War is over so can we give peace a chance? These abandoned British bomb stores and ammo bunkers are looking peaceful indeed now that the explosives are gone.

The Brits built up their military infrastructure explosively, pardon the pun, before and during the World Wars. Peacetime saw a corresponding deflation with hardened assets such as bomb stores typically abandoned instead of being dismantled.

One such quieted bomb store can be found at RAF Wittering near Peterborough in Cambridgeshire, England. Established in 1916 as an base for zeppelin-fighting BE2C and BE12 aircraft, the base was used by the USAAF in World War II and became the “Home of the Harrier” in the 1970s.

After the war, the base’s bomb stores were expanded and toughened to accommodate nuclear weapons. Flickr user Graeme Hutton (graemehutton) visited the disused and derelict bomb stores at the Wittering Ammo Dump in late July of 2014 and snapped dozens of evocative photos.

RAF Chilmark

RAF Chilmark in Wiltshire was built in 1936 and by 1965 it was the RAF’s only remaining ammunition supply depot. The base was shut down entirely in 1995 but it took the better part of two years to clear live ammunition from the site. Flickr user Newage2 visited the base’s bomb store in early February of 2016.

RAF Chilmark also houses a civil defense bunker built in 1985 and sold to private interests in 1997. In February of 2017, a police raid revealed the bunker had been converted to a large-scale marijuana grow-op. “There are approximately 20 rooms in the building, split over two floors, each 200 feet long and 70 feet wide,” stated Detective Inspector Paul Franklin of the Wiltshire Police Dedicated Crime Team. “Almost every single room had been converted for the wholesale production of cannabis plants, and there was a large amount of evidence of previous crops. This was an enormous set up.” Up in smoke, as they say.

RAF Newton

RAF Newton in Nottinghamshire was built in 1939 and closed in the year 2000. The site is gradually being converted into an industrial estate but not without controversy: radioactive contamination from Radium used to paint luminescent dials in the 1940’s has been detected. Flickr user Goldie87 visited disused parts of RAF Newton in late February of 2008.

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Boom To Busted Abandoned British Bomb Storage Depots

Known for its naval power, England has a great many leftover army and sea forts. Some have been turned into private islands, radio station or micronations, but this one has been made into a museum and luxury resort.

The Spitbank Fort was the result of an 1859 Royal Commission and is located in the Solent, near Portsmouth, England. Though its purpose and wares shifted somewhat over time, it was aimed at protect British shores from both sea and (eventually) air attacks.

The structure remained an operational military island for a full century before being decommissioned in the late 1900s as obsolete.

Five million dollars worth of renovations later, the structure is now a hybrid of its original architecture and engineering and added luxuries including (but not limited to) hotel rooms, bars, restaurants, libraries, saunas, sun decks and swimming pools.

Day and overnight guests alike can enjoy breakfast, brunch, lunch and dinner in the cozy brick interior or with a 360-degree exterior vista above.

It’s a surreal, otherworldly scene: ornate palaces with the finest appointments being used as temporary shelter for American soldiers. The detritus of their everyday lives mingles with the ornate columns, shiny marble floors and war rubble in the palaces built by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. After the dictator was forced from power and his property seized, the US Army moved their command headquarters into Al-Faw Palace in Camp Victory.

Photographer Richard Mosse traveled to Iraq to document this bizarre circumstance, this juxtaposition of supposed liberators dwelling in the very home of the dictator they vowed to depose. He called the resulting book Breach, a nod to the liberators stepping into the breach they created when Hussein was removed from power.

That’s not to say that Mosse’s work is sternly anti-war. He seeks to show extraordinary images of an unprecedented situation with a fair measure of neutrality. He didn’t resort to telling one side of the story or another; he simply made photographs that, regardless of how you feel about the war, are moving.

Al-Faw wasn’t the only palace occupied by US forces. Of the 81 palaces Hussein built for himself, Mosse was only able to visit three in his month in Iraq: Al-Faw in Baghdad, Al-Salam in Baghdad, and Saddam’s Birthday Palace in Tikrit.

Many of the palaces are falling apart, both because of war damage and because they were built in a time of harsh embargoes. The palaces were also constructed quickly, with Hussein desiring a palace in nearly every city. The dictator’s goal seems to have been to inform Iraqis that he was everywhere at all times.

In a fascinating interview with BLDGBLOG, Mosse describes the experience of visiting the palaces as surreal. The oddly decorative bits and pieces of American soldiers’ daily lives strewn about the self-indulgent chambers were part of another world just waiting to be explored.

Notable not only for the bizarre combination of Hussein-era opulence and American soldiers’ flotsam, Mosse’s photos are also incredible journeys through some very interesting architecture. Plywood cubicles resting precariously beneath ornate chandeliers. Company and squadron insignia taped to the heavy marble walls. Impossibly massive halls with impossibly garish features.

It seems that he tried to capture the feeling of the locations, rather than the experience of the people, in his journeys. There are no cheesy shots of a lone soldier with his head down, none of the typical sympathetic wartime human interest motivation. There’s only an exploration of the circumstance. And that makes every single image in the series that much more compelling.