SRHQ 4.2 Regional Government Bunker

UPDATE!! February 24, 2016 (Scroll to the bottom!)

After hearing rumours of this place undergoing works I thought I would go see what was going on as I was in the area. On approach my jaw hit the floor with the horrors of what used to be Sovereign House, it’s gone! Is it wrong to feel slightly emotionally attached to a bunker that kick started my love for urbex when I was a kid?

Taking a walk around to see what’s left in hope the bunker itself would be retained only  confirmed my suspicions that the place will never be the same again…

UPDATE!! September 27, 2015 (Scroll to the bottom!)

Known about this place since I was a kid and was always intrigued in seeing the inside, you could even say this is what sparked my interest in urban exploration. So after many years of wonder, many hours of research, a lot of head scratching along with the odd bump to the head we found our entrance inside the bunker!

I am not going into details of our entry as we would rather not see this place trashed, however once we were inside the bunker was in fantastic condition… all-be-it empty of any contents other than generators. We were also surprised to see the power still on in the majority of the bunker.

After an hour or so wondering the coridoors heading back and forth through the bunker, curiosity got the better of us and we ventured up the staircase at one end of the coridoor which emerged to ground level inside Sovereign House. After the odd few moments of exploring we jumped at the sound of a loud beep, fearing this may well be our warning to leave we made our way back to the exit, just as alarms began to sound.

Most of you probally already know the history of this place and I suspect a lot of you looking this up will be local to Hertford, but here’s some history on the the bunker shamelessly pinched off the interwebs.

“Only three SRHQ bunkers are of recent construction- Basingstoke, (SRHQ62), Herford (SRHQ42) and Southport (SRHQ10).
Each has the same rough design, a All two-storey concrete basement below government office blocks built in the late 1960s.
Walls are 20-30 inches thick (50-75cm) and each has its own borehole for water.
Some one hundred and fifty thousand gallons of water are also stored in permanent tanks, and a generator room can power all the SRHQ’s equipment for a month, with a ten thousand gallon fuel reserve.
Two sets of filters are fitted to the air-conditioning plant, one for peacetime exercise use, and the second for war.
If the level of fallout dust becomes too high, air conditioning can be switched to internal circulation for a period.
The bunkers were designed to have a radiation ‘protection factor’ of about 400, and to resist blast pressure of 1.5psi. In contrast, the average house is unlikely, after attack, to offer a protective factor better than 5-10.”

Please excuse the quality of the pictures, given our route into the bunker I opted to leave my tripod behind. Also as the majority of the place had already been void of it’s contents I decided to shoot on video instead.

UPDATE!! September 27, 2015 (Original report above, 15/04/2015)

We have returned to see what we missed before! We knew there had to be a second level somewhere, though not large at all, we found it. Here’s a few updates and updated pictures…

UPDATE!! February 24, 2016