Bunker mentality

Nigel Hugill, chief executive of Urban & Civic, is showing reporters around one of his favourite buildings at Alconbury Weald, its development on an old RAF airfield in Cambridgeshire. This is not one of Urban & Civic’s smart new buildings. This is the Magic Mountain, a Cold War nuclear bunker which boasts a blast cap made of rubble and a gravel lower layer that would absorb a nuclear blast. Completed in 1988, it was never used in anger because almost as soon as it opened the Iron Curtain started to fall. It cost £58m to build. “That’s more than we paid for the site,” observes Hugill dryly. Given the concrete walls were built to withstand a nuclear blast, any plans to turn the grade II-listed bunker into, say, an educational or heritage attraction could be tricky.

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