Original subtitles

Tom ward (narrates): A network of ominous towers,

rusting away in the north sea.

Being out there and living

in one of these structures

must have been very intense and quite terrifying.

A mysterious concrete pyramid, dominating the American midwest.

There's a brooding menace about the whole environment.

A dilapidated medieval style castle in the heart of urban america.

It looks like someone airlifted

one of the spectacular medieval buildings in France

and just dropped it in the middle of Philadelphia.

And one of the biggest machines ever built,

forgotten in a German field.

You're just completely flabbergasted

at the enormity of this thing in front of you.

(Theme music)

Once,

they were some of the most advanced structures

and facilities on the planet...

At the cutting edge of design and construction.

Today, they stand abandoned,

contaminated, and sometimes deadly.

But who built them and how?

And why were they abandoned?

Off the east coast of england, at the mouth of the river thames,

a group of bizarre

rusting structures hover above the horizon,

like something from 'war of the worlds'.

It looks like an alien standing as a sentry.

Coming out of the water,

it almost looks like deposit from an alien civilisation.

It's completely out of character from what you would expect.

Standing 80 feet above the sea,

are 7 huge steel boxes weighing 580 tonnes,

supported on four 17 feet long splayed concrete legs,

extending down into the waters.

Being out there and living

in one of these structures

must have been very intense and rather quite terrifying.

You sort of know there are people nearby,

but it must have been a very, very isolating and scary experience.

It's easy to see from their corroded steel plating

that these mysterious structures have been derelict for years.

But what drove engineers to create these bizarre constructions

in such an inhospitable place?

What was their purpose?

And why were they abandoned?

By 1943, the second world war had reached a turning point.

Allied air forces were engaged in a new tactic of area bombing.

Instead of targeting specific industrial sites,

thousands of British and American bombers delivered

massive round the clock raids on Germany's civilian centres.

Hitler, enraged by these attacks on his cities,

planned to obliterate London in a devastating aerial offensive.

In response,

the British military developed a top secret defence project

to protect the beating heart of the mighty British empire.

The river thames was crucial to London's survival.

This lifeline allowed supplies to flow into the city,

whilst delivering tanks,

planes and ships made in its factories

to the frontlines.

Churchill and the British

had to make sure that nobody ever came up the river thames

to threaten London again.

The designs were like nothing seen before.

Often really sound,

practical engineering solutions can be borne out

of what's a very difficult and tragic situation.

Britain's solution to the Nazi threat

was the red sands sea fort.

It's part of a string of defences equipped

with heavy anti-aircraft guns across the mouth of the thames.

This was total war.

And in total war,

you do not leave the river that goes up

to your Metropolis undefended.

But would the fort prove effective against Germany's luftwaffe?

And how big a role did it play in Hitler's defeat?

(Dramatic music)

Construction began in 1942.

In the past,

creating defences at sea had been a long and complex process.

But for this project,

the engineers decided to try a new building technique,

and it began on land with prefabrication.

Taking a fort and constructing it

in an easy location, and then floating it out

into a strategically beneficial location

was a groundbreaking

and very important innovation in terms of offshore construction

and engineering projects.

Each fort consists of a concrete grid base

with angled legs.

These support a two-storey accommodation block

with a gun platform on top.

So, there's two really,

really basic principles of structural engineering

that have been used in the design of these towers.

The first one is making sure that the weight of the structure

is as low as possible 'cause the lower that is,

the more stable your structure is.

The second great principle

that we're seeing is the use of a triangle.

So, by having a wide base and bringing the legs up

almost into a point,

you've kind of recreated that stability of a triangle.

And structural engineers absolutely adore triangles

'cause they're a really stable shape.

These legs support towers, each weighing 580 tonnes.

Built at Gravesend in Kent,

they were then carried by tugboat and sunk into position.

Three groups of seven towers were built to defend the thames,

the majority armed with heavy anti-aircraft guns.

(Cannon fires)

David Phillips is part of project red sand,

established to preserve and restore these historic structures.

This is the whole heart of the operation.

We are now on the platform of the 3.7 inch gun,

of which there are three others on each of the other gun towers.

The gun that was out here was very effective.

They were controlled by radar and a sperry predictor,

which was a piece of kit that sat between the radar and the gun,

which could automatically get the gun to lock onto their target.

By the end of 1943,

the thames forts were ready for battle.

All that remained was to man them with soldiers,

165 were needed for each group of towers.

To operate the gun,

there were two crew on the gun itself,

and then there were lots of people in the control tower

and also watching by the searchlight.

Soldiers manned these remote and isolated forts

for a month at a time,

ready to rapidly respond to incoming planes.

Coming down here

is the shell lockers all around the site,

all around the gun towers, which held the 3.7 inch shells.

They were brought up from the armoury

and loaded into these lockers.

But living conditions could be brutal.

Since this was a military structure,

the human consideration of the occupants

was probably not a priority.

It was more about can it withstand the weather?

Can it withstand an enemy attack?

And then, let's worry about the comfort of the operators.

If it meant using

thousands and thousands of rounds of ammunition

to try to shoot down only a few German aircraft,

that's what you do.

And if it meant that soldiers and sailors

had to live under miserable conditions

in the north sea, in all kinds of weather

with only a little bit of fresh water

and only occasional re-supply, that's what you do.

(Dramatic music)

Crews braved the volatile conditions

and guarded this gateway to the heart of London

with great success, shooting down 22 Nazi aircraft.

And when Hitler targeted London with swarms of his v-1

'vengeance weapons' in the summer of 1944,

30 of them were sent plummeting into the sea.

Having anti-aircraft artillery

pointed at anyone who tries to approach London

up the river thames limits German options.

The German bombers that attacked London

during the blitz,

they could not just drive

right up the river and attack London.

Hitting targets with any degree of accuracy

was extremely difficult for world war ii era bombers.

Rivers provided a valuable landmark

and helped crews navigate their way towards their targets.

Removing the thames as a guiding marker

greatly diminished

the destructive power of German bombers.

These stark forts are

one of the most extraordinary engineering successes

that helped lead the allies to victory in 1945.

Having fulfilled their purpose,

the British government decommissioned them in 1956,

leaving them abandoned.

Today, seven of the original red sands sea fort towers remain,

rusting away at sea.

The fact that the red stands forts

are still standing to this day

is a testament to the quality of the engineering

and construction involved in making them

and putting them to use.

The battle to preserve this piece of history goes on.

But without urgent funding,

these remarkable engineering feats will be lost to the elements.

Engineering can't last forever,

and these have served their purpose.

So, it's often a difficult decision,

but sometimes we do just have to accept that things

just can't be there forever.

Across the Atlantic ocean in north Dakota,

just 15 miles from the Canadian border,

stands one of america's most incredible

and mysterious structures.

Standing on top of a sloping mound,

this 79-foot tall concrete pyramid looms over the surrounding plains.

This thing looks downright sinister.

This has to be one of the weirdest looking things

in the entire country.

There's a brooding menace about the whole environment.

There are no windows visible.

Sloped at 56 degrees,

the otherwise blank surfaces of each wall are punctuated

with strange white discs.

You're confronted with something completely unworldly,

for where you are.

This giant structure has the impression of an aztec pyramid.

The pyramid lies at the centre of a 470-acre field,

surrounded by dozens of mysterious manholes,

security fences, and derelict guard posts.

This is no ordinary industrial complex.

When you get closer,

you can see this was some kind of military installation.

But what?

These monolithic structures springing out of the ground.

You have a concrete parking lot that has hatches and pillars.

What is this?

Who built it and why?

And why was this giant pyramid abandoned?

During the cold war in the early 1960s,

the nuclear arms race between the Soviet union

and the United States was reaching crisis point.

(Distant explosion)

A fierce debate broke out

within america's armed forces about the best way to protect the nation

and its arsenal of missiles

from annihilation by Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles.

By the 1960s,

the popular imagination has fixed on the idea

that nuclear war will involve all out,

total war assault.

Nuclear armageddon was very much on the horizon.

The potential for mass destruction was very real.

The Soviet union truly respected one thing only,

and that was military force.

And so we had to show

that our technology was equal or better than theirs.

The us army raised the stakes of military defence

and developed this,

the nekoma anti-ballistic missile system.

At the heart of the complex was a state-of-the-art radar.

This is a one-of-a-kind radar system

that was constructed at the height of the cold war,

the height of American paranoia.

Construction of the installation began in the late-1960s.

Teams of engineers excavated nearly a million cubic feet of earth

to create a vast pit 53 feet into the ground,

lined with concrete and reinforced with 22,000 tonnes of iron and steel

to shield against nuclear electromagnetic radiation.

Inside, multiple floors covered 127,000 square feet

and contained tactical operational systems,

weapons control, and the new phased-array radar.

Local resident, Duane Otto, is caretaker of the nekoma complex.

The phased-array is a radar that,

through the computer system, will detect a missile or an object

coming in from Russia at a greater distance.

The technology develops to create

a virtual radar antenna that is capable of focussing

in different directions without actually having to move

a big piece of steel mesh.

This was the cutting edge of technology

to allow the usa to feel safe

that should there be a strike from the ussr,

they'd be able to take out those nuclear warheads

before they landed on American soil.

Achieving this level of defence

required the most advanced computer in the western world.

Engineered to handle 10 million instructions per second,

the radar's computer was located deep

beneath the blast-proof pyramid.

It controlled an on-site fleet of 46 missiles

held in underground launch silos,

designed to shoot down incoming Soviet weapons,

all directed by the huge circular radar dishes

mounted on each side of the pyramid.

The nekoma system was operating

at the limits of 1960 technology.

And the biggest problem they had was

you had seconds to decide

are you gonna fire your missile to stop that missile

or is it a decoy?

Is it something else?

To be effective,

it had to be able to simultaneously target

multiple Soviet nuclear missiles.

The radars could detect

a Soviet missile incoming and give six minutes warning.

The missiles could hit a target on 30 seconds notice.

That meant that as long as the big computers

could make their decisions fast enough,

a nuclear tipped missile could be in the air

and intercepting an inbound Soviet icbm in time to blow it up.

Refining these technologies took many years.

Eventually, by late-1975,

the nekoma base was fully equipped with both long-range spartan

and short-range sprint nuclear missiles.

These weapons ensured they would have two chances

to take out incoming Soviet missiles.

We have here sprint missile field.

You'll notice that there's a white cover

on top of this missile site.

That is mainly fibreglass.

When they fired this missile,

it would go directly through the fibreglass.

When they launched these spartan missiles,

you'll notice that there is a steel rail on each side.

When this missile is ready for firing,

they send the signal

and then there is explosive charges in that area,

and they'll blow this cover out of the way

and be speeded on its way to the outer atmosphere.

But would this high-tech missile defence system

actually work?

And why was it abandoned?

Completed in 1975,

the complex cost $5 billion to build,

equivalent to around 20 billion pounds today.

Those missiles were so fast

and so accurate

and directed by radars that were so powerful

that the United States was able to demonstrate

its capability to the point at which

the us could be made invulnerable to Soviet attack

scared the hell out of the Russians.

In 1976 however,

the American political climate took a turn.

In the wake of the Watergate scandal and president Nixon's resignation,

Jimmy Carter was elected into office,

bringing with him a new cold war policy.

After just five months of full combat readiness,

the us government concluded that nekoma was no longer

an effective war deterrent and abruptly shut the complex down,

leaving it abandoned.

Although it was technically operation,

rumour has it, it was only ever switched on,

screens alight, lights flashing, buzzing noises, for three days.

So, when you look at nekoma,

you're in for a shock.

When we waste money,

we really go down in flames, don't we?

I mean, this has to be one of the greatest

waste of taxpayers' money

in the cold war if not in history.

Yet many experts believe the vast sums of money

spent at nekoma

did in fact help negate the Soviet threat.

If you look at it that way,

the very fact that the nuclear war never did break out,

maybe the American taxpayers did get value for money.

If 5 billion bucks

was the cost of nuclear peace,

that is 5 billion bucks well spent.

Today, the nekoma safeguard complex lies abandoned

in a remote corner of north Dakota.

Plans are afoot for nekoma to be opened up

as a tourist attraction.

Now, you might think,

"why am I gonna want to travel a distance and pay money

to go and visit this giant concrete eyesore?"

Well, you could look at it this way.

It's all monument to the fact

that the two nations could come together

and resolve their issues to create peace.

Despite its short active life,

nekoma pushed the boundaries of radar and computer technology.

It proved that simply flooding the planet with nuclear missiles

was not necessarily the way to win the cold war.

And I think reason enough to keep nekoma as it is

and to go along to learn about that history

and feel the significance of what is otherwise

just this giant, mysterious concrete structure.

1,500 miles way,

an unusually shaped complex sits empty

in the heart of the densely populated

city of Philadelphia.

When you come across

what looks like a medieval castle in Philadelphia,

with battlements and flags waving from turrets,

it looks like someone airlifted

one of the spectacular medieval buildings in France,

the ones that inspire Disneyland,

and just dropped it in the middle of Philadelphia.

Taking up nearly 10 acres or several city blocks,

it's surrounded by 30 feet high, 10 feet thick stone walls

that contrast sharply with the homes

and offices that fill the surrounding streets.

With seven corridors extending outward

from an octagonal central hub,

this foreboding complex is shaped like a giant wagon wheel.

It's decaying and mouldy and dark and damp.

A haunted place where you definitely don't want to spend any time.

It's really spooky.

You can smell the paint peeling off the walls

and the damp concrete.

It's really, really eerie.

What was the purpose of this strange site?

And why was it abandoned?

In the early 1800s,

the state of Pennsylvania had a problem.

The prisons they controlled were overcrowded,

hard to keep orderly and inhumane for the inmates.

For decades, prisons were cold,

crowded buildings where inmates were just crammed

in like chickens in a Coop,

inviting disease, violence, even death.

So, officials planned a bold new site

for the rehabilitation of prisoners, the eastern state penitentiary.

The aim was to create a state-of-the-art prison

that put all others to shame

and revolutionised the justice system.

You can see that this was a real reaction

to a social reform.

And at the time, very revolutionary indeed.

In 1822,

work began on america's biggest and most expensive prison project,

costing the modern equivalent of 15 billion pounds.

Sara Jane elk

is president of the eastern state penitentiary.

The architect of this prison, John haviland,

had to think of all the daily needs of a person

while they were by themselves.

So, consequently, this prison was built with central heat,

central plumbing, ventilation.

It was the first environmentally controlled place for human life.

It was a drastic change from the chaos and violence

of ordinary communal prisons,

which experts believed gave inmates no chance of reform.

In 1829, this humanitarian prison opened.

The purpose behind the design

was to give occupants their own space.

Each inmate has their own cell.

They also have their own little skylight.

And this is interesting

'cause the whole thinking was about social reform.

The skylight was designed

so that inmates would feel the presence of god

as he looked down upon them.

The idea was,

"we're not just gonna punish prisoners.

We're gonna allow them time to reflect and repent."

The word penitentiary comes from repent.

So, they isolated each prisoner by himself in a cell.

They didn't get to talk to each other.

They were supposed to spend their days

in quiet contemplation of their crimes.

Prisoners were let out of their cells

twice a day for exercise in an individually open-air yard.

And the idea here was,

the fresh air and sunlight would keep people healthy.

The initial design featured 450 individual cells.

To supervise this many people in an ordinary prison

would take an army of guards.

So, British architect John haviland

solved this problem by introducing a unique layout.

It's a really ingenious design

of having what is effectively a wagon wheel,

a central hub,

where the guards can look out in every direction

and see the cells going off in the distance.

The design of the penitentiary

was actually extremely innovative,

which meant that a small group of guards

could keep an eye on the whole prison

from that one location.

However, creating a model prison

to revolutionise the treatment of offenders was not cheap.

It was one of the most expensive public building projects

ever carried out in the us.

This is 1828.

Now, each inmate has their own central heating,

their own wash basin...

Their own flush toilet.

Now, let's put that in perspective, the white house,

the president, he doesn't have his own flush toilet.

These guys do.

Prisoners were in solitary confinement,

but they did have enough food,

they weren't threatened by violence from other prisoners.

You can see why the founders of the prison

thought it was a step forward.

Would this revolutionary prison actually rehabilitate the inmates?

And why was it abandoned?

After just a few years of operation,

problems began to surface.

By the 1830s,

engineers had to expand the penitentiary

and alter the design in order to accommodate

a growing number of inmates.

They had to double the cells.

They had to bring in a whole lot more prisoners.

So, all those nice design features

about solitude that would foster reflection, that was gone.

The prison kept working, it kept functioning,

but it was no longer

the idyllic prison of the future it once was.

Even the advanced features of the cells

failed to work as planned.

There were furnaces at the end of the cell blocks,

and they were to heat the tunnels underneath the cells,

and then the air was to flow in.

But the people closest to the furnaces

were getting carbon monoxide sickness

and the people on the other ends were getting frostbite.

The flush toilets were flushed twice a week

by the prison guards.

Twice a week.

And hence the stench that this created,

it was legendary.

On a practical level,

the whole idea of rigid separation

of prisoners proved impossible to maintain.

Cells designed for one man soon housed two or three.

By the end of the century, the notion of solitary confinement,

originally intended to encourage prisoners

to reflect and reform

was replaced with overcrowding and harsh,

unsanitary conditions.

In 1929,

the prison still employed solitary confinement

to try and rehabilitate

one of the most notorious criminals of all time.

And the eastern state penitentiary

actually had quite a few famous prisoners in it,

the most famous being al Capone

who spent a few years there for a minor charge.

Now, he was serving eight months,

although his original sentence was longer.

He described his time there as easy.

Well, it would be easy when you have your own sofa,

your own bookcase, and your own record player

that you play waltzes on.

It couldn't have been that easy though

'cause we know he spent a good deal of his bootlegging income

trying to get that sentence even further reduced.

For 42 more years,

the prison continued to operate despite its notorious conditions.

But in 1970, because of overcrowding,

the once revolutionary prison finally closed its doors for good.

Today, the dilapidated eastern state penitentiary

lies deserted in the middle of bustling Philadelphia.

After it was closed, the whole site became abandoned.

But then a consortium of concerned citizens

got involved and said, "no, this is a historic landmark.

We need to make it into a museum."

And that's what it is today, and that feels about right.

Despite its many drawbacks,

the groundbreaking design was copied all over the world.

More than 300 central hub prisons were built.

Yet the whole concept of solitary confinement

came to be seen not as a way of reforming criminals

but as a punishment in itself.

At the time, it was thought to be

this very enlightened,

gentle way to treat these prisoners, give them time to reflect.

But in fact, it was solitary confinement,

a very cruel punishment to isolate people.

Spending months, years in these cells all by yourself,

it's really hard to imagine.

Over 4,000 miles away, across the Atlantic in schipkau,

east Germany,

a corroding mass of steel towers over the landscape.

Out of the thick pine forest emerges a monster machine.

You're just completely flabbergasted

at the enormity of this thing in front of you.

This thing looks like something out of star wars,

giant super-structure.

It's 160 feet high,

it's got this evil-looking wheel at the front of it.

This vast rusting hulk is made of three grid-like arms

all connected by a spider's web of steel cables.

It's very science fiction.

You'd be forgiven for thinking

this is definitely some kind of contraption

built by an evil genius planning to take over the world.

It's just unbelievable.

Incredibly, this metal leviathan was once mobile.

Two huge tank-like tracks support 4,000 tonnes of weight.

Control cabins perched among the girders

also suggest that it carried a crew.

But what is this mysterious machine?

Who built it?

And why was it abandoned in the middle of nowhere?

In the 1960s,

communist east Germany was changing its economic policies

in an attempt to boost industrial growth.

To fuel its power stations and meet energy demands,

they tapped into their key energy deposit,

brown coal.

Huge deposits lay just below the surface.

Getting at it, however,

was costly and incredibly labour intensive.

In 1964,

the engineering firm lauchhammerwerk

developed something radical to overcome this problem.

When designing structures

at such a scale,

engineers face many challenges, mostly due to the sheer size.

Things weigh

so much that modern materials are almost at their limit.

When you take a closer look at some of the elements,

on the extremities of this giant monster,

you can slowly figure out what the purpose of it was.

This is schaufelradbagger or bucket wheel excavator 258.

It's one of the largest machines ever built.

Nicknamed 'bagger 258', this is a strip mining excavator,

designed to remove earth and rock

to expose veins of brown coal that run just beneath the surface.

There is nothing delicate about strip mining with bagger 258.

This thing removes yards of earth at a time

in this great big long trench,

following the coal underneath the earth's surface,

until you get down to what you're after, the coal.

While the company manufactured 13 types of these machines,

they only made one bagger 258

and they unleashed it in 1965.

The key element of the bagger is its immense cutting wheel,

40 feet in diameter,

each of its 10 buckets can hold 50,000

cubic feet of earth and rock,

allowing it to cut deep into the surface

at astonishing speed.

This thing is shovelling up

thousands of tonnes of earth and rock at a time

before dropping it onto its own conveyor belt to shift it away,

all the while, trundling along on its tracks

to continuously eat up the earth in front of it.

Machine doesn't do it justice.

This thing's a factory on tracks.

Bucket wheel excavators are

amazingly complex in terms of their abilities to move,

function, and otherwise just do their job

with a minimal amount of human involvement.

When you see the size and the complexity of bagger,

you'd imagine it would need an army of people

to actually operate it.

But that's not the case.

It only takes five people to run,

and all of them are situated on board.

So, whilst it might have cost

the earth to build, running it comes relatively cheap.

There's a trade-off between

building one machine that's really big and using dozens

or hundreds of trucks and shovels.

Obviously, if something breaks,

you're in trouble and you need to shut down, but overall,

the bucket wheel excavator is so much more efficient

that it's worth the risk.

It began operating in 1965,

and though designed to extract coal efficiently,

it was painfully slow moving.

Weighing around 4,000 tonnes,

it could only move at 6 yards a minute.

And even that was no easy task.

That's hardly gonna beat any world land speed records,

but it's actually extremely impressive

when you consider the size and the weight of this thing.

In fact, it weighs so much

that as it moves any ground

ahead of it needs to be specially prepared.

And any roads it crosses needs to be prepared,

so that it doesn't just pulverise the surface.

Yes, bagger is mobile, but mobility comes at a cost.

One of the big challenges

is you've got to move the bucket constantly,

so it's always digging in to fresh soil or fresh coal.

The bucket excavator has to pivot

as the wheel is turning into fresh soil,

then the whole thing also has to creep forward

in order to move into new areas to be excavated.

That wasn't the only operational hazard facing

this engineering giant.

What strikes me about bagger

is the number of appendages that it has sticking out from its main body.

You've got a spoil arm

sticking out the back that then spits out

all of that earth into trucks waiting to take it away.

But crucially, you also need a counterbalance arm.

Now, this counterweights the forces and the stresses

at the front of the machine as it digs through the earth,

otherwise the whole thing would just topple over.

For decades, bagger 258

successfully mined coal across eastern Germany.

Even after German unification in 1990,

it continued to fuel the country's energy

needs until 2002.

Eventually, it simply ran out of material to mine,

so operation was halted and the machine abandoned.

Today, the bagger 258 is rusting away

in a remote and empty field.

But in more ways than one,

it's left an indelible Mark on the landscape.

The problem with large bucket wheel excavators

is that they're made of manmade materials,

metals, that do not weather very well.

So, preserving them for future generations

would be very expensive, very costly.

So, leaving them in the field is probably

the only true solution we have for us.

Bagger 258 has been left to rot.

It has been abandoned.

But maybe that's not such a bad thing.

Rightly or wrongly, we're still massively dependant

on fossil fuels today and bagger 258,

for me, is a reminder and a monument

to the effort and the ingenuity required to exploit

the earth's resources in the way we do.

Now abandoned,

they were once on the cutting edge of human engineering.

Within these decaying structures are the echoes of history.

They speak of war and terror

but also of exploration and human endeavour.

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