Six tonnes of metal creates ‘thrill of the real object’ as part of cold war section of Hayward Gallery exhibition History is Now

Commuters on the top decks of passing buses should not panic: although a giant cold war missile launcher has been installed on the terraces of the Hayward Gallery in London, the South Bank complex is not under nuclear attack from the east.

“When you stand beside it, it is hard not to go ‘Wow,’” the artist Richard Wentworth conceded. He has curated the cold war section of History is Now, an exhibition on Britain since the second world war.

Wentworth first thought of using newsreel showing firing tests of the British designed surface-to-air missile. Then he and Cliff Lauson, overall curator at the Hayward, instead decided to track down a real six-tonne Bloodhound missile. Mounted on its launcher, gleaming and newly conserved for the exhibition, it is as striking an object as any piece of contemporary sculpture. “It’s the real, the thrill of the real object,” Wentworth said.

The newsreel clips, which will be shown as visitors make their way out on to the terrace to stand dwarfed by the missile, were chilling enough. “It worked perfectly,” says the plummy commentator in one film. “The target has been completely destroyed.”

In truth, if Bloodhound had ever been fired in anger, the western world would have been engulfed in a barely imaginable catastrophe. The missiles were designed in Britain within two years of the Soviet Union testing an atom bomb in 1949. Stationed along the east coast from 1958 until 1991, and designed to pass the speed of sound in seconds but with a relatively short range, they were intended as a last line of defence, to blow up Russian nuclear warheads in mid-air moments before they hit British soil.

Bloodhound was not nuclear armed. It was a continuous rod warhead, designed so the explosion pattern spread into a large circle to destroy its target.

The Bloodhound was borrowed for the exhibition from the RAF Defence Radar Museum in Norfolk, which is on an old air base a few miles from where the nearest missiles would have been fired. It was restored specially for the exhibition, with advice from the Bloodhound Preservation Group, by a car maintenance workshop, Boyer’s in Cromer, not far from its original base.

Wentworth, born in 1947, is the oldest of the seven artists who have chosen the works of art and installations for the exhibition – “so kill me, kill me now” he said wryly – and so has only secondhand memories of the second world war, while Lauson, born in 1978, was barely in time for the end of the cold war. “To us it’s history, to them it was part of the fabric of their lives,” Wentworth said.

The exhibition, Lauson says, is neither pessimistic nor optimistic in its view of the history of the last 70 years. “It says there are many questions, some answered, some unanswerable.”

• History is now: Seven Artists Take on Britain, Hayward Gallery, London, 10 February - 26 April 2015