THE Barnton Bunker in Clermiston, Edinburgh is set to host a launch event for a new community garden which will open outside the historic site.
A community garden at the former quarry and RAF command centre has been in the works for months now, with volunteers having worked to transform the site.
The launch event will feature food trucks, a sauna, live music, bunker tours, a goods swap, stalls and demonstrations.
The event is free, but donations are hugely appreciated, and all proceeds will go towards the upkeep of the garden.
The garden, which hopes to serve the local community in Clermiston, received funding from Edinburgh Council’s Grow Your Own Fund.
The Barnton Bunker obtained funding as a part of the council’s pilot scheme for the fund.
The garden has been a crucial facet of the Bunker’s restoration process, and has undergone a lengthy design, public consultation and construction process.
The Barnton Quarry, which is now known as The Barnton Bunker, was used by the RAF as a fighter command operations room during the Second World War.
A bunker was then built in 1952, and the site became a central coordination facility for radar bases in Scotland during the Cold War but has been in disuse for many years.
The site fell into disuse and disrepair from the 80s to early 2000s, with vandalism and a fire in the 90s threatening its future.
Since 2011, however, new ownership has pre-empted a drive to restore the facility and turn it into a museum and educational centre.
The bunker now hosts open mic nights, Fringe shows, Bunker tours and a whole range of events.
Natalie, one of the lead volunteers at the bunker said: “I’ve been a volunteer at the bunker since January, and the garden project – I guess you could call it my baby.
“There have been some raised beds and things that were built here a while ago, and there was the greenhouse that we moved over and installed as well – we’ve gradually been building it from there.
“From that and seeing how good of a project it is to work on with people, I applied for a grant from the Edinburgh Council Grow Your Own Fund.
“And then we got funding for that – basically to extend the garden.
“It’s nice to be self-sustaining in that way if you can grow your own veg, and there’s also a big movement at the moment to support community gardening initiatives and growing your own food.
“Then there’s the social aspect of it as well, because it’s just a really good way to bring people together.
Speaking on the reaction from the local community to work on the bunker, Natalie said: “It’s been really positive so far – loads of people come in who are either like ‘oh my god, I never realised this was here, I walk past it every day’ or they’ve sometimes been engaged with it in unofficial ways in the past – because it was derelict for quite a while.
“People who used to come in and have a little snoop around are like ‘whoa, you’ve done so much work here, so much has changed’”.
Natalie says she is “really excited” to show off the garden at the launch event.
She continued: “We’ve got a whole bunch of different stalls, we’ve got two caterers, food trucks that are going to come.
“The sauna has confirmed that they’re going to come along as well, so people can come and sauna while they look around the garden.
“We’re hoping for pretty decent numbers, up to 500.
“[We want] to get loads of people signed up for the garden, to raise loads of money for the conservation effort, for the space, for the charity.
“We want people just to get excited about the potential here and get involved.”
The site served as a crucial, and highly secretive, node in Britain’s defence structure for years before it was transferred from the RAF to the Scotland Office and its importance diminished.
The site’s location and role within the Britain’s defence was revealed by Spies for Peace in 1961.
A march to the bunker was then organised by Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (Scotland CND), in what would become the first public exposure of a key Scottish bunker site.
The importance of the bunker subsequently diminished over time but has now gained attention as a tourist attraction and Cold war educational centre.
The new owners of the bunker also own Scotland’s Secret Bunker, another RAF radar centre turned Cold War Museum and tourist attraction near St Andrews, Fife.
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