Burlington
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aka Turnstile, Subterfuge, Site 3
Secretly: Excalibur
During the 1930s, a large section of Tunnel Quarry was converted into the Central Ammunition Depot for the United Kingdom. During the Second World War, an aircraft engine factory was constructed in the adjoining Spring Quarry, to provide a fallback in case the factories in Bristol were destroyed.
Over the course of the Cold War however, a section of Spring Quarry was repurposed. Inside, the British military constructed the Central Government War Headquarters - a 240-acre network of facilities connected by an underground street network, located 120 ft below the surface to provide a bunker where the British government, Royal Family, and more than 4,000 civil servants could be evacuated in the event of a nuclear attack.
Known variously as Burlington, Stockwell, Turnstile, Subterfuge, Peripheral, and Site 3 - among other names - the bunker contained ops rooms and communications centres to allow a command infrastructure for the country to be quickly re-established in the event of an emergency. The facility possessed it's own underground reservoir and generator, maintained a climate-controlled enclosed atmosphere to protect it's occupants from nuclear fallout, and could sustain it's population for up to three months without being resupplied from the outside. The bunker even had a BBC broadcast studio, so that the government could address the nation if needed.
Though highly sophisticated at the time it was created, the bunker became somewhat obsolete as nuclear arms became increasingly devastating, and after the 1980s the military ceased to upgrade any of the facilities' equipment. It was eventually superseded by the construction of a newer, more modern, and completely secret facility; the military maintained the bunker's secrecy however, allowing it to serve as a decoy for the replacement facility.
The site was taken over by the Ministry of Defence in 1991, who decommissioned the facility. In 2000, areas of the recently-closed RAF Rudloe Manor - located on the surface above Burlington - were sold off by the Ministry of Defence to a private owner; and while the Defence Communications Service Agency (DCSA) assumed responsibility for the remaining sites (including the bunker itself), the classified nature of Burlington means that entry into the facility - even by military personnel - is not authorised.
Following Britain's adoption of a new anti-mutant stance in 2009, Nathan Godfrey exploited his knowledge of the site, covertly appropriating it as an underground training facility and staging area for a team of mutant heroes dubbed Excalibur. Members of the team were originally housed in nearby Rudloe Manor, though as the team grew the Bunker eventually became used for accommodation as well.
Out of Character
Burlington Bunker is a real place. In the real world, the site was declassified in 2004; prior to that - and indeed since - it, and the nearby RAF Rudloe Manor had been believed by conspiracy theorists to be a British equivalent of Area 51: a site at which alien technologies could be studied and stored.
