Overview
- The Fan Bay Plotting Room opened to booked tours on Friday, with visitors required to wear a hard hat and head torch and to descend an 18-step shaft into the conserved space.
- Built in 1940, the plotting room processed target reports from Fortress Command at South Foreland and used a fire direction table and an electromechanical computer to calculate gun bearings for the Fan Bay six-inch batteries.
- The underground site was abandoned and buried in the 1970s, rediscovered in 2017, and has been conserved rather than recreated so visitors can see peeling paint, wartime graffiti, pipes and other original fabric.
- National Trust staff and White Cliffs volunteers have traced service records and photographs to link names and marks on the walls to people who served there, informing interpretation for tours.
- Opening the room gives the public controlled access to a frontline element of Dover’s coastal defences and may prompt further research and preservation work on other buried wartime sites.