Bunkerology

What is bunkerology? Luke Bennett coined this term to characterise the phenomenon of those with an interest, even obsession, with exploring underground concrete military facilities. In other words, ‘urban explorers who wrote online about their exploration of abandoned Cold War bunkers’ (2011, 421) although this could also be extended to pill-boxes and other concrete defensive features of earlier wars as captured so evocatively in Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology project and book (see my 2018 blog post Talus). More recently UrbEx geographer (and former archaeologist) Bradley Garrett has written a book simply called Bunker (Penguin, 2020), a study of subterranean spaces (a literal deep dive) created by / and or inhabited by preppers. It could be said that the 20th century was the age of concrete bunkers: “during the twentieth century the bunker became a ubiquitous form of architecture…” (Garrett, pp. 3). Funnily enough, prehistoric archaeologists and heritage managers were not immune…