What you might have needed to wear when you did the weekly shop in Fleet (David Dixon/geograph)
The curious amongst us will always want to visit locations where disastrous else exceedingly unpleasant things have taken place. You could, at one time for example, book a day trip to Chernobyl (would you really want to stay there for any longer?) ; a tourist destination where, according to one website that was promoting the then most famous Ukrainian phenomenon, ‘…you will find, amongst many other things that radiation makes the zone particularly interesting”.
‘Interesting’?
I’m sure that the thousands of people who have either died or are currently dying as a result of the world’s most infamous nuclear accident found the proliferation of deadly radiation in and around them, their families and homes anything but that.
Great Britain has not, yet, had its own Chernobyl. Yet, regardless of that, there are places in this country where you might just think twice about paying a visit, however curious you might happen to be.
Except that, at any given time in this instance, thousands of unsuspecting visitors will be all too close to this particular location of ‘interest’.
The place in question is close to Fleet in Dorset which was where the site used in what was referred to as the Dorset Defence Trials. These were carried out in the 1960’s and 70’s; experiments that saw the airborne release of zinc cadmium sulphide over residential areas to simulate what might happen in the event of a genuine chemical attack on this country.
The fringes of Fleet in Dorset. Does it glow at night time? (Tony Atkin/geograph)
The MoD stressed, of course, that the chemicals used were ‘harmless’ but, given that some families in the area went onto have children with birth defects, there have been calls for an official enquiry. There seemed to be little to no effort made at the time to conceal the experiments as, in another trial using the same chemical compound, a generator was towed along a road close to Frome (population approx. 26,0000) that generously emitted the chemical into the air for at least an hour.
These experiments were not just restricted to the West Country either as, in early 1964, it was reported that the MoD had carried out germ warfare aerial spraying over Norwich for much the same reasons: to simulate such an attack and to assess, from that, how the airborne particles might have behaved, given the meteorological conditions at the time.
A wet Norwich. But this is not just rain. This is Ministry of Defence rain (Roger Jones/geograph)
This programme was regarded as ‘Top Secret’ until 2000, when it was eventually declassified.
Which is what Norwich would have been if things had gone wrong.
A report was duly commissioned and written called The Fluorescent Particle Trials (sounds gripping) which revealed how, from 1955 through to 1963, aircraft flew from the north east of England down to the tip of Cornwall, ejecting, en-route, huge amounts of the afore mentioned zinc cadmium sulphide onto an unsuspecting population.
Experiments of a similar nature were also carried out in London during the mid-1950’s when bacteria was released on the London Underground between Colliers Wood and Tooting Broadway.
Colliers Wood Underground station. Scene of some unpleasant tests in the fifties (Ian Capper/geograph)
Nowhere and no-one, it seemed, was safe from potentially being poisoned via the actions of their own Government. The site near to Fleet was also near to seaborne trials that took place off that part of the Dorset coast involving the vessels Night Ferry and Golden Arrow (the Government have long learnt that, if you want to utilise something or somewhere that is potentially harmful to the public, give it a really pleasant and fluffy name-like, for example, Sellafield, which sounds so much more unthreatening than Windscale) which were used to oversee the airborne experiments.
These accounts, and others, featured in an online article in The Guardian that concluded with the writer of the piece enquiring of a spokeswoman from the Porton Down ‘science park’ if the sort of experiments that had centered on Fleet and the surrounding areas were still being carried out.
Porton Down from the outside. ‘No Unauthorised Access’? Why on earth would any sane person want to go in there? (Oscar Taylor/geograph)
Her response was, to say the least, a telling one.
“'It is not our policy to discuss ongoing research”.
I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.
But I wouldn’t be 100% happy about eating any fruit or vegetables that might have been grown in that otherwise rich and fertile Dorset soil.