Of course I don’t actually walk IN bunkers. I walk to and from bunkers, or past bunkers, and occasionally I go into one one, but many of them are too small to stand up in, let alone walk in. And I admit that I'm using the term loosely, some of the things I call bunkers are no doubt actually pillboxes and observation posts, along other things, but then, I’m a layman.
This one, which is I think the most extraordinary bunker I’ve ever seen, was somewhere near San Diego on the Pacific Coast, though nobody was allowed in.
There is no shortage of bunkers and such along that coastline. This is part of a series just north of San Francisco, and you could poke around there to your heart’s content:
There’s a great pleasure in going for a walk and suddenly coming across a bunker when you least expect it, like this one by a recreation ground in Saxmundham.
This one is near Walton-on-the-Naze:
This one I did go inside this one – as had others before me – hence the phallic graffiti.
And here’s one that’s local to me, by the river Stour, in Essex, well dug into the earth, located between Manningtree and Cattawade.
The council just sent somebody just cut all the tall weeds around it so you can walk down and peer in through the gun holes, or embrasures, though I couldn’t see much of anything in there. And you could go inside if you really wanted to, but you’d have to crawl through broken glass and who knows what else:
And last weekend in Hackney Wick, which is generally ‘street art central’ there was this rather well decorated one.
And I did wonder for a moment whether decoration this was in some way ‘a bad thing’ but actually it reinforced the idea of how surprisingly (not completely) untouched so many of the similar structures are. Why is that? Respect for wartime ‘monuments’? Maybe, though it seems unlikely.
But if you really want to bunker down, you could do worse that head for Harwich, in general.
And specifically for the Beacon Hill Fort with shelters, gun emplacements, underground magazines, petrol and oil stores, and some things called spigot mortars. Paul Virilio would have had a field day, as did I.
And if you just wanted to walk, there’s always the Squirrel Trail.
Our hero amid the bunker ruins:
