This Former British Torpedo Facility Is Now a $9 Million Mansion

In the early days of the Cold War, the British Admiralty built a torpedo testing facility in the middle of Bushy Park, a royal park outside London. The facility had a 150-foot-wide pool reinforced with 4-foot-thick concrete blast walls, in which scientists spun torpedoes at the end of a metal arm.

Eventually, the site was decommissioned and handed back to the Crown, at which point it sat unused until 2000, when a developer purchased the property, demolished most of the facility, and in 2004 turned part of the curved pool walls into a private home and filled in the rest with a lawn and landscaping. The project was almost complete, at which point “he left it to stand and rot,” said Zena Holloway, an underwater photographer who purchased the house in 2011 with her husband, Patrick, a property developer. After moving in, the couple spent four years turning the house into a livable residence and then put it on the market in 2015 for £6.75 million ($8.8 million).