The Nuclear War Base Designed To Save The Nation [4K] | Underground Britain

britain's a small island with an extraordinary past and amazing landscapes but what we see above ground is only half the story i'm traveling the length and breadth of our country to see it from a whole new perspective underground i'm rob bell and i'm on a subterranean mission i'm exploring the mysteries and wonders that lie right under our feet you've got to make yourself as small as possible from man-made to natural wonders it's just so much to take in here [Applause] many are forgotten corners from the darkest points in history there's a real presence down here this is an adventure of those places beneath the surface a journey through underground britain [Music] this time my journey takes me to southern england i'll be exploring a top secret installation designed to save the nation 35 days without becoming contaminated i'll descend into perilous tunnels dug out in search of precious metal this is what they came down here for and i'll uncover a subterranean labyrinth with a mystical past the ghost of a druid with a sickle dripping with human blood i begin my underground adventure in south devon's torquay a picturesque seaside town that's been a popular holiday destination since victorian times [Music] but i'm here to uncover a much older story on the trail of some of britain's very first humans archaeological investigations have revealed that people didn't start visiting just a few hundred years ago torquay's been a stopover for the last half a million years and the choice of prehistoric accommodation a cave i'm on my way to a remarkable one to find out how this quiet corner of britain turned the idea of where we come from on its head it's called kent's cavern and what was discovered here rewrote the history books i don't know about you but when i think of caves i think of coastal cliffs or hidden away up in the mountains somewhere remote i certainly don't think of a built up urban environment but the entrance to kent's cavern is just in here [Music] here we go stepping beyond this i'm having my own little narnia moment here [Music] just a few steps and you're straight in look at this it sounds different it feels different it's much cooler in here it's enormous kent's cavern was created around 2 million years ago by water carving its way through the limestone [Music] some of the formations feel really alien but the colors are really deep and rich and earthy [Music] 200 years ago people were starting to question the story of life on earth believing that kent's caverns ancient rock may hold clues early antiquarian explorers decided to excavate it back then the cave looked very different to what we see today we're walking at a level that's not the original floor the original floor that was here in 1865 before the victorians started excavating was much higher so the floor would have been way up there way above my head probably twice as high as where we're standing right now this was completely in filled with mud and rocks and boulders about 8 000 tons of rubble that was taken out amongst the rubble the victorian excavators found the bones of animals that had long since disappeared from britain [Music] we found evidence of mammoth lots of mammoth teeth found in here sabretooth tiger if you know where to look you can even see ancient bones still embedded in the cave roof here's a bear the skull of a cave bear that lived here some 320 000 years ago in torquay you had bears roaming around and dwelling in caves so it died probably in hibernation the bears were hibernating in these caves here in tokyo the creatures came here during cold periods in the ice ages when temperatures and sea levels were much lower and britain was connected to europe by a vast land bridge across what's now the north sea and english channel outside look completely different summer temperatures 12 degrees maybe maximum so these mammoths are just kind of trundling across the north sea trending across the channel coming here and then trembling back again and that's and that's how we've got this incredible evidence of these ice age animals i'm struggling to imagine prehistoric animals roaming past the spot where talkies bnbs stand today but the evidence is all here in the town's museum [Music] this is impressive this is all been excavated from ken's cavern deer bones hyena lots of hyena from the cave rhino even lots of rhino as well oh mammoth teeth these are mammoth milk teeth they're in amazing condition aren't they they're beautifully preserved yeah obviously mammoths weren't actually living in the cave they're too big an animal so these things have been cracked in by hyenas the most extensive victorian excavation of kent's cavern was led by a dedicated explorer william pangeli who excavated over 80 000 finds from the cave and meticulously numbered each one here we have a box of bare bones we can see on here that it's got a number and that's a pangeli number oh yeah just in here yeah and that's pangaea's original numbering on that angeli's handwriting he he actually wrote on every bone himself this is one of pangeli's original diaries this is 6626 and it says uh he's excavating on thursday 29th of july in 1875 two teeth of bare bones and pieces of bones and we now know that those fines will be around about half a million years old so that's a piece of half a million year old bear but what the archaeologists discovered next changed the history of man and shocked victorians to the core [Music] i'm burrowing through southern england deep under devon i'm in kent's cavern an extraordinary cave system where ice age beasts once sheltered but findings uncovered by victorian archaeologists suggest they weren't the only residents there were early humans too some of the oldest evidence of human activity in britain were found underneath this floor flint hand axes it's clearly been formed into some kind of working tool and you could have used it as a hammer action okay possibly sort of a scraping it may not look much but rocks like this shaped by a human hand in the prehistoric past were world changing most early victorians believed the earth and man was as the bible stated created by god only around 6 000 years ago but the victorian archaeologist who did the main excavation in these caves william pangeli estimated that these rock formations took tens of thousands of years to be created by nature and the axes were found underneath them so the tools had to be even older than the rocks above to suggest that man was older than 6 000 years old was something that for the for the victorian society was hugely controversial in fact it was so controversial that the discoveries at kent's cavern were banned from any discussion because at the time it was accepted that man had come as the bible states yes so something that contradicted that so so violently almost must have been almost impossible to for societies to accept to think that they'd actually live with prehistoric animals was unthinkable modern dating techniques show that the tool is around half a million years old which means its maker was a member of a very early human species homo heidelbergensis another discovery this time of an actual human bone proves that another later species of human used this cave it doesn't look like much does it have a few teeth uh in a piece of bone and this is uh is actually the uh the oldest human fossil ever found in britain this is a replica of the 41 000 year old human jaw its owner was an early homo sapiens it's from early modern humans so from people that thought and felt and had the same feelings as us but our ancestors lived in a very different world what it might be is that that person died in or near the cave and then was dragged into the cave by hyenas who then ate the body leaving the hardest part which is this piece of the jaw oh grizzly another find dating back ten thousand years suggests humans actually lived here archaeologists have discovered some of the very first purpose-made lighting they found empty scallop shells that had traces of burning on them and it's thought that they were filled with a mixture of dry moss and animal fats [Music] now these could burn for around an hour and light up the cave it's really really effective it's incredible to be in this cave thousands of years later and see the world as our ancient ancestors would have known it leaving the ice ages far behind i'm traveling southwest to a secret underground installation it's a glimpse into one of the darkest chapters of recent history but looking down on south devon's picturesque coastline it's hard to imagine anything sinister down there the location i'm told is just a mile in land where during world war ii there was a major airstrip raf bolt head played a small but vital role in winning the war 70 years ago even so what's that got to do with underground britain well it's what happened next with that building right down there that i'm interested in [Music] it's called bolt head bunker and when it was built it was one of the most hush-hush locations in the country the building holds the secret to our government's defense plans against nuclear war nuclear explosions are caused by weapons such as h-bombs or atom bombs they are like ordinary explosions only many times more powerful they cause great heat and blast so severe that it can kill they also make a cloud of deadly dust which falls slowly to the ground this is what is called fallout shortly after world war ii the soviet union and america were threatening each other with nuclear missiles as an ally of america the uk was a target stepping back 40 years this public information film was designed to keep the general public above ground calm [Music] but the moment the government feared a nuclear missile was on its way they planned to move underground this is sterile [Music] if world war three broke out the country would be divided into regional seats of government and bolt head bunker would be region seven secret headquarters it takes you right back to that cold war era but how could the top brass in bolt head bunker govern a population of around 5 million people living in an area stretching from gloucestershire to cornwall all the local councillors local technicians all the emergency services they would all congregate here to effectively control and look after the whole of the southwest wow it's quite a massive area isn't it it is yes so how many people do you think would have been down here had had there been a nuclear fallout in that that could have been between two and 300 personnel here and they would have been shut in here for that that whole period to try and get this part of the country region seven back up and running again yes while there was an emergency situation they'd be shut down within this bunker if the soviet union had hit the red button i can only imagine what it been like above ground mass destruction and mayhem the job of the people in this bunker was to try to keep some sort of order amongst the chaos these rooms here all formed the communications hub down here you've got the telephone exchange in there 400 lines coming in and out this would have been full of teleprinters again messages coming in and out for the duration of the cold war this bunker's 28 rooms were kept in pristine working order ready to become region seven's headquarters all staff including 88 year old tom geeches were sworn to secrecy so tom what's it like being back down here in bulkhead well it's amazing really when you when you think about it i mean i spent a third third of my life here did you really how many years was 29. so what was your job down here watchmen we recalled there are three of us you have to look after the place keep it clean keep it tidy so between the three of you there'd be somebody here 24 7. 24 hours a day seven days a week so this this place then was watched and maintained and looked after 24 hours a day just in case just in case somebody dropped the bomb tom regularly signed in the nation's top military officials to bolt head bunker the army used to come here the army and the air force and the navy come once or twice and they had exercises here with all the machinery downstairs we weren't allowed to go in and see him or nothing so even that was secret to you yeah oh yeah yeah we we weren't allowed in when the when the troops were here it seems the government did at least have a cold war plan in place but if a nuclear missile hit would bolt head bunker be up to the job it's pretty obvious this is built for her protection i mean this looks pretty solid and just how thick's this concrete they're approximately a meter thick of pure concrete yes oh really heavily reinforced with steel what about the roof because that seems safe yep almost a meter thick reinforced with steel and then finally underneath as well same again so we really are in a in a concrete one meter thick concrete box absolutely down here but if the air above ground was contaminated with radiation and fallout how would those down here breathe in clean air we're actually in what is effectively a massive air duct the air has been drawn in through here from outside from outside and then in through these skills it also goes into the main fan just down below [Music] to me it looks like any modern air conditioning system but would it be able to shut out contaminated air what would happen if there had been nuclear fallout the gills would be shut tight this door will be shut tight and then the air is then diverted through these filters here and they'll take out the polluted air before it goes into the main system i'm not convinced the 1950s style cooker hood technology would have been up to the job [Music] and i reckon there's another weak point surely the doors here would have been a bit of a weakness you can see the rubber seals on these doors and the idea was that the door closed that formed a seal which is supposed to be airtight this that's it yeah there's one in here as well isn't it yeah it's heavy [Music] and that just and that's it that is the only protection against air coming in this is 1950s technology early technology i love how we're calling this rubber seal technology yeah sealed inside the building a complex system of generators was designed to keep the power switched on but for how long 35 days in the hope that the radiation levels had depleted enough to be able to go back outside and do anything you needed to do without becoming contaminated two generators running 24 hours a day that's your electricity heating air conditioning air ventilation everything yeah your life depends on those generators because if the generators stop the air conditioning stops the lights go and you can imagine being in here with no lights no air it's quite a nightmare scenario so actually the plans to survive here were as good as they could come up with but they were hardly foolproof there was a lot of hope [Music] if the country's military radar stations detected a missile heading our way the nation would have had just four minutes to take cover [Music] had there been the four-minute warning would you have been down inside this bunker as well well i think if the truth was known if anything had been going on a lot of the higher-ups would have been in here and i think it was going to kick us through what's been out do you think so i'm pretty sure they were for nearly 30 years bolt head bunker was kept ready for action it wasn't until 1994 after the collapse of the soviet union that region 7 secret headquarters were finally closed the next stage of my journey under southern england takes me east to the roman times and beyond i'm heading to an enigmatic warren of tunnels beneath chiselhurst above ground chiselhurst is a leafy commuter town popular with london city workers but scratch beneath the surface you'll find a whole different world underground these are chiselhurst caves a dark mysterious maze of man-made tunnels local legend says they're 8 000 years old and there are tales of miners smugglers and even human sacrifice so i want to sort out the fact from the fiction and find out just what has been the enduring pull of this underground labyrinth [Music] these caves stretch on and on for a staggering 22 miles and just listen to that echo here we go [Music] the victorians opened a section of chiselhurst caves to the paying public in 1900 visitors flocked to hear elaborate tales of the cave's dark past these were reinforced by early archaeologists who were eager to connect the creation of the tunnels to some lurid historic stories now i think i'm at this place right here at least i think i am this is the druid section there's also an anglo-saxon section and a roman section but they all look pretty similar to me jason my first question is how have these caves come about being here technically they're mines they're only caves because we're underground and the stuff the miners were after was chalk it's claimed the mines go back nearly 2 000 years to roman britain so what were they after all this chalk for well they would have dug it out nice and soft pulled it up top and then they would have burnt it in kilns or killed pits to bake lime and they would have used that lime and the plaster the mortar the cement to build all their bath houses their walls the lovely villas that they lived in in fact the road going into london that old roman road this is the tool that would have been used to create those things but it wasn't just sweat and toil that brought people down here it's rumored these caves were used as a place of ancient worship and human sacrifice [Music] my underground expedition through southern england has brought me to chiselhurst caves this man-made labyrinth has attracted stories of magic and mysticism my mission is to sort the fact from the fiction it really is an absolute maze down here every few meters there's a tunnel heading off in one direction or another it's been said these caves were once home to the ancient druids history books tell us very little about these mysterious iron age priests but people have suggested they performed pagan rituals here in chiselhurst caves there's plenty of evidence that prehistoric people found caves religious they deposited offerings in them all the way from the old stone age right down to roman times the romans told stories of druids performing spiritual ceremonies and human sacrifice nearly 2 000 years later victorians picked up on these stories and elaborated them with blood dripping detail the idea of the druids as experts in human sacrifice is quite big in victorian times as a kind of horror picture of ancient paganism to justify being civilized christian and victorian local legend has it that this ledge carved out of the chalk is an altar used by druids for ritual slaughter do we think this could be druid it could be a druid altar but the odds against are less than one in a million we haven't found a single druid altar in the whole of europe but the first visitors to come down here lapped it up it was this brew haha about druid altars that began bringing people down here in large numbers but it actually started the tourist industry for chiselhurst caves but hey it just could be possible but right behind you now in these shadows as the ghost of the druid with a sickle dripping with human blood okay back to reality something we do know is true is that these tunnels were full of chalk and where you get chalk you get this stuff flint flint naturally occurs as nodules in chalk beds most people know it was used to make stone age tools and weapons but flints were still being used to win battles only 200 years ago that's got a heck of a fire to it mark mark's using just the type of rifle with a flintlock firing mechanism which helped defeat the french at the battle of waterloo the flint will fire forward yeah striking the prison it creates a spark to ignite the charge inside the bowel and then you get the discharge so a rifle like this needed a totally trusty flint in battle i like using the darker flint for me is a bit more reliable so when i get given my flint from the sergeant i'll try and get the nice nice dark ones the flint found in chiselhurst caves is dark good quality flint perfect for use against napoleon's army at waterloo is there any chance i could have a go yep really but the cave's association with war doesn't end in napoleonic times during the first world war they were used as an ammunition depot and in world war ii chiselhurst caves became an air raid shelter during the blitz fifteen thousand people took cover down here chiselhurst caves notice were these all rules for 17 rules the rules covered everything from safety to lights out times [Music] i mean look at this no furniture admitted they needed the room for the people what was the setup then would people just come down here for the nights when there was a bombing going on some people would you know just for the evening the airaid siren went off they'd come down but others chose to live here permanently they were fearful the bombs were going to fall destroy the houses those that lost their homes had nowhere to go but it wasn't free they paid sixpence a week for a plot the entrance fee helped pay for power sanitation and ventilation it was vital to keep the air moving as the heat from 15 000 people raised the temperature down here from a constant 10 and a half degrees celsius right up to 28 degrees it was dubbed the underground city it gave them a sense of leaving something devastating up top and coming into a world where they could say everything's fine you had your lights you had all the facilities you could need you had a cinema you had a theater dancehalls you had canteens the church people did die so services could have been performed in the church for them funeral services yeah you had weddings it's a church it's consecrated where else i mean they weren't going to go up top and take the chance on anything up there they felt fully comfortable down here and you had the hospital the only child actually born in the caves kavina was given this spectacular name because she was born inside of the cave hospital due to back-to-back air raids going on up top today the caves are uninhabited only visitors and guides walk these tunnels that echo with real history and tall tales i can see why this winding labyrinth still tempts people to believe in the dark past of chiselhurst leaving the mysteries of the caves far behind i'm heading way out west again to explore underground tunnels dug into the cliffs of cornwall my destination pendine [Music] on cornwall's western tip much of the land is barren and windswept the atlantic ocean menacing but this coastline is also littered with the remnants of an industry that's key to cornwall's heritage below these abandoned chimneys people have gone to amazing lengths to dig out one of the earth's most valuable rocks people have mined this coast for thousands of years i'm in an 85 mile system of tunnels that makes up cornwall's geva mine dug out to produce over 50 000 tons of valuable metal you can still spot it glimmering in the rock they are drilling and blasting a very very narrow seam and that's it here up in the roof to the untrained eye it's hard to see but mike's pointing out a seam containing tin a really narrow tin load and you can see it right here it stands out it goes up above our heads and it goes down below the feet tin has been used throughout history to make everything from bronze weapons to the humble baked bean can it's a metal that changed the world and you can see it's pretty narrow it is pretty narrow but the whole tunnel's pretty narrow as well that's correct [Music] anything outside of that vein is complete waste so in effect the guy is mind to shoulder with as long as they could turn around inside the tunnel that was wide enough for them because the more waste you mind the more rubbish you have to carry out of the mine it's almost kind of surgical precision mining through all this bedrock which explains the size of the tunnels it does indeed [Music] all of this has been brought up from inside the mine this is the fruit of the miner's labour tinor it just looks like any other normal rock to me but to the miners this is where the profits were in the early 19th century the next door the van mine found a way of making tin mining big business oh look at this this is fantastic isn't it all right tell me about this what have we got what is it this is the winding engine for the band mine used to raise the ore up from deep underground up to the surface 24 hours a day and it's what steam driven is it oh steam driven yes that's a beautiful machine does it still work today it does do you want to see it going can we i'd love to i'd absolutely love to we'll get it fired up wow straight away it's really responsive isn't it this is beautiful it's mechanics in motion there's pure mechanics look at the piston up and down so you've got the flywheel turning here and then that's driving what that's driving big spool it's driving it what's called the winding drum but yeah just like spools on the outside of here and two cables running from here over a headgear about 50 meters away over here basically one skip bucket being lowered down the shaft empty at the same time the full one's coming up and then you see this dial up on the wall up here would show the driver where the two skips were in the shaft so when it gets near to the top and the bottom he's then slowing everything down and actually relying on bell signals from the men at those levels to tell him slow slow slow stop i guess you'd have to know where they were because if if that full bucket got to the top full of ore crashed right through the headgear at the top yeah yes disaster not very good yeah might lose your job so this is really really important in the whole function of the mind it is very important yeah it was one of the fastest ones in its day it winched it up at around about 130 meters a minute so you took about four and a half minutes to do a complete lift from bottom to top and this is with a a ton a quartz ton and a half of water in the skin when they introduced steam engines to this miner levant mine in the sort of late 1820s they probably quadruple their production really yeah absolutely straight away yeah [Music] and the technological advances didn't stop there in the early 1900s a new invention sped up the process of extracting the tin from the oar in geva mill the ore was crushed ground into small particles and then transferred onto huge shaking tables this is what's been mined out and ground down correct nothing else has been added nothing else so i'll just spread that along there put it along there okay and let the table do its work there's a slope on the table okay yeah there's a flow of water over the table and there's this movement everything is moving along in this direction because that's the movement of the table oh yeah here you go yeah so the sands is just just making its way slowly with every little shutter it's just there's the darker denser material staying at the head of the table yeah and the waste material goes off in that direction there yeah it's just that's just that's just washed off just washed off there the stuff that we're actually looking for the tin is staying at the head of the table the force of gravity separated the heavier tin crystals from the lighter rock surrounding it and that works its way along falls off the table and there we have it that is fitting this is tin here that's tin oxide in there less than one percent of what came up from underground ended up as being that so what it means is that stuff there has to pay for all of the costs of mining it all of the costs of processing it all the other costs of the mine plus profit and also make a profit for most of the 20th century the geva mine sold its tin worldwide and made a profit of over 7 million pounds but chasing profits cost lives i'm going to experience the extreme risks the miners had to take in their quest for tin [Music] i'm on the final stage of my journey under southern britain throughout history men have taken enormous risks to extract the valuable metal tin from this cornish coastline [Music] following in their trail i'm heading to the levant mine it opened in 1830 and its entrance i'm told sits precariously on the cliffside hundreds of feet down there i've got a safety harness which is more than can be said for back then [Music] put one foot wrong and the miners would tumble head first into the atlantic oh this is it here entrance to the mine so there's some effort just to get down here here's the seam this is what they came down here for they followed this in a good couple of hundred meters into this cliff face they tunneled down down then they weren't even done they tunneled back out in the other direction underneath the seabed the levant tin miners burrowed an extraordinary two and a half kilometers out to sea toiling less than 40 feet under the ocean floor the men knew that one false stroke could be their last and that was hard enough just getting down here goodness only knows how tough it would have been in down and back out and then having to bring all that you've dug out back out along those tunnels up through here back out the entrance and up to the surface the effort they went in let alone the risks they were taking just goes to show how valuable commodity this was for them tin miners earned a decent wage compared to other local industries with other jobs scarce and families to feed cornwall's men were prepared to put their lives in danger for their work conditions in this coastline's tin mines were hot and oppressive particles of mica dust in the air caused lung disease and many men lost their lives chasing new seams of tin [Music] the method they used to check the stability of the tunnels was literally this and listening out for a good sharp ring off the bar that meant that the rock here was solid but if you've got a duller sound [Music] that was an indication that the rock was a bit softer mine collapses were a constant threat [Music] in the 20th century technological advances helped safety but there were still terrible risks this deep levant mine shaft i'm descending housed a large lift cage to get the men in and out of the mine today the lift has gone and the only way in is by ladder it's best not to look down into the abyss below how deep are we here we're only about 20 25 meters below surface here but how it keeps on going doesn't it how oh geez how far down it goes down about 550 meters [Music] took about half an hour from the top to the bottom of here on this particular type of lift in 1919 the connections at the top of the lift broke miners fell to their deaths or were crushed by the falling lift 31 men were killed in in this shaft and another 19 seriously injured one survivor says it was as if the gates of hell had opened the fire and brimstone were pouring down on me oh my goodness but as long as there were profits to be made the production wheels kept turning in 1985 the price of tin crashed from ten thousand pounds to three thousand four hundred pounds per ton production gradually slowed down and in 1998 the last tin mine closed [Music] a whole underground world fell silent its secrets awaiting discovery [Music] you

Channel: Spark

Views: 37,080

Keywords: Britain, British Geography, British Secrets, Documentary, English Heritage, Epic Journey, Geological Phenomena, Hidden Caves, Legendary Sites, Metal Mining, Mysterious Underground, Nature Exploration, Remarkable Landforms, Rob Bell's Discoveries, Secret Tunnels, Secrets of the Earth, Southern Region, Spark, Subterranean Marvels, Treasure Hunt, Underground Discoveries

Id: 25YthnSCdiE

Length: 44min 42sec (2682 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 12 2022