Found An Air Raid Shelter In My Garden,any Advice Please?

Evening all.
We moved into an old house six months ago,and looking through all the deeds/ legal jargon paperwork we got from the solicitor i know our house used to be a doctors surgery during ww2.

After meeting our new neighbour a few weeks ago he told me theres a ww2 bomb shelter buried in my back garden.
He remembers the chap who used to live here filling it in about 20 years ago.
He tried to break the roof but failed as it was so well built.

So a few weeks passed,then it really started bugging me,i had to find it!

A few failed attempts as the neighbour couldnt quite pin point it as it was so long ago that he had seen it,i found it!



Inside is about an eight foot square,all brickwork and retaining walls are two courses thick.
The shelter has about a 10 inch concrete slab roof with corrugated sheeting underneath.
You can see where the chap tried to break it above the door and the re-bar is showing a bit.
It has a doorway either side.

The neighbour told me it had steps leading down to it but i havent found them yet.
Cant really understand the whole layout of this yet as the retaining wall outside the shelter is longer than the shelter.
Hard to explain,but in the next photo,right hand side of the shelter wall you can see the corner.
But the retaining wall opposite the door runs wider than the shelter,and is getting closer to my newly built garage!



Cant really do anything with this untill i find the steps to it,if they are still there of course!
I might start to dig the other side of the shelter where another doorway is.
On the next photo inside,you can see how the earth has been poured in.



Was there a standard design for these private built shelters?
Just cant understand how the external sort of alleyways were set out,did it run round the whole of one side?

Another problem that has accured is theres now a 5 foot drop into the ground from the level of the garden!
Obvouisly this will be even deeper if i dig to the concrete floor,im guessing from 6 to 8 foot down!
No good when the missus is hanging the washing out above it all!!
How did they stop someone falling down from the garden level? A handrail all the way round?
Or did they not even bother?!?

Thought id show some pics of it anyway.
Cheers.

 

Apoligies if this thread is in the wrong section.

 

Great photos, what a great find. There was usually a set design for outside Anderson Shelters,

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWandersonshelter.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-raid_shelter

 

Brilliant! I hope someone comes along who knows this kind of stuff,
I'd be digging the whole garden if it were mine.
Don't be doing anything silly (like filling it in after you've excavated it) though !

 

Pez thank you for posting very interesting

regards
Clive

 

Unless i can find the steps,if it has any?!!
Im afraid i might have to fill it back in,ive already made a mess of our lawn!
Now its just become a bit of a death trap until i can decide what to do with it.
Certainly wouldnt want to be wandering around the garden in the dark!!

 

There's probably buried treasure underneath the shelter floor too and you'll kick yourself if you don't look

 

It looks very well built and in great condition. Do you have any rough dimensions?

 

Pez - obviously built by a man who knew what he was doing - when you have it all cleared out - it will make a great cold storage unit for the whole neighbourhood will save loads of money on the electric bills

Cheers

 

The actual shelter is about an eight foot square.
The width outside between the shelter and retaining wall is about three foot.
Obvouisly i havent dug deep enough to reach the floor of it,but im guessing its around 6 foot in height.
A foot of soil and rubble has been put over the top of the whole thing once it had been back filled.

Cheers.

 

What a great find!

 

Your so lucky finding that in the garden. Do be careful though, shouldn't dig past 1.20m without shoring, but the walls look sturdy enough. What type of material do you think it's built on? If it's silty/clayey stuff it could have settlement, especially with the weight of the soil above. (This is what you get for living with a geologist for 15 years)

You got access to a metal detector? What a great den it would make for children or a store as previously suggested. Keep us updated.

 

You are a lucky chap having that in your garden. I think it's a well constructed private shelter. Anderson shelters were the most common type as they were cheap and easy to build but they didn't provide a lot of protection. If you had a bit of money (you say this was a doctors surgery?) then you could build something a bit more substantial like this.The use of re-bar suggests it was a very professionally done job as depending on when it was built (if it is WWII) that would have been hard to come by even in the building trade.

 

Is that asbestos sheets for roofing in the 3rd pic?

 

Given the size of it & its location, it probably was a privately-built shelter, although in addition to the individual family refuges (Anderson's & the like) that were widespread, there were also a lot of community shelters built by the government/local authorities.

I excavated part of such a shelter last year & its construction was very similar to yours, albeit on a somewhat larger scale. Period photos of the one I looked at showed that it was originally covered by a large mound of earth & the blast walls at the entrance extended above ground level, so there was no danger of anyone falling into the access 'hole'.


Kevin

 

Thanks for the replies lads

I guessing its built on a solid concrete floor,especially as all the walls are two courses of brick thick.
They are that solid i had no worries about the retaining walls caving in on me whislt i was digging.

As for the photo of the inside of the roof,its definatley not asbestos.
Its tin corrugated sheeting,with a concrete slab on top of that with has reinforcing bar through it.
The tin sheeting just looks very shiny on the photo because of the flash on my iphone.

As a doctor owned the house during ww2,think this is the reason its here,a doctor would have had the money to get it built.
The nazi's were bombing the i.c.i chemical plant and nearby ship yard close to the town i live in,hence the doctor wanted this building i guess!

Still got to find some steps,otherwise its pretty pointless having it,and i,ll have to fill it back in.

 

I would imagine that as he was a Doctor and his house was his surgery then he would have been entitled to financial aid and labour to build a larger but simple shelter for public use i.e. when his surgery was open with a few patients waiting, family, perhaps an assistant, he would need somthing larger than a Anderson. After all, he couldn't expect patients to run home, or down the street when he was open and there was an air raid. Would I be right in thinking your house is on an estate? Somewhere you would expect to find personal shelters but no public shelters?

 

my house is on a main road,with around 20 houses all of the same design and build.
towards the back of the houses there is quite a large estate of houses built in the late 1920s for ici workers.
i dont know of any public shelters that were in my home town.
its got me intrested though!

 

just another question or two!

why does it have a doorway at each end of the shelter??

to stop people inside getting trapped??

so would this shelter have had a set of steps at each end??

or just the one set of steps but all linked up with the retaining walls making a sort of alleyway around three sides of the shelter?

thanks.

 

Can't give you any advice unfortunately, Pez, but I'll grab the opportunity of boring you with an account of how one of these things worked, from my own personal memory:


...........Whilst the Luftwaffe aircrews were risking their lives overhead, they were also risking mine several thousand feet below where I was four and a half and being hurried in a blanket towards our shelter. We were very lucky: we lived a mile or so outside the Birmingham city boundary, to the north-east, and therefore a reasonable distance away from the main industrial targets like "The Dunlop", Nuffields, BSA, ICI, Lucas and the rest. But the ghastly air raid warning siren was nevertheless taken very seriously indeed. I would be roused from my slumbers, wrapped up in a blanket and carried to the half open french windows at the back of our house. There the wooden blackout frames would have been removed and we would wait by the open door in total darkness for my father to decide that there was a lull overhead and it was safe to scurry the twenty-odd yards to the shelter down the garden.


Our shelter was an impressive structure. My father, an inveterate do-it-yourselfer years before it became fashionable, had constructed it himself in late 1938 and early 1939, well before the outbreak of war and to the ill-concealed amusement of friends and neighbours. But now two years later his family was protected by a two foot thick slab of concrete with a large pile of earth above it to form a rockery; whilst our neighbours sheltered under their stairs or beneath a structure of thin corrugated iron covered by a few inches of soil. One of my earliest memories is of its construction, its walls being cast with barrowloads of concrete reinforced with steel mesh. It was mainly below ground and its design must have owed much to the dugouts my father had occupied on the Western Front just 23 years earlier. It was always known within the family as "The Dugout" and it almost certainly survives today, still defying efforts to demolish it.

One entered the dugout down several angled steps. Inside there were a couple of bunks, one above the other, made of rough wood and chicken netting. These were for my sister and my mother. I reclined in some sort of orange box wedged across the far wall. I suppose the internal measurements were something like 6ft x 4ft and the headroom something a bit over 5ft. I don’t ever remember it as being uncomfortable - in fact it was quite cosy - but my main recollection is the ever-present smell of mustiness and of fumes from the paraffin heater and the hurricane lamp or candles which we inhaled over the following hours.

While the Luftwaffe was doing its worst overheadwere overhead, the three of us would spend the rest of the night in relative safety and comfort whilst my father and elder brother, if they were not elsewhere on Home Guard duty, would maintain a vigil up at ground level protected only by their tin hats. One was well aware of the seriousness of the situation - I once got thoroughly ticked off for allowing the torch I was holding to point briefly upwards as I went down the steps - but it never seemed particularly frightening, thanks, I suppose, to my parents protecting me from their worst fears and somehow keeping me cocooned. There was apprehension, of course. But one accepted it all as part of normal life. How my parents felt as they strove to protect their children in these extraordinary circumstances I prefer not to imagine. I have to say however that my own sense of relative security was one day somewhat compromised by my elder sister who airily advised me that this massive structure would, as everyone knew, not survive a direct hit. This was a disturbing nugget of information which I could happily have forgone.

We spent many nights like that - I cannot remember how many. But as the war progressed and the siren continued to sound from time to time my father seemed to develop some sort of system to assess the risk. Sometimes I was allowed to stay in bed where I would lie awake, waiting for the wail of the all-clear and the feeling of relief. On other occasions I would be taken downstairs where it was deemed safe enough to sleep on the floor whilst unknown aircraft droned far overhead in the darkness. And sometimes it would be back to the orange box.

But history reveals that no direct hit ever materialised, neither on the dugout, nor in the immediate vicinity. Many of those nights were full of distant thumps and glows on the horizon and on one occasion we could see an area of Sutton Park ablaze - "The so-and-sos really thought they had hit something worthwhile", the grown-ups chortled the following morning. But nothing close, the buckets of sand and water standing ready in the house were never put to use, the stirrup pump stayed idle. Unlike those living in the more central areas for whom the memories are far less cosy, we were, as I say, very lucky.


Chris
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