A dad has flogged his nuclear bunker for nearly double the asking price. Brits appear to be scrambling to find a safe haven with World War Three fears on the rise.
Jon Graves’ Cold War era ex-Royal Observer Corps bunker obliterated its £15,000 guide price, fetching a whopping £29,000 at auction last Thursday.
The savvy businessman had spruced up the 15-foot-deep fallout shelter, which was in operation from 1964 to 1991, after snapping it up three years ago. Reluctantly, he decided to auction off the military-grade retreat, and it was snapped up by an anonymous proxy bidder.
The new owner might have bagged themselves a steal, especially with the surge in demand for underground bunkers. With Russian ‘nuclear-capable’ strikes causing havoc in Ukraine this week, the threat of global conflict has skyrocketed.
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(Image: Lee McLean/SWNS)
Jon, who’s planning a move to Dubai, reckoned Russia‘s invasion of Ukraine has ramped up interest in his bunker. He said: “It’s definitely topical with the way American politics is at the moment and with Russia and Ukraine fighting. It wouldn’t survive a direct hit, that’s for sure, but from a novel perspective, it’s definitely interesting.”
He said the freehold property isn’t listed, so future owners can give it a makeover as they see fit, provided they get the go-ahead from the planners.
“It’s certainly big enough to record music in it. If you live locally, you could just probably go and chill out in it. It’s a big enough space that you could go down.”
Jon, a businessman with multiple ventures, confessed his long-standing fascination with the 1,500 observation bunkers scattered across the country. When one came up for sale near his home in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, the military enthusiast couldn’t resist the opportunity to purchase it.
(Image: Lee McLean/SWNS)
The shelter, located on a secluded 40ft by 50ft plot of land, was initially sealed off with a six-inch layer of concrete. However, Jon was taken aback when he finally broke through the crust to discover it was watertight and in relatively good condition.
He said: “I’d always wanted to own one, but every time I saw one come up, they were all down south, miles away from home.”
“We’d never been in it. We took a punt really that it was going to be ok.The top of it was in a reasonable condition – all be it with the cap on top.
“And when we first opened it, it was bone dry inside, which was great. Then of course we could get on with decorating and renovating it.”
Jon explained that if a nuclear weapon detonated somewhere in Britain, standard communication lines would likely be severely disrupted.
(Image: Lee McLean/SWNS)
Jon’s bunker, known as Upton ROC, is believed to have detected radioactive material that spread from the Chernobyl nuclear powerplant disaster in Ukraine in 1986. He intentionally renovated the underground structure with items reminiscent of the era when it was operational.
He said: “We tried to keep it in the same format, the same layout that was there originally, and I think we did that reasonably well. We ripped off all the old polystyrene tiles and cleaned it up, got rid of all the dead mice that were stuck in it, and just kind of decorated it.
“We furnished it and put back in what was already there. So we didn’t put brand new modern beds in, we put old metal beds back in. It was always about trying to tastefully restore it to a condition that you could stay and sleep in without the noise from outside.”
This week, Putin launched his first suspected intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) strikes against targets in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. The tyrant’s decision followed President Zelenskyy’s reported choice to strike inside Russia with British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles and long-range US warheads.
(Image: Lee McLean/SWNS)
Mathew Wright, from the firm Burrowed, which manufactures ‘fully fitted prefabricated underground bunkers’, said inquiries had ‘doubled’ since Monday. He revealed: “In the last six months we’ve had a couple of thousand inquiries. And there probably been double the amount usual of inquires since Monday.”
Andrew Parker, an auctioneer and partner at SDL Property Auctions, which handled the bunker’s sale, was hardly taken aback by the massive attention it garnered. He noted: “This is the fourth nuclear bunker we have sold at auction and not surprisingly they have all attracted huge amounts of interest. There are not that many relics still around that epitomise the threat and paranoia of the Cold War era in the way a nuclear bunker can.”
He also added: “And this one had also been beautifully restored, which makes it even more unusual.”
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