How to make 1500 holes in the ground: accounting for law alongside other place-shaping factors in the making of an exceptional Cold War network

Whilst contemporary legal geography retains its concern to identify political or socio-economic power as a key driver in the materialisation of law into space (and thereby its constitutive role in creating places), a pragmatic analytical lens accepts that manifestations of particular types of place may not be driven by traditional models of power or conflict, or even fully conceptualised by their enactor. This chapter illustrates and explores this pragmatic perspective, by exploring the way that 'everyday' property law principles and rural land managements practices where co-opted into the creation of a Cold War network of nuclear blast monitoring stations, spread across the UK's hill tops and fields, between 1956 and 1965.