Portillo's Hidden History of Britain by Michael Portillo

Author:Michael Portillo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Michael O'Mara

Orford Ness, Suffolk

The night before catching the train to Suffolk I got out the maps to do some homework. The relevant Ordnance Survey Explorer map, ‘Woodbridge & Saxmundham’, wasn’t much help. It showed Orford Ness – the focus of the next day’s investigations – as an innocuous sliver of land and shingle clinging to a bend in the North Sea coastline below Aldeburgh. The symbols of wading bird and boot print indicated that it is a nature reserve with walking trails. Nothing about the secret stuff. But I knew it was there.

Anyone who has worked within the British defence establishment – and I occupied the very highest political office as Defence Secretary – has heard stories about Orford Ness. It is purely a place of recreation now. But over many decades, away from prying eyes, highly classified military research and experimentation took place there that involved the testing of parachutes, night flying, aerial photography, bomb aiming, early work with radar and the development of Britain’s nuclear deterrent. That much is certain. But there are many rumours and unanswered questions concerning the precise nature of this work and the potential danger it may have posed to the general public.

Its legacy is a series of bizarre structures built to accommodate the highly specialized procedures that went on within them – and in some cases to contain the fallout of those procedures should anything go wrong. These buildings have names straight out of science fiction: the Pagodas, Black Beacon, Cobra Mist. But there was no sign of them on the OS map. I had more luck, however, when I opened my laptop and called up satellite imagery of Orford Ness. Cameras orbiting 370 miles above the Earth do not lie. I zoomed in on the beach, clicked on a couple of blocky-looking structures near the white foam of the water’s edge and a window obligingly popped up to tell me I’d found the Pagodas.

The Official Secrets Act still governs much of what took place at Orford Ness. The MoD, my old stomping ground, remains tight-lipped. This is our ‘Area 51’, the code name for the top-secret facility in the Nevada Desert where the United States Air Force carries out its so-called ‘black projects’ – highly classified military research – and whose existence is officially denied by the US government. But thanks to new technology and old hands – former operatives who are willing to talk – Orford Ness is now beginning to slow-release its secrets.

My journey the next morning took me into the heart of the hidden state. My mission was to sift rumour from fact and in the process answer this question: if you found out what is really being done in the name of national security, would you feel safer?

The gateway to Orford Ness is the village of Orford, a village richly deserving of the epithet ‘quintessentially English’. It has a Norman castle, a Grade I-listed medieval church (both commended by the architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner) and a rather fine

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