Regional War Room 6, Reading

Reading's Top Secret Government Cold War Bunker.

Which is remarkably intact in two of the rooms the rest were sadly altered over the years to become suitable for other uses before becoming derelict.

Inside it blew my mind, it is very well-preserved, the machines and giant generators are all intact and look like they were in operation recently. As you enter the bunker you go past a rather weird red blast door. Looking at it up close it does not look like it would survive a nuclear bomb, with it being less than 10cm thick.  As you head down the corridor you reach a flight of stairs on the right leading down into a flooded basement which had a horrible rotten egg smell to it: I didn't stay to long down there long! As you walk pass the stairs down the corridor I found what was the former Control Room, which now looks to have a false floor added and was full of mouldy books.  The windows have been removed, but the frames where the windows would have been are still there. As you go back towards the blast door, on the right is the plant room, one of the most interesting rooms in there, in my opinion. Everything intact and looks like it could work if the power was on.

As you come out of the plant room, walk back up the corridor and turn left, there is another blast door, of exactly the same type as the main front door. In the shower rooms and toilets there was not much to see except piles of potting compost, left by the horticulture department of the university. The basement level was empty except for an interesting looking regional map detailing the local area. All the other rooms had electrical equipment dumped in them by the university staff and growing rooms left over from plant experiments. There was one bizarre looking room at the far end of the corridor in the basement, with some rather weird graffiti on the walls and a bed. My theory is that when the university no longer used the building a homeless person got inside. It's a shame such a cool Cold War bunker in my home town is standing empty. I think the university could do better than leaving it derelict: like possibly turn it into a museum. They could remove the false walls and floors and take away all the modern rubbish left in there. As I exited the bunker, further down the road around half a mile past the former War Time Offices & Hospital Building is a rather strange-looking white box. My first thought was that it was a generator room, but as I looked around it I noticed it had a blast wall. As soon as I saw that I knew that it was an air raid shelter. The shelter didn't have much to see inside except the graffiti, probably left by maintenance staff over the years as well as an odd-looking air compressor which looks like it went out of action a few years ago.