The Eerie Subterranean Ruin of Culham ROC Post

Concealed by trees yet easy enough to find – assuming you know where to look – this abandoned Royal Observer Corps Post near Didcot, England, was one of 1,563 ROC monitoring facilities built across Britain during the Cold War. Opened in August 1960, Culham ROC Post remained operational for just eight years before closing in November 1968. Vandals and the elements have been unkind in the half century since, yet these photograph reveal an eerie Cold War relic that lingers quietly on beneath the Oxfordshire countryside. Spaced roughly eight miles apart, ROC posts were built across the UK between 1958 and 1968 in a bid to detect and report Soviet nuclear explosions and fallout. This chilling role emerged from the civil defence corps’ original wartime purpose, which saw the ROC, headquartered at RAF Bentley Priory, provide a raid reporting system by monitoring UK skies for hostile aircraft. Subterranea Britannica visited the abandoned Culham ROC Post in 1998. The website described the Cold War relic as follows: “OPEN Heavily overgrown. All surface features remain intact but the ventilation louvres are missing. Internally the post is damp with graffiti on the walls and burnt rubbish on the floor. A dismantled bed and a siren box are the only remaining artefacts.” As we wrote in a previous article about Ponteland ROC: “Underground monitoring posts cost around £5,000 to build and were excavated to a depth of 25 feet. The waterproofed structure comprised of a reinforced concrete monocoque building buried beneath a compacted mound of earth. A sealed hatch allowed access to the subterranean chamber below via a vertical shaft, fitted with a steel ladder. Inside, there was room enough for three observers and their assorted monitoring equipment.” Urban explorer and photographer True British Metal found that the derelict Culham ROC Post had changed little over the course of 15 years, despite the open shaft and various acts of vandalism. The urbex snapper wrote: “This particular one opened in August 1960 and closed in 1968; just over 8 years in service, closed for 45 years and mostly forgotten about! Not much has changed since Subbrit’s November 1998 inspection apart from more rubbish being tipped down the shaft. The post was sadly fire damaged many, many years back, and all that remains now are two beds, one of which is dismantled and a siren box which has now been broken. Typical for a 1968 closure, but as far as trashed stuff goes I’ve seen far, far worse. The sump is broken. As for surface features, again nothing has changed except that the shaft is now jammed open; luckily the post is mostly dry.”