WALKING IN BUNKERS

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:

WALKING IN BUNKERS

And speaking (obliquely) of walking and San Francisco … I’ve been reading Paul Virilio’s book Bunker Archeology. Virilio, invariably described as a philosopher, urbanist, and cultural theorist, here writes writing about the French bunkers, part of the “Atlantic Wall,” built under Hitler’s instructions, from Norway to the South of France, during World War Two.  Virilio says that when he was a child in France he never saw the sea because the French coast had been turned into a no man’s land, scattered with defensive structures, in anticipation of an Allied invasion. 

As a grown up, he walked daily along the beach, exploring, photographing and philosophizing about the concrete bunkers that could still be found every few miles.  He concluded that these bunkers were “symbols of the fragility of the Nazi state.  This cryptic architecture became the marker for the evolution of Hitlerian space.”  The notion that bunkers are a sign of fragility is an interesting one, but I wonder if there’s any civilization that hasn’t built bunkers of one kind or another.

It so happens that San Francisco has its own line of bunkers, along with other attendant fortfications, as in fact as does the whole of the American coast: a sort of “Pacific Wall” built to deter enemies coming in across the water, be they real or imaginary, Mexican, Japanese, or Russian.  It’s tempting to see this as simple American paranoia, but in fact in fact the first San Francisco bunkers were built by the Spanish.

The San Francisco bunkers are on the west coast of the peninsula, all along the side of the Presidio, once an impenetrable military base, now a public park.  I decided I’d walk the length of the Presidio, from the southwest corner, take the path that goes past various bunkers, battlements and batteries – Battery Chamberlin, Battery Crosby, Battery Godfrey, Battery Boutelle, et al -and end up somewhere under the Golden Gate Bridge.  That’s not a huge distance, not more than a couple of miles, though with plenty of up and downs and detours, including the Battery to Bluffs Trail, if you choose to take them.

I’d been told that this area is known in some quarters as “bad boy beach,” a hot bed of gay sex, but I couldn’t see any evidence of this.  Maybe it was too cold.  I did see a couple of professional dog walkers at the southern end, and increasing numbers of more or less serious walkers, and even runners, as I got further north, but in general the stretch was thinly populated.

Of course the ocean is the attraction for a lot of people, and there’s a pretty fabulous view of the bridge for most of the way, and yet the bunkers still felt like the real attraction, and I didn’t see any anybody resisting the urge to walk among them, going up and up and down the steps, climbing the parapets, walking on the roofs, on what would have been the impenetrable face they toward the enemy.

I’m still trying to work out exactly what’s so great about these bunkers, and perhaps all bunkers; I think it’s because that they’re so uncompromising, they’re absolutely functional, built exactly the way they need to be built, without decoration or aesthetic consideration, they don’t look like any other kind of building, they’re completely themselves and yet when you want among them it’s as moving as walking in the ruins of ancient Greece.

There are still several thousand World War Two pillboxes scattered around Britain, there were originally 28,000 of them apparently.  When I used to live East Anglia, in Suffolk, I’d always come across a pillbox or two when I was walking, nothing as grand as those in the Presidio,  and not nearly as photogenic as Virilio's, but they were appealing for many of the same reasons.  The coast itself had bunkers bunkers too – I used to poke around in one close to the Sizewell power station - looking out across the North Sea, ready for a German invasion just as the Germans behind the Atlantic Wall were ready for an Allied invasion.  Last time I was in England I walked by, and even into this, very fine example in Hartford End, Felsted; above and below.