40 C O N T E X T 9 3 : M A R C H 2 0 0 6 full-size sections through a masonry cornice and string course, or full-size details of panelled doors and architraves. Many a student of building conservation practice could benefit from this rigorous programme. Although at the time McKay was writing, Portland cement was becoming the favoured material for mortars and renders, there is full discussion of lime in its different forms and uses. Similarly, there is a wealth of information on special brick bonds, including raking and herringbone bonds, and the construction of arches, squint quoins, rebated and splayed jambs, plinths, copings, sills and lintels, which all show the versatility of brickwork and have been largely forgotten today. The section on leadwork is based on sound and tested principles that remain best practice. All these details are displayed with marvellous clarity in the full-page illustrations that are such a valuable element of the three volumes. For example the plate illustrating rainwater pipes contains 35 separate vignettes, artfully arranged on the page to demonstrate the principles of effective roof drainage. For each trade he describes, McKay includes a plate showing all the tools that are used, and their individual names. For readers who need a crash course in traditional building construction, or lack a useful book on the subject, McKay’s is the one. It has long been out of print, and Donhead is to be commended for making it available once again. Peter de Figueiredo, historic buildings inspector, English Heritage. Chilling survivals Cold War: building for nuclear confrontation 1946-1989 Edited by PS Barnwell with authorship by Wayne D Cocroft and Roger JC Thomas, English Heritage, 2003, 281pp, numerous illustrations in b&w and colour, ISBN 1 873 592 69 8, £24.99 It is difficult to imagine how this farreaching and carefully-made book could have come from any group of authors other than those in the ranks of English Heritage. Its extensive resources have been drawn upon to survey, record, illustrate and collate the large number of structures, sites and man-made landscape features created in the course of more than 40 ColdWar years. Despite the global nature of the east-west power struggle, the geography of this heritage is English too, with Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the Channel Islands generally excluded. Interwoven local and national affairs were depicted with warmth and affection on TV in Dad’s Army, in which the serious business of defending Britain in the ’40s was played against a background of Captain Mainwaring’s home town of Walmington-on-Sea in its little-changed landscape setting on the Kent-Sussex borders. When national met local affairs in the nuclear era, however, across swathes of East Anglia,Yorkshire, the Midlands, Home Counties and numerous other parts of the country, there was not much scope for knockabout comedy. Secrecy kept civilian interests distant from military ones, frequently placing razorwire and concrete perimeters between the defenders of democracy and the surrounding, liberty-loving, native population. Some of the land that played host to these installations was utterly transformed. ColdWar contains few funny lines. Among the small ration of drolleries is the production by the soviets as late as 1989 of maps of our towns and cities with the names of streets and buildings printed in Russian, presumably to serve as a handy guide for invasion forces. Then, these islands are described from the viewpoint of United States military strategists: ‘Britain had a stable and sympathetic government, and offered sufficient proximity (by air) to the USSR without the risk of being quickly overrun’. So now we know: that is why the bases were built here instead of in France. This extensive subject is treated by topic (such as ‘Observation and monitoring’, Chapter 8) rather than as a straight chronology or as a gazetteer. The well-made index allows individual places to be easily found (such as Cardington, Beds, Blue Joker system, p134). The introduction and the ten chapter headings cover an admirable range of war themes, embracing the plans made by both sides to a) destroy the world many times over and b) to ‘survive’ such nuclear-weapon attacks. This survival was to consist of preservation of the capacity to react to and retaliate against the enemy’s actions, in whatever form the latter might come. War conducted on this basis relied upon highly complex electronic surveillance, monitoring and early warning. This gave rise to structures and buildings of an unprecedented size, style and constructional form.Where these sites are featured, the book shows to us the most modernistic architectural products of the ColdWar.When dealing with air bases, bunkers, manufacturing installations, test facilities and suchlike, the nuclear age, architecturally speaking, was a continuation of building-for-war as seen up to 1945, except bigger. The phenomenon described as ‘the banality of evil’ is abundantly illustrated. Many buildings shown here are simple, plain, unremarkable; not much different from health clinics or tax offices. Nevertheless, the captions show that their ordinariness gives no clue to the development of the hydrogen bomb as planned-for at these sites: the white heat of nuclear technology gave rise in the main to un-cool architecture. Not everything here was brand-new and purpose-made. The large sheds at RAF Feltwell, Norfolk had begun as 1930s C-type aircraft hangars, finding re-use in the missile age as RIM depots, and as seen in a new-ish photo, also serving as an ideal basketball court. ColdWar may also be enjoyed on other levels. It is a work of topography that will instruct the interested traveller in locating sites that, since 1989, have been given over to public access (such as National Trust ownership, as at West High Down, Isle of Wight and formerly a site for testing Black Knight and Black Arrow rockets). To the lovers of ruins, ColdWar brings back to life all the old feelings about abandonment, decay, nature reclaiming its own, and the ‘sublime’. Try page 251: it shows, in colour, the ruined state of the former FI centrifuge chamber at Ordfordness, Suffolk. Look on page 164 at the old experimental site at RAF North Coates, Lincolnshire, where rails and huts offer up their rust and flaking masonry to an endless sky. Graham Tite, conservation officer, Sevenoaks District Council, Kent
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