If the Soviet Union decides to launch its nuclear missiles on this part of the country, two part time members of the Royal Observer Corps will entomb themselves in these cold dank chambers, and breathing filtered air, they will use their measuring equipment to relay information to the operations room at Regional Group Headquarters at Durham on the size of the blast, the direction of the atomic cloud and the amount of radiation on the surface.
  
I was told that the Observers were likely to remain in these shelters for as long as three weeks and to relieve the strain and tedium, the Government in one of its rare light-hearted moments, has kindly agreed to supply a set of dominoes, a pack of playing cards and a dart board, all of which might have been better appreciated had not the shelter’s only illumination been a tiny torch bulb running off a 12-volt battery. As to the sanitary arrangements in these bunkers – well it’s best not to ask.
  
“Should an attack take place we are in a position to give an overall picture of the amount of radiation in any given part of the country” a Civil Defence spokesman told me. Some hope.
  
What he failed to explain was if a surprise attack took place, how the part time observers were going to get from their place of work, or homes, to the shelters in time, given that Fylingdales monitoring station near Whitby, offered just five minutes warning of such an attack. Another unanswered question was what would the observers do when they finally surfaced to a bleak uninhabited moonscape.
  
Other bunkers are to be located at Redcar, Saltburn, Eaglescliffe, Loftus, Hinderwell, Castleton, Osmotherly and Upsall.
  
Now in 1998 - The Tree Brigg shelter is still by the road side and many others can still be seen around the area. They were de-commissioned in 1992 when then Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke mindful of the thaw in the cold war decided they were no longer necessary. The Regional, and Monitoring Headquarters have been sold off, their powerful aerials being of particular interest to mobile telephone companies and the aircraft industry. But the local bunkers remain, of little use to anyone. The land they occupy was leased to the Government, but these leases have now expired, leaving the landowners with the problem of disposal. They have little practical use apart from storage, and are likely to remain – like the pill boxes of the last war - as symbols of a frightening era.

This article originally appeared in the May 1998 issue of Now & Then Magazine