Hidden away in a patch of wasteland in suburban Nottingham, a Cold War relic lies abandoned. This is Regional Seat of Government 3, a nuclear bunker from which a Regional Commissioner would have presided over a society and landscape devastated by nuclear war. This small book is what happened when the bunker opened its steel doors to a group of writers and experts, giving them privileged access to this strange and haunting space before developers moved in.

Bunker is the outcome of that visit: stories and poems that wander the windowless corridors and offices, kitchens and canteens, dormitories and washrooms of a place from a terrible alternate reality. Breathing life into the dead rooms and peopling them with figures from past and present, it is both a memorial to a key moment in history and a reflection on a twenty-first century world with its own existential fears: new nuclear threats, environmental catastrophe and social dislocation.

Contributors: Zayneb Allak, Hannah Cooper-Smithson, Anthony Cropper, Ailbhe Darcy, Jay Gao, Delphine Grass, Jonathan Hogg, Helena Hunter, Martine Hamilton Knight (photography), Phil Leonard, Jon McGregor, Andrew Taylor, Maria Gil Ulldemolins.

Editors: Daniel Cordle is a writer and researcher with a background in higher education and in work with cultural and heritage organisations.
Sarah Jackson is a writer, curator, critic and a Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at Northumbria University.