they literally threw money at the project to get it built once the Soviets had developed their own nuclear weapons.

So that's why the building was here originally.

Once it had been decommissioned as a radar station, you're left with a concrete bunk head basically you're not really sure what to do with.

But in the event that it had become useful in the future, they never like to throw those, you know, sort of completely demolish these kinds of buildings.

So effectively it's just reused and repurposed.

And was it always secret or was it not a secret when it was a radar station?

It it was critical infrastructure.

So you would have, if you were posted here, doing your national service, you're working in A at a top secret site during the 1980s, though you're a reserve building for the running of the country.

So you can't get a whole lot more secret than that, really.

And in those days when it was secret, was there a staff here the whole time or was it just a a building that was waiting to be staffed if the need?

So there was.

There was a cadre of people working here all the time, sort of the the the day-to-day running of the building.

There would be war games taking place here to plan around the best way to deal with a a scenario like that.

Other people had come in and to put their skills from time to time, coming in once or twice a week perhaps if it was say the the local BT engineers making looking at their equipment.

This is a routine British Telecom emergency communications network test message for regional government headquarters Station 10.

Two test message begins AQK2.

Standby.

FDB8.

They were very rarely fully staffed.

I think there was one situation when it was fully staffed, which was during the minor strike, which is when basically they decided the situation was so dire that they needed to potentially move to disaster planning.

And you mentioned disaster because when you go around the museum, there's the disaster is quite a a theme, isn't it?

It's quite frightening.

Indeed, as soon as you walk in through the building there are decommissioned nuclear weapons completely safe to look at nowadays.

But yeah, the the sort of things that were many, many, many more times powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

They were the nuclear deterrent basically for, for the UK in the 60s, seventies, 80s, 90s.

We work with the atomic weapons establishment at Oldham Mast and they loan us the decommissioned warheads and we work with them to show the public the dangers and the, the skills that are needed And you know, and hopefully making people understand just how awful a nuclear war could be in many ways.

It's not just the, the initial damage which is the problem.

It's all it's everything which comes after, up to and including potentially the the total collapse of society.

We.

Interrupt regular programming to bring you a message from Her Majesty's Government.

Please stand by and await further information.

This is an emergency warning from the BBC.

Information of a possible nuclear strike against this country has been received.

And I think those of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s probably remember that we all feared a nuclear war, didn't we?

That?

But that seems to have.

That's gone away a bit, hasn't it?

Really?

It did.

And then I started working here just after COVID.

And at the time, we used to make a, you know, a little joke with the public about aren't we lucky that the, you know, the nuclear war apocalypse never happened.

And basically we're dealing with with little germs, staying at home, watching box sets on TV, trying not to be bored out of our minds.

But then, you know, as, as these things often do, the world changed again and we had a little war going on in the Ukraine, which has brought everything back to very, very sharp focus for.

And it seems remarkable that we're so close to the canal and yet the whole place was secret and people didn't really know it was here.

Indeed, apparently the personnel posted here in the 50s and 60s during their their free time would climb up onto the roof of the building.

There was a sort of an area where they could relax and have a few minutes outside and wave to the boaters.

But not when it was probably.

No, no.

So they must have known something was going on here.

But as to exactly what that was, I think they were they, you know, they would be blissfully unaware.

And now everyone is blissfully aware because there's signs about the secret you'd.

Indeed, it's one of the little jokes, isn't it?

We get people coming in from a far and wide who like to tell us about how it's not such a secret bunker anymore because they followed the signs to get here.

Well, after that brief visit to reality, we're back on the move in the world of the canals and just north of the bridge where you can walk to the nuclear bunker from there are the 2 hack green locks.

Now we're in the Cheshire Plain here, so the two locks only go down 12 feet between them, and in fact the next lock on the Shropshire Union mainline is almost 9 miles further on.

Now at the top lock there's a former stables and that's a reminder of when the horse drawn fly boats used to operate on the canal.

They were often carrying perishable cargoes and they used to run 24 hours a day.

And there were regular stables all along the route so that the horses could be changed.

And if you just look behind the stables, you can see the site of the nuclear bunker.

You can't actually see the bunker itself because the trees have grown up.

But you can see one of the big radars and you can certainly see the massive great communications tower, which is one of the reasons that the mobile signal is so good.

Even though we're in the middle of nowhere, we're down the locks.

And that means that's all for this episode of The Water Rd.

The podcast is produced and presented by me, Adam Porter.

If you want to find out more about the Hack Green Secret Nuclear bunker, there's a link in the episode description.

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