Cold War: Building for Nuclear Confrontation 1946-1989 (English Heritage)

by P.S. Barnwell (Author), Roger C. Thomas (Author), Wayne Cocroft (Author)

• Used

  Illustrated
  2004

  $25.51

  The historical and cultural aspects of the Cold War have been much studied, yet its physical manifestations in England - its buildings and structures - have remained largely unknown.

  To the great landscape historian WG Hoskins writing in the 1950's they were profoundly alien: England of the ... electric fence, of the high barbed wire around some unmentionable devilment.... Barbaric England of the scientists, the military men, and the politicians .

  Now these survivors of the Cold War are, in their turn, disappearing fast, like medieval monasteries and bastioned forts before them - only with more limited scope for regeneration and reuse.

  This book is the first to look at these monuments to the Cold War. It is heavily illustrated with photographs of the sites as they survive today, archive photographs (many previously unpublished), modern and historic air photographs, site and building plans, and specially commissioned interpretative drawings. It also endeavours look at the installations within the military and political context of what was one of the defining phenomena of the late 20th century.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2003

  $36.84

  In the early 1950s, the historian Professor William Hoskins, in his pioneering work The making of the English Landscape, lamented what he saw as the devastation of the countryside by scientists, the military and politicians. He saw his world as dominated by 'the obscene shape of the atom-bomber, laying a trail like a filthy slug upon Constable's and Gainsborough's sky. England of the Nissen hut, the 'pre-fab', and the 'electric fence, of the high barbed wire around some unmentionable devilment'. A generation later, this book reveals what lay behind the fence and how these sites are now, in dereliction, a new aspect of the complex landscape history of Britain.