UNDERGROUND FORT

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 4724, 10 January 1946, Page 3

UNDERGROUND FORT

KEY IN LONDON DEFENCES HOME FOR WAR CABINET One of the war's most closely kept secrets lias been revealed, when it was disclosed that if London had become' a Stalingrad, a subterranean fortress in Horse Ferry Road, Westminster, would have enabled the War Cabinet, the chiefs of staff and their immediate personnel, numbering 2000, to camon for three weeks w-ithout contact with the outside world. It is the largest of throe such underground citadels, the construction of which was begun on strategic sites during Britain’s most critical days in 1940, when the country was threatened with invasion. It was sunk to GO feet below- street level on the already excavated site of an old gasometer. It contains throe miles of corridors and nearly 1000 rooms. -The fortress is bomb-proof and poison-gas-proof. It has -its own power plant and water supply. Experts believe that even the atom bomb would not have affected the activities inside the citadel’s “crust” of 12-feet thick steel and concrete. A miniature power station maintains among other services lighting, ventilation, air-con-ditioning and cooking. Although the citadel was never put to full emergency use, it housed for four years, and still houses, Government departments. Passers-by walk past inconspicuous entrances without suspecting its secrets. A flying bomb hit the citadel in July, 1944, and merely “scratched” it.