Nuclear bunker refit into home for historic records on environment to cost close to £2m

Close to £2m will need to be spent refitting a former nuclear bunker to turn into an archive for historic records on the environment, it has emerged.

The NI Regional War Room in south Belfast, one of 13 similar buildings constructed across the UK in the early years of the Cold War, will become the home of the Historic Environment Record of Northern Ireland (HERoNI).

Firms are being asked to submit tenders for the refit of the B1 listed building, with its spare interior that includes a double-height map room with smaller rooms branching off from the centre. The tender price listed by the Department for Communities is just over £1.8m

The bunker, built in 1952 and situated on Mount Eden Park in the Malone area of the city, was to be used as an emergency centre in the event of a nuclear attack.

It was designed to accommodate 45 designated government officials who would coordinate an emergency response and effectively take over the running of the north.

The location was chosen deliberately to be at a distance from the city centre, out of the primary and secondary blast range of an atomic bomb.

External concrete walls 1.5 metres thick are topped with a reinforced concrete roof. It was also designed to withstand a direct hit from a 500lb bomb.

Rhonda Robinson, the DfC’s principal archaeologist, previously told the BBC the building was “one of a kind”.

“We want to make sure we look after these archives and find a sustainable reuse for rare buildings, so this is a great combination,” Ms Robinson said.

“The fact that this building is very cold, has thick walls and no windows, makes it perfect for archive storage.”

Within a short time after the construction of the bunkers UK-wide, it was realised they would not be fit to be centres for co-ordinating a long recovery.

The advent of the far more powerful thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb – first detonated by the US in 1952, then by the USSR in 1955 – further made such structures entirely obsolete.

In the late 50s, the centre of post-nuclear bomb emergency operations was switched to a much larger facility within Gough Barracks in Armagh.

The south Belfast bunker maintained as a more localised Belfast Corporation facility, shut in the late 1960s then reactivated in the early 1980s as a regional headquarters.

In more recent years, it was used as a store for Courts Service records.

The DfC was contacted for comment.

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