Our Visit to Gravesend Nuclear Bunker
on 6th May 2026.
Four members of the Civil Defence Living History Group paid a visit to the wonderfully restored Civil Defence Corps Headquarters bunker in Gravesend.
We would like to thank Jay, Bob and David for their hospitality and it was great to meet more CDC history enthusiasts. We hope we get a chance to visit again in the future.
The bunker Opened on 7th July1954 as a Civil Defence Corps (CDC) Sub-Divisional and District headquarters for Gravesend, Northfleet and Swanscomb. The bunker cost £11,000 (roughly equal to £400,000 today) and closed in March 1968 when
the CDC was disbanded.
In 1995, the New Tavern Fort Project (now renamed Thames Defence Heritage) asked Gravesend Borough Council for permission to restore the bunker which was granted. The bunker was officially opened and a museum in 2004 and in 2013, it was
designated a Grade II Listed Building.
After a brief period of closure during 2014-2018 due to flooding issues, the bunker re-opened in 2018 and remains one of the best (if not the best) Cold War CDC bunkers in Britain. The bunker has a
Facebook page and this web site where you can contact them for information about tours.
This area is where the Sub-Divisional control room was but is now used for talks and give the volunteers a place to do their introduction on tours.
This room held tables for CDC operations staff who dealt with the wider picture of local action covering Gravesend, Northfleet and Swanscomb rather than that at district level
Also, in this room, you can also see a WE177 air-dropped nuclear bomb (the training version
) which was our main
aircraft dropped nuclear weapon from 1966 to 1998. Depending on the version (A,B or C), it had a warhead on 0.5 to 450 kilotons.
The Messengers’ Room is where messages or orders would be given to runners or dispatch riders to take to other sites as needed.
The Message Room has 12 little booths for its operators. Note the old fashioned “candlestick” telephones used with headphones. Half of the booths were for incoming calls and half for outgoing ones.
This is the Liaison Officers’ room and has a manual telephone branch exchange connected to internal extension and to outside lines via a junction box under the road outside.
The District Control Room is where local operations in Gravesend would have been planned and the resources boards and local map kept up to date. The tables had positions for the Operations Officer and the heads for each of the five sections
of the CDC (Headquarters, Rescue, Ambulance, Wardens & Welfare) . The side table were to be used by the map-plotters, the Movements Officer and the Scientific Intelligence Officer who tracked fallout and chemical and biological attack.
A Recconnaissance Team Leader makes his report using the local map and then heads for a cuppa!
This drinks area shows some of the insulated food containers used by the CDC Welfare section at the time. In fact, when they designed
the bunker, they forgot to put a kitchen in! Instead they added a small partition in the
Sub-Divisional control room to act as a kitchenette.
The Controller’s Room is a simple wooden partition and allows the Head of the Operations to see and access both control rooms.
Separate men’s (see above) & women’s toilets were provided with ‘Elsan’ toilets & electric water heaters. – I wonder who would have
had the job of going outside to empty the ‘Elsans’ as there was no way of disposing of the contents inside the bunker.
In the original layout their were 3 dormitories for men (see below) & 1 for women (see above) giving 8 men’s beds & 6 for women.
In the current set up of the bunker, two of the men’s dormitories have been used to make a mock-up of a Royal Observer Corps post.
Above ground there is relatively little to see in the corner of a park.
There is a 30ft radio mast in a roadside style lamp post. This is connected via an underground cable to the Message Room.
Sources:
All photos are mine except for the first one which was taken by one of the volunteers.
The information comes from my notes of the excellent tour and from this brilliant book:
Preparing for Armageddon. The Story of Gravesend's Cold War Bunker. by Victor Smith, 2020.
