Rye Outstation

The Station is located on private land in Rye, East Sussex. Its strategic location provided occupants with unobstructed views of potential invasion routes, including the sea, railway, and major road.

This outstation appears to either be the HARSTON 7 outstation or a previously undocumented outstation from the Kent network. Based on the Jones map and location we consider it to be HARSTON 7. The following extract is from an article written by Stewart Angell for an archived edition of Subterranea Britannica magazine:

"Another underground out-station in East Sussex has been identified near Rye. Whilst there doesn’t appear to be a standard design applied to out-stations, the Rye site is remarkably similar to a known out-station at Cloughton, North Yorkshire, some 320 miles away! The Rye out-station is constructed on a solid concrete base with all its brickwork rendered and painted white throughout. Low sidewalls support Anderson shelter-type corrugated iron sheeting along its whole length. The site has two chambers; both measuring six feet long and nearly five feet wide, divided by a narrow wall which includes a low doorway.

A vertical entrance shaft allows entry at one end into the first chamber and a three-foot-wide concrete emergency exit tunnel runs out for thirty feet from the opposite end of the second chamber. Above the start of the exit tunnel are nine four-inch-diameter glazed pipes set into the wall providing ventilation. Five other pipes, three included in the tunnel area, assist with air flow.

Two aerial feeder wires run to the outside of the outstation through an iron pipe, set into the corrugated iron near the internal dividing wall. These wires were originally concealed under the bark of an oak tree as they made their way up its trunk to the aerial".

These pictures were taken by Nick Catford in 1999 and show the bunker in a very good condition.

The doorway into the second chamber would have originally been fitted with a bookcase with a hidden release revealing the second chamber and escape tunnel.

A source has confirmed that the bunker remains in a similar good condition in 2024.