Site Records

Site Name: Finsbury Borough Control

Rosebery Avenue
London
EC1

Sub Brit site visit 14th January & 5th March 2004

[Source: Nick Catford]

The left hand wooden door leads to the male toilets with two cubicles and the right hand steel gas door leads to another small lobby with stairs down to the lower level and through another gas door there stairs up to the town hall basement. On the outside of this door the words 'Civil Defence Control' are scrawled in chalk. Half way up the stairs is a second emergency escape shaft up to Garnault Place. The shaft has bars across the bottom of it and the top of the shaft has been capped with concrete.

At the time of our first visit on 14th January the lower floor was completely flooded and inaccessible. The water level came to within two steps of the top of the northern stairway while it came to the very top of the southern stairway a difference of approximately 18" indicating a considerable tilt in the bunker. The water level fluctuates rapidly and a few days after our visit the water had started flowing into the upper rooms. The lower level was pumped dry seven weeks later to allow an inspection of the lower level on 5th March.

At the bottom of the northern stairway there is another gas tight door into the control room. As with the rooms above this has been stripped of any original fittings apart from ventilation trunking and a number of ceiling lights with angled shades which would have illuminated wall maps. At the northern end of the room a wooden door leads into the plant room. The door has acoustic padding on the inside to deaden the noise of the generator and ventilation plant. The generator has been removed but the ventilation fan and trunking is still in place in the middle of the room and there is electrical switchgear mounted on one wall.

At the far side of the control room a door leads into the signals room. There are also two large square openings in the wall between the two rooms. These could have been either windows or message hatches. There is no evidence of any wooden framework so it is unclear exactly what was here; they may just have been as they appear today.

The signals room is slightly smaller than the control room and again is stripped of any original fittings apart from a wooden batten and table height fixed to two walls. This would have been the rear mounting for the acoustic booths. On the far side of the signals room there is a short corridor with a door on the left into a messengers' room and doors into two small rooms. One was a toilet cubicle and the other has a flooded sump and a rusty pump mounted on the floor indicating that there has been a long term problem with water ingress. In the original plan this is shown as another toilet cubicle.

There is another message hatch between the signals room and the messengers' room. On the far side of the room there is a shallow butler sink and another steel plate gas door out to the southern stairway.

NOTE: A few London boroughs took an independent line on defence against air attack. Finsbury for instance was one of the most progressive, taking air raid precautions very seriously. It collaborated with the progressive architectural practice Tecton and produced a number of highly ambitious schemes that culminated in a textbook that attracted such interest and acclaim in 1939 that it was also published in the USA two years later.

The shelter design chosen was a circular underground affair designed as a spiral with a very shallow slope, approached from street level by ramps. Fully air-conditioned and provided with air locks, the idea was that these structures could be used as shelters for the duration of the war (for between 7,600 and 12,600 people according to size) and then as car parks when the hostilities were over. The street plan in Tecton’s book Planned A.R.P. shows that locations were chosen for 14 of these ambitious underground shelters but nothing concrete came of it.

Further reading:
Messrs. Tecton, Architects: Planned A.R.P., Architectural Press, 1939. Practical study of air attack protection and policy based on the experience of the Metropolitan Borough of Finsbury.

Sources:

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