B is for Bobbly Bunker!

I drove past this the other day, at Edenbrook, near Dogmersfield, and noticed it had an interesting roof, so stopped and took a few pictures, now there's a car park - it has been a field most of my life - and despite being still quite away outside town, is being turned into an 'end destination leisure facility' for the denizens of the new developments which are turning Fleet from a small Victorian dormitory into a larger town lacking facilities of most kinds!

Facing Northward, it seems to be a pretty standard Type 22, but they are hexagonal, while this in an octagon; more commonly associated with the much larger Type 27, even to the added entrance block off one wall, but the variation between bunkers - of any type - was vast and the common instruction from the ministries was "do what you can with rationed materials, local supply/construction problems, manpower availability and the lie of the land."

Looking Southeast, this would have been part of the GHQ-A Line, one of several lines of defence against invasion from the Germans, and I shot another a couple of miles away ages ago which I'll try to get up here shortly. The door is obviously a modern one, and I suspect the town council is using it to store tools or community activity stuff for the bike track and allotments being constructed in the field.

Due West, this could be modeled from the unit embedded in the old Airfix play set Gun Emplacement although that plastic one doesn't have walls of the same length, but it would look OK! In fact you could remove the ventilation shafts and door over-hangs of both bunkers in that set and glue them together to get the basic for this one!

Heavy-wire/reinforcing bar has been set into the cement/mortar courses to attach camouflage netting or foliage too and you can see that with a lot of these bunkers, the corners were left unfinished to save time - in peacetime a join like that would be pared-back flush with each face.

Dead South, and you can see a heavy concrete roof has been added and given a look I haven't seen on others round here, perhaps at the whim of the builder, in his own time at the end of the day, perhaps for a specific reason, like breaking up its outline in a bare-arsed field - the trees may not have been there then, just a low/trimmed hedge?

The light was muted and with uniform weathering it was not the best conditions for photography, but you can see the bobbled effect of 20 or so pimples rising out of the body of the concrete.

The positioning of the bunker - which would have had a section of ten men when fully manned with a couple of LMG's and maybe some anti-tank capability, Boyes .55" A/T rifle or one of the Home Guard 'contraptions' (The Northover Projector) - is ideal for covering the tunnel under the main-line to Basingstoke to the West (upper image) and the bend in the road coming up from the South (lower image).

Although the positioning of the door without an additional protective blast-wall suggests that the main expected role was to cover/counter enemy advance up the road from the south - the Odiham area. Once the Odiham/Alton area was in their hands, they would have several air bases to bring in troops, and would be heading to Farnborough and Blackbush, to take/neutralise the air bases there?

And/or indeed - to neutralise the vast garrison/training area of Aldershot-Farnborough-North Camp, Arborfield, Camberley-Frimley, Chobham, Crookham, Deepcut, Pirbright/Bisley and Southwood-Minley (hell - it was all military round here!), before turning-right for London!

By some chance twist of irony, there are at the same place, three modern, civilian, triple-spike 'containment' barriers, aping the old dragons-teeth, but probably presenting little challenge to a Challenger II! They join-together like jig-saw puzzle pieces!