Nuclear Bunker: A Creative Archive exhibition

Hidden away in a patch of wasteland in suburban Nottingham, a Cold War relic lies abandoned. Known locally as ‘The Kremlin’, this is a huge nuclear bunker, constructed in 1952-53 as a Regional War Room and expanded in the early 1960s into a Regional Seat of Government from which a Commissioner and a staff of over 400 people would have governed whatever remained of the North Midlands after nuclear war.

This exhibition explores the bunker through the eyes of writers and experts who ventured through its steel doors to explore its strange and haunting interior in the summer of 2024. Combining words, photographs and artwork, it wanders the windowless corridors, offices, dormitories and washrooms of a place from a terrible alternate reality. Bunkbeds seem still to await their occupants, a 1960s kitchen and canteen are apparently poised to feed people sheltering from radioactive fallout, and in a BBC studio you can almost hear instructions being broadcast to survivors.

The exhibition features poetry and prose by acclaimed writers: Zayneb Allak, Hannah Cooper-Smithson, Daniel Cordle, Anthony Cropper, Ailbhe Darcy, Jay Gao, Delphine Grass, Jonathan Hogg, Helena Hunter, Sarah Jackson, Phil Leonard, Jon McGregor, Andrew Taylor, and Maria Gil Ulldemolins. Photographs are by Martine Hamilton Knight and artwork is by Ganna Bielcheva. The book, Bunker: Stories and Poems from a Nuclear Age, is edited by Daniel Cordle and Sarah Jackson, and is available from Five Leaves Publishing.

Find out more by following these links

https://danielcordle.com/

Bunker : Stories and Poems from a Nuclear Age – Five Leaves Bookshop

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