The remains of the telephone exchange.
SECRET MILITARY BUNKER, CODENAMED ‘PADDOCK’
Some of London’s most secret government and military sites turn out, on declassification, to have barely been used. A leading example is the underground bunker codenamed Paddock at Dollis Hill in north London. It was built at the start of the Second World War as a contingency against the destruction of the main Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall, but it appears that there was never any operational cause for ministers to deploy there. It was occupied by staff only twice, in brief exercises lasting for a couple of days.
On one of those occasions, 3 October 1940, it was visited by Prime Minister Winston Churchill in what he described as a ‘dress rehearsal’ for Central Government War Headquarters dispersal. This was the high point of its melancholy, dust-gathering seventy-year history. Churchill had a considerable aversion to austere secret buildings, and described Paddock as ‘a useless piece of folly’. He did not believe that the Cabinet could ever work there. By contrast, the main Cabinet War Rooms in central London were used more than a hundred times during the war. The Prime Minister, who enjoyed creature comforts, preferred the luxury of Downing Street close by. At Paddock there was no accommodation, and the dispersal plan was to house the Prime Minister and staff above ground in Neville Court, a requisitioned block of unfortified civilian flats in a nearby suburban street. The logic of this is hard to fathom.
The generator room.
Paddock was excavated in secrecy alongside the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill, a massive office and laboratory block. A late decision about the dispersal of key sites had launched construction in the grounds of the Dollis Hill site in 1939, and Paddock was completed a few days before the start of the Battle of Britain in June 1940. When Paddock was conceived, there seemed to be a compelling need for it. Expert studies, based on the notion that ‘the bomber will always get through’, had anticipated complete destruction of vast areas of central London in any forthcoming war.
It was a three-level structure, with basements 40 ft (12 m) below the surface. Thirty-seven rooms in all were built along central spines, including offices for the Cabinet, a map room, teleprinter space, possibly a broadcast studio and a private office for the PM. The surface building for Paddock has been demolished, but two of the three original entrances remain, one of which now lies incongruously at the end of a garden between two private houses. Underground, many of the rooms and the diesel-powered emergency generating and ventilation plant remain intact, but derelict. Massively engineered entrances, which once held blast doors, can be seen, but the thick concrete slab ceilings for both basement levels are now concealed.
It was called Paddock merely because that word appeared on a randomly compiled list of non-descriptive codenames. After the Churchill visit, just one further meeting was conducted there: a presentation given to impress the visiting Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies in March 1941.
As it emerged that the bunker was unlikely to be used, much equipment was moved out to other sites. Only a skeleton guard of Army personnel remained. Paddock was officially closed in late 1944, even as V-2 rockets descended on London.
Above ground, in the main Post Office building at Dollis Hill, a far more profound contribution to the conduct of the war came in the form of the first programmable computer, designed and constructed by Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers. This was Colossus, destined for Bletchley Park for crucial code-breaking duties. It is said that some of the prototype circuit boards for the Colossus were stored in the Paddock rooms for years afterwards, but the Post Office did not make much significant use of the underground facility.
The emergency staircase.
The lower spine corridor.
Although a new series of secret buildings were developed in Britain after 1949 for Cold War use, no subsequent use was ever found for Paddock. It had been designed around comparatively vulnerable manual and electro-mechanical communications systems with surface landlines. Later, cable tunnels were driven deeper in central London and the telecommunications links were made tougher. But Paddock remained a well protected bunker, at least, and local authorities were charged to find sites for regional seats of government and other secret facilities in the age of nuclear war. As late as 1981 there was a suggestion that Paddock might be revived as a war room, but the Greater London Council found that water seepage had taken its toll on the lower basement. Telecommunications research at Dollis Hill had ended by 1976 and the main Research Station building was converted into apartments. A housing association acquired the rest of the site, and developed new homes where the bunker surface building once stood. Paddock bunker is listed, preserved and maintained, and has recently been opened to visitors on one or two occasions each year.
