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Thinking Allowed

Bunkers

Thinking Allowed

BBC

Society & Culture, Science

4.4997 Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Bunkers: The bunker has become the extreme expression of our greatest fears: from pandemics to climate change and nuclear war. Laurie Taylor talks to Bradley Garrett, Assistant Professor in Human Geography at University College Dublin, about the global movement of 'prepping' for social and environmental collapse, or 'Doomsday'. They're joined by Diane Morgan, Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds and author of a study examining the symbolic meaning of the bunker and the way in which demilitarised bunkers have taken on a new cultural life.

Producer: Jayne Egerton

Transcript

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0:00.0

Take some time for yourself with soothing classical music from the mindful mix, the Science of

0:07.0

Happiness Podcast.

0:08.0

For the last 20 years I've dedicated my career to exploring the science of living a happier more meaningful life and I want

0:14.4

to share that science with you.

0:16.1

And just one thing, deep calm with Michael Mosley.

0:19.4

I want to help you tap in to your hidden relaxation response system and open the door to that

0:25.5

calmer place within. Listen on BBC Sounds.

0:31.6

Hello. It was 1980 when Paul Weller and the Jam declared their horror at the prospect of continuing

0:39.4

to live in a country where warfare was prioritised over welfare.

0:44.3

A place where the public gets what the public wants,

0:48.4

but I want nothing this society's got.

0:52.0

How, asked Weller could one possibly stay in such a place.

0:56.8

There was only one way out. It was an option that had particular appeal to me in that I'd come to go an underground

1:08.0

it was an option that had particular appeal to me in that I'd come to regard the underground as a place of secret

1:16.6

sanity ever since I'd played naughty schoolboy games with the boy next door in the half buried remains of the Anderson Air Raid

1:24.7

shelter in our Birmingham back garden. And the idea that Sellers and Caves constituted

1:31.7

an alternative more congenial world, was only reinforced by my sweaty

1:36.8

trips to the cavern in Liverpool and by long happy nights in the jazz sellers of Paris and New York.

1:43.7

Somebody once said that if there was a four minute warning of a nuclear attack,

1:48.1

one should immediately head for a branch of John Lewis,

1:51.8

because nothing bad ever happened there. Well I I felt much the same

1:56.6

about sellers and cabbos and caves and as I now know from reading a fine new book called Bunker, Building for the End, I had some

...

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