Portillo's Hidden History of Britain

London Live

7:00 PM to 8:00 PM

Friday 26 April

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On the Suffolk coast lie some of Britain's most mysterious ruins - concrete bunkers, rusting radar towers and crumpled military hardware. For almost a century, Orford Ness was owned by the Ministry of Defence, and when it closed in 1993, its buildings were still shrouded in secrecy. Michael Portillo explores a 90,000 sq ft windowless box code-named Cobra Mist, a joint UK-US venture built in 1968 that purportedly housed a huge aerial array to spy on Russian missile launches. He also examines Orford's apparent role as a testing centre for atomic weapons, including the first British atom bomb