Orford Ness
Orford Ness is a project in collaboration with artist Mary Wardle. More to follow...
During the 1950s the British Ministry of Defence built a nuclear research facility at Orford Ness, a 45 hectare natural pebble spit off the east coast of England. Laboratories with 15 feet thick concrete walls were constructed to vibration test, drop test, cook, spin and assemble nuclear weapons. Cobra Mist, a top secret Cold War eavesdropping programme was established on 'the island' using 'over the horizon' backscatter radar to listen in on the Soviets. Other laboratories were devoted to centrifuge, the original testing machine was later moved to AWE Aldermaston, where it is still in use. The structures most shrouded in secrecy were the 'pagodas' used for mechanical and vibration testing. Their massive roofs, piled high with pebbles for extra mass, are supported on impossibly slender columns. In a nuclear blast it was planned they would give way and cap the bunker to contain an explosion.
As the Cold War ended the need for Orford Ness diminished and the M.O.D. decommissioned the site and gave it to the National Trust, but not before they tested some of their samples and the labs to destruction. The enormous steel armoured doors were blown off Lab3, known as 'the oven'. The control room is filled with a strange ash, in which wild hares have built a warren.
The buildings are almost unique, the only known similar construction anywhere in the world is at the nuclear testing facility in Nevada, USA. What was actually tested in them will remain a secret for decades to come. Military architecture has an aesthetic all of its own, it is highly utilitarian yet there is always something more than mere 'form following function'. The bombs these military scientists played with were given names such as the Blue Danube or Polaris. There is strong element of fantasy and the fantastic in the poetics and aesthetics of these spaces, not least some expression of the Cold War anxiety about the end of the world. The vibration-testing chamber has a quasi-religious aesthetic
The National Trust are experts in the restoration of stately homes and making them accessible to the public, however they must be at a loss with Orford. So for now the military complex is left in its raw state and is out of bounds as a bird sanctuary takes over. Orford Ness could be around for millennia, an archaeology of the immediate past, that still embodies our fears of the present. At some point society will feel the need to interpret these abandoned structures and Orford Ness will come out of hiding and enter the national psyche.