“To enable the County to operate efficiently under wartime conditions a County Main Wartime Headquarters will be established at Guildford and a Standby Headquarters at Reigate.” A guide to communities for survival in war. Sec 1, para 20c. Surrey County Council.
The Surrey County Main Wartime Headquarters are located at ground level beneath the more modern 5-storey block of Guildford College. The property is currently used as a gym. I have yet to revisit the site after 38 years absence but I remember some details of the layout from the HQ’s active days. In online photographs the HQ now has innocent looking glass outer doors. Louvred panels to the left of the doors hint at the ventilation plant that was located behind this area. Going through the outer doors there used to be (circa 1987) concrete and steel framed blast doors ahead and the ventilation / generation plant to the left. After these a turn to the right would reveal a floor plan of a conventional single level rectangular structure. This was subdivided in places at the periphery but with a large internal open plan area. Suspended ceilings hid the services. Substantial concrete beams and pillars supported the roof - and the weight of the five storeys above! An emergency exit was situated at the Stoke Park end of the building emerging through the rising ground.
A HANDEL system was present - remembered as an earlier WB400 model in late 1987 even though the WB1400 series was available by then.
As well as providing a war HQ for the County Controller (Designate) and their teams, including the County Emergency Volunteer Reserve, the building was also used for training, including Community Leaders and Teams. Circa 1987 Surrey apparently had the largest civil defence budget of any county at about £1 million. Surrey invested in the civil defence training of community teams - including rescue, firefighting, first aid, radio nets, and other duties. Radiac Reporting Posts (RRPs) were to be established in community locations and fallout readings sent back to Guildford via the radio nets. These would be used to add to the radiological picture and thus direct surviving services.The setting up of Community Control Centres / RRPs (that had any sort of radiological protective factor in them) was left to the community team to organise.
“It is quite impossible to lay down hard and fast general rules as to where the Control Centre should be located in the community. The decision can only be taken by the people who will have to make it work in peace and war”
“Should our experiments with home based radiac reporting posts prove successful, it could be of course, that a number of Community Control Centres would also be RRPs thereby guaranteeing that they had radio communications with their District War HQ.”
NB The author was a member of one of the Community Emergency Volunteer Reserve teams trained at Guildford during the late 1980s. Surrey had identified some 340 communities.