Regional Seat Of Government

War Room with Regional Seat of Government

A complex of reinforced concrete structures built in the early 1950s with the Regional Seat of Government added in the early 1960s. The site is located on Brooklands Avenue and forms one of only two purpose-built Regional Seats of Government constructed in Britain during the early 1960s.

The War Room is a two-storey surface structure with a smaller footprint. Its interior is planned around a central map room surrounded by control cabins, offices and a plant room. The building presents a plain elevational treatment, with a projecting parapet to its flat roof and a steel-doored entrance at the north-east corner.

The much larger Regional Seat of Government is attached to the south-east elevation of the War Room. Its interior is subdivided into plant rooms and offices on the ground floor with dormitories above. The exterior displays a distinctly Brutalist appearance, featuring elevations that are unpunctuated by windows and relieved only by formed concrete hoods to external duct openings. These include four air intake openings for the plant rooms, with raised exhaust vents on the roof. The elevations incorporate washed gravel panels alternating with plain concrete panels, the latter subtly decorated through the use of shuttering boards. All rainwater pipes are protected by curved stainless steel shields. The main entrance with steel doors is located in the south-west elevation.

The War Room's map room features an inserted suspended floor viewed from the control cabins through perspex screens. During its final phase of use, two cabins were occupied by the Deputy Regional Commissioner and Deputy Principal Officer. The original air filtration plant installed in 1953 includes a Cyclone Fan supplied by Matthews and Yates Manchester Cyclone Works, Swinton, and two alternating current Cylent electric motors. Air conditioning was provided by galvanised metal ducting fixed to the ceilings. The room contains wooden doors with bakelite fittings (where original) and concrete stairs.

The Regional Seat of Government interior features concrete stairs and wooden doors to all rooms. Most of the plant was replaced in 1988. The kitchen contains a tea bar with a boiler resited from the 1950s War Room.

Historical Context

This structure represents a unique example in Britain of a building designed to operate in a post-nuclear attack environment where Brutalist architectural treatment was deliberately employed to express its grim function. The building documents a significant shift in British civil defence planning during the Cold War.

From the 1920s, the country was divided into 12 Home Defence Regions, each to be controlled by a Regional Commissioner in case of emergency. Initially these regions were to be run from existing government offices or improvised basement shelters. In the early 1950s, each of the 12 Regional Commissioners was provided with a War Room to protect them and their staff of around 50 from an atomic bomb attack.

By the late 1950s, the greater threat posed by the Soviet hydrogen bomb led to a restructuring of emergency government arrangements. The smaller War Rooms were replaced with larger Regional Seats of Government designed for around 200 staff. This expansion reflected the recognition that regions would need to remain autonomous for longer periods due to the greater devastation posed by hydrogen weapons. All were provided with thick external walls to resist blast, heat and radiation penetration, air filtration plant, standby generators, canteens, dormitories, operations rooms, communications facilities and support areas. Although designers recognised that no structure could withstand the full effects of an hydrogen bomb, they primarily concerned themselves with protecting staff against the effects of fallout.

Nine Regional Seats of Government were constructed in England, of which Cambridge and Nottingham were the only purpose-built examples. This juxtaposition of the War Room and Regional Seat of Government symbolises the evolution of government planning from a relatively small regional centre to counter atomic bomb devastation, to a far larger structure needed to house staff to control the region after hydrogen bomb attack.

The poet Adrian Mitchell, associated with the Liverpool beat poetry movement, wrote a poem entitled "On the Beach at Cambridge" based around the Brooklands bunker in 1981.