ABSTRACT
There are numerous iconic spaces and sites in the UK that haunt (and taunt) us with their inaccessibility – of right of entry, archived knowledge and legibility. Like the architectural equivalent of exotic fauna, these structures, specifically Cold War ones, exert a compelling fascination. There is an astounding affective power to these strange architectural structures that are familiar in material but otherwise utterly alien in form. They are enigmatic yet distinguished by their sheer scale and harsh geometries. The design is rigidly functional: the primary materials are often concrete, steel and earth – hard and soft materials combined to form reverberant monoliths. Yet gaining physical admittance to these abandoned defence sites can sometimes be as problematic as if they were still active. Additionally, access to detailed textual/visual information about the work undertaken there can be restricted or forbidden to the layperson, since many of the most important (nuclear) sites are still covered by the Official Secrets Act. Papers, photographs, films and other data are not yet, and may never be, in the public realm and former employees must remain silent about the work they performed there. Without knowledge to project onto these sites during the course of a visit, one must let the places speak for themselves. These architectural forms communicate more than their pure materiality, however, the difficulty of mediating the value of a monument is particularly acute for those monuments that Norbert Huse (1997)1 described as being ‘uncomfortable monuments’:
These are monuments that predominantly – because of their history – remind us of politically uncomfortable or painful times, or mark places of human suffering and fate, or cause uneasy emotions among visitors because of a clear attribution or use by predominantly authoritarian political systems.
(Schofield et al., 2006: 7–8) Monuments of the Cold War, defined as “structures built, or adapted, to carry out nuclear war between the end of the Second World War and 1989” (Cocroft and Thomas, 2003: 2) are profoundly paradoxical, moreover: often formally banal while radiating fearsome associations.