Top Secret War Rooms on Reading Campus grounds NUCLEAR BUNKER RSG 6

Reading War Room, completed in 1953, was the regional base for Home Defence Region 6 during the early Cold War, and was designed to protect the functions of regional government from the atomic bomb and to co-ordinate defence. It is designated at Grade II for the following principal reasons: * A remarkably intact early 1950s war room which has experienced very little in the way of alteration since built; * A building which expresses through its monumental and robust form the threat posed by the atomic bomb; * A plan which illustrates the needs and functions of regional government in that decade; * One of only thirteen war rooms nationally of the early 1950s; * One of only four surviving in England built to the two-storey semi-sunken design.
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Reading War Room ('The Citadel'), Univ ersity of Reading

II Reading War Room, completed 1953. A War room for Home Defence Region 6 (one of ten such regions in England) to protect regional government and co-ordinate defence in the event of an atomic attack.



HISTORY: By 1951 the construction of buildings to protect the functions of government against the atomic bomb had been agreed. One war room was to be built in each of the ten Home Defence Regions into which England was divided. The exception to this was the London Region which was provided with four war rooms making a total in England of thirteen. All except one (in Newcastle-upon-Tyne) were purpose-built structures. The defence regions had their origins in the Second World War when plans were made for the eventuality that central government was disrupted or destroyed. Each had a regional commissioner who would govern and organise his region and its defence until such time as things returned to normal. The new war rooms were located in the same cities as their wartime predecessors but were usually built on government estates so that they could sit alongside the offices of other ministries. The war room designs were in progress by October 1951 and the last one to be completed was Birmingham in 1956. Each had a reinforced concrete structure with extremely thick external walls (1.45m) and roof (1.5m) and further reinforced concrete internal partition walls as well as its own generators, air filtration system and water supply. The function of the war rooms was to gather information in the event of an attack and to co-ordinate rescue and welfare facilities in support of the regional government.

There were three different designs: single storey surface buildings; two-storey surface buildings; and two-storey semi-sunken buildings as at Reading but in plan they followed a broadly similar pattern. Essentially, as well as the aforementioned plant rooms and water storage facilities, each had a central map room with control rooms, offices and communications rooms surrounding it, as well as ablutions, dormitories and a canteen. The buildings provided protection for the staff within (approximately 50 people including the commissioner, police and military liaison officers, telephonists, telex operators and secretaries, hospital and fire service liaison staff and a science officer), as well as the collection and analysis of data and the dissemination of decisions for the organisation of the particular defence region. The importance of the map room can be seen by its central position at the heart of the building and, in relation to the two-storey design, it occupied the full height of the building with overlooking control cabins on both the lower and upper floors.

Reading War Room was completed in 1953. It was located on the wartime government estate at Whiteknights and some of the pre-fabricated buildings from this use still survive in its vicinity. It was the war room for Home Defence Region 6 which broadly covered Dorset, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Reading and other regional war rooms were replaced in the early 1960s by Regional Seats of Government which were better equipped to cope with the hydrogen bomb (the detonation of the Soviet H-bomb in August 1963 was the catalyst for this change in strategy). Reading War Room thus became the communications centre for the Warren Row Regional Seat of Government near Henley-on-Thames, Oxon. More recently it has been used by the University of Reading for document storage and by Plant Sciences.








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