Anderson Shelters

Oval, London

The shelter at the back of a house in Richborne Terrace, near the Oval Cricket Ground in Central London, is still in good condition, including the frames of the bunk beds on which families tried to sleep during air raids. This shelter has survived nearly 80 years partly because the owner of the house – Mr H L Sutton – was a builder and decorator who decided to set the corrugated iron roofs in a substantial concrete base.

The frame of one of the original bunk beds
The emergency exit at the back of the shelter, for use if the doorway became blocked by rubble. The two (now rusty) vertical pieces of iron at the bottom of the rear wall of the shelter were each held in place by a single bolt which could be removed – if you had remembered to keep the appropriate spanner in the shelter! The central piece of corrugated iron could then be removed allowing the occupants to claw their way out through the earth which would have been piled against the rear of the shelter. 
The wartime maker’s mark (or utility stamp) which was imprinted on much corrugated iron produced during the war, perhaps to show that it was price-controlled. The top line reads BRITISH MAKE but then there is an image of a sheep, above the word MERINO, which is of course a type of sheep. The bottom line is HO (for Home Office) with a simple image of a crown between the two letters.

360 degree tour

Many thanks to Bryan Jones for creating this amazing interactive 360 degree tour of the inside of the Oval Anderson shelter in September 2024. Use your mouse or finger to explore the shelter.

The bombing of Richborne Terrace

Not all the shelters in Richborne Terrace survived even the war – and nor did their occupants. The result of one bombing was recorded, in words and a picture, by local civil defence worker Stanley Rothwell:

There was a vast crater with bodies of women and children strewn in the rubble around its edge, the shelter they had occupied had gone sky high… We got busy shrouding the dead and mangled bodies… We tried to check the number of people involved but found that there were some missing…

We found them the following morning lying some hundreds of yards away on some waste ground spread-eagled like tailors’ dummies; they had been tossed there by the blast, heads and limbs missing.

Mr Rothwell’s painting of the incident is in the Imperial War Museum and is reproduced here with their kind permission.

It shows an Anderson shelter after a direct hit. Mr Rothwell is on the left accompanied by his colleague Benny Cunningham.

Interestingly, Mr Rothwell’s son subsequently went to work in the War Museum.

Visitors to the Richborne Terrace Anderson shelter

The owners of the shelter near welcome visitors, including school parties, and may be contacted via Martin Stanley.

Television

The shelter has featured in a number of TV programmes. Shane Richie (EastEnders’ Alfie Moon) interviewed Joan Longley about her experience of using a wartime Anderson shelter for the TV programme Blitz Cities.

School visits

Several school parties have visited the shelter.

Visitors from Ashmole School in Oval and Willow Brook School in Leyton.
Other visitors have included a first class model maker and an ‘evacuee’

One visiting school – Willow Brook from Leyton in North London – kindly showed me these extracts from the school’s 1939 to 1945 Chronicle and Record Book.

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