Blitz Portraits

Hidden beneath a seemingly ordinary park is a pretty large 1940s air raid shelter. It's mostly blocked off now, but one entrance seems to be in a perpetual state of flux, closed off for a bit, reopened days later, sealed again, on a loop. I decided to swing by when the entrance was open just a smidge, so I stripped down, lubed up, and slipped inside!

The cool thing about this shelter is that it's decorated with the portraits of those who waited out the blitz here, scrawled onto the walls by someone who was seemingly passing the time and entertaining the others with caricatures. These portraits offer a glimpse into the past, and bring the era to life, but their identities, as well as the identity of the artist, are still largely a mystery. 

It's as frustrating for me as it is intriguing.

To the best of my knowledge, the media first reported on it in 1984, after one of the parks gardeners accidentally uncovered one of the entrances. He said to the paper that he may well have been the first person to set foot in there since the war. But a fair few older people have also claimed to have explored the shelter as children in the 1950s. One guy even said that he and his friends were trapped down there for hours when their candles accidentally blew out.

It sure is wild to think that this place has been explored and enjoyed by people for so many decades, and yet it remains just as mysterious now as it did then. 

The tunnels are pitch black, with the only light source being my entry point, and my torch. 

This shelter was allegedly built for the nearby headquarters of the Littlewoods Football Pools enterprise, which was some sort of lottery with football matches instead of numbered balls. The Littlewoods Pools building was built in 1938, and lasted about a year before it was requisitioned for the war effort. 

Being a pretty chunky building, it wasn't limited to just one purpose. 

It was used for postal censorship, parachute manufacturing, intercepting and decoding enemy communications, printing national registration forms, and also manufacturing components for RAF bombers. So even if it hadn't been in a heavily bombed city, it was a potential target for the Luftwaffe.

In wartime, if a space allowed it, external bomb shelters were preferred. Nobody wants their bomb shelter exit obstructed by an entire buildings worth of rubble. Not when fifty of you have to poop in the same bucket. Consequently the air raid shelter was built outside and parallel to the factory. If an air raid siren went off, the staff would come out and enter through one of its many entrances. 

Here we can see where one of the escape ladders used to be. The rungs were ripped from the wall, and the hatch filled in.  

Here's another, this time retaining its rungs, but still blocked up. I wonder why some ladders have been retained while others haven't. Perhaps it's because towards the latter years of the war blitzing eased up a bit and they retrieved some of the metal from redundant shelters to recycle for the war effort. 

I suppose it could just be scrap thieves. 

This little corner here looks like it used to have some storage shelves.

And here we have another entrance, much like the one I came in through, albeit blocked up.

There was once a multitude of these sloped entrances, connecting to the shelter at right angles to provide blast protection. 

And now onto the best part of any abandoned place, the toilets. 

Still in better condition than the toilets in some pubs and clubs. 

The toilets of the shelter consist of corner cubicles with buckets. Presumably they once had wooden doors too. Shitting into a bucket doesn't sound particularly appealing. It must be rather awkward waiting out the blitz and needing a shit. If you stunk out this place, everyone's going to know who did it! You may have to sit with these people for several more hours! 

And just think, when the air raid was over, someone had the job of taking these buckets up to the surface and cleaning them out.

More ladders up to the surface. 

And another blocked entrance, this one showing some pretty cool plant roots reaching down from the surface. 

Check it out! Isn't nature cool? Whatever is growing above us on the surface has clawed its way through the concrete and is now all over the walls and ceiling. 

It's all over this corner too, like a big botanical spider web. I absolutely love it. 

Each entrance has a number, and a sign instructing people to turn right and duck. Presumably each person at the factory had a designated a number, so that when the siren went off, it wasn't all a disorganised scramble for the nearest doors, and so that the shelter was filled out evenly. 

It sure is cool to see legitimate 1940s signage. 

Apparently the shelter is 300 metres long. But the earliest newspaper story said it's 2000ft, and one urban explorer said it was a mile. None of these distances are remotely similar, and I didn't bring my tape measure, so I don't know which is the more accurate. Probably not the urban explorer or the newspaper, let's be honest. It was surprisingly big though. 

Despite its size, it has a really simple layout. The corridors turn at right angles in a big square loop, and each square is connected by a central corridor. The entrances lead into the central corridor, and the people would then turn right, and take a seat in their designated square. It's pretty simple. Look, I can map it out with brackets and hyphens: 

 []-[]-[]-[]-[]-[]-[]-[]-[]-[]-[]-[]-[]-[]-[]

It's impossible to get lost in here, which is why it's annoying that some weeping cyst on the rectum of humanity has painted arrows everywhere. 

It's not a labyrinth. It's a very easy layout. Even if your light goes out, just feel your way along the wall (as long as it's not the middle of a square), and it will take you to the exit eventually, albeit with trip hazards.

Although some of the corridors are wetter than others. 

The buckets that are dotted around are the old toilets. At some point over the past eighty years, someone decided to move them around. I did hear that they were all once neatly stacked into a pile but this clearly hasn't lasted. 

Along the wall, it's still possible to see where the benches used to be. They ran the entire length of each corridor, but were pulled out after the war. I have no idea when or why. 

As you've no doubt gathered, it does get repetitive. Each segment is pretty much the same, albeit with varying levels of rubble at the entrances and at the bottom of ladders. So let's head to section five, where things get interesting...

Decorating the walls here are numerous portraits. These are the faces of those who took refuge here many decades ago. These are the people whose nights were disturbed by air raid sirens, who fled for the shelter and waited for the all clear signal while the surface was battered by the German bombers. 

These two people are wearing helmets. They were no doubt Air Raid Precaution Wardens, volunteers who had the task of enforcing blackouts, handing out the gas masks, and guiding people to shelters. 

The one on the left may actually be a woman. It looks like there's some hair tied up under that helmet, and the coat resembles the female warden uniform. 

Between August 1940 and June 1941 there were over five hundred air raid warnings on this city. They didn't all result in bombs dropping. The Luftwaffe often performed "Nuisance Raids" where they would fly over just to scare the populace. They sometimes did six or seven of these a day. But nevertheless, the people down below couldn't afford to take a chance. 

The longest blitz on the city was the infamous "Christmas Blitz" where the city was continuously bombarded for three nights in December. These people would have been sat down here all night, not knowing what condition the outside world would be in when the bombing stopped. Would they still have homes? Would they still have a place to work? Were their families okay? They wouldn't know until the bombing stopped. 

It's mad to think that at the time, drawing these portraits was some arbitrary means of passing time while the bombers flew overhead. These people were just having a quiet little chuckle and trying to keep their spirits up. They probably didn't think their faces would still be seen and pondered over eighty years later. 

But these portraits bring the place to life. It's easy to read about the war without it really sinking in. There's a big difference between knowing that the city was bombed and actually seeing the faces of the people it affected.

These were ordinary people with families who were out there somewhere hoping that they were okay. Some of them look to be in their twenties with the whole lives ahead of them, and here they are huddled in the dark because some dwarf from Austria wanted to take over the world. 

In the 1980s, a chap called Joseph Edwards contacted the papers claiming that the artist was his father, Robert Edwards. Robert had been in the military and had been in this city in the early 1940s, before dying in Italy in 1945 when his car was hit by a train. He allegedly used to send cartoons to his family, and the art style is apparently very similar to those in the air raid shelter. 

Unfortunately I haven't been able to see any for proof, and Joseph Edwards passed away in 2001, so there's nobody left to contact for clarification. 

(newspaper credit: Kyle May)

Alas, the 1980s really were a much more ideal time to try cracking this mystery. At least back then, only forty years on from the war, people were still alive who remembered the people in the pictures. If the internet had been as sophisticated and widely available then as it is today, perhaps they would have been tracked down. As it stands, an additional forty years later means that even the children of the people in these portraits are dead. 

The chances of cracking this mystery are slim. 

But credit where credit's due. It would be remiss of me to not mention a chap called Kyle May. He is quite possibly the only urbexer in the UK whose youtube videos I actually like. He's into the history but doesn't take himself too seriously. He's a bit like me if I went down the video editing route, and was ginger. 

Kyle went to the media with his pictures of this place, with the intent of raising awareness of it, and perhaps encouraging some older people to come forward and identify their relatives. He also wanted to put pressure on the council to do something about this place, either seal it up to protect it from vandals, or make it safe and open it to the public so that the history can be enjoyed by tourists.

The council, predictably, did what they always do about things that actually matter, which was nothing. 

And then the media jumped onto the next story, cycling back to this place occasionally, acting like it's a brand new discovery whenever there's a slow news day in the office. 

Nevertheless, Kyle has done some pretty heavy research into this place. He noticed that some of the portraits have initials underneath, and did some rather impressive detective work. 

And this brings us to U L F. 

Kyle was able to match these initials to a woman named Ursula Lois Forshaw. He then contacted her surviving relatives, and was able to get a photo of her for comparison. 

(Image credit: The Forshaw family)

Sweet Judas Christ, that's her!

How amazing is this? Words cannot begin to describe how happy I was with this discovery. Not only has this brought about a glimmer of hope that the mystery of the portraits can be solved, but it's also helped bring the history to life. This young lady has sat in this shelter, right in this corridor. That is cool. 

Ursula was born in 1923, and was a member of the Women's Air Force. We can't be certain but it looks like she's wearing her uniform in that drawing too.

It's an excellent discovery. 

Look at me, saying nice things about an urban explorer. No, I've not been hacked and no you're not dreaming. Credit where credit is due. Urbex should be about documenting history and respecting forgotten places. It may have been largely commandeered by people who think it's about online popularity, annoying the police on video, and posting clickbaity crap. But there are some good urbexers still out there.

The history of this place is still mostly speculative but it would be entirely speculative if not for Kyle.

Sadly his attempt at generating interest by going to the media did backfire due to the fact that nobody, not the council nor the media, actually give a shit. Even when given the facts, the media still managed to get it wrong. A more recent article, about another urbexer visiting here, flat-out claims that Ursula is the one who drew the pictures.

And I guess it is possible, but it's one hell of a coincidence that out of everyone here, the artist just so happens to be the one portrait whose identity has been confirmed. It seems infinitely more likely that the media just got muddled up while half-arsedly regurgitating all the facts that they had, due to the fact that they suck at fact checking and existence in general.

But this whole revelation about Ursula led me straight down the rabbit hole. With my only clues being the initials of the people depicted here, I headed straight for the old records from the 1940s, looking specifically for local air raid wardens, factory workers, women's air force, mail censorship workers, civil defence workers, and employees of the Littlewoods factory. Every time I found someone whose initials matched the people here, I'd try to investigate that person, find old photos, and track down their living relatives. And for all my trouble, all I got was a humongous list of Maybes. 

Oooooh May Bea!!! 

The initials "I A M G" are intriguing. Surely this would be an easy one to match up. 

Kyle did find a "Irene Agnes Mabel Grey" in the old records. My own research found that there were actually two Irene Agnes Mabel Greys in the UK at the time, which seems like a weird coincidence. But only one of them was local to here, and her maiden name was Goodman. She was born in 1908 and she married in 1932.

Chances are this is Irene Agnes Mabel Grey, nee Goodman. There's not going to be many more matches for those initials out there. But we can't be sure unless we can get a comparison photo, or at least a relative to look at the portrait and confirm that it has a resemblance.

I have reached out to her surviving relatives but I haven't had a response. I guess it can be quite perplexing when a stranger rocks up in your inbox and says "Hey is this your dead nan?"

Next to her is a chap labelled D.W, and you can't see it in this photo because I'm an idiot with my framing, but he has a gun slung over his shoulder on his back. He was clearly an air raid warden or in some sort of civil defence role. And my research did find a "Douglas Woosey" who worked in civil defence in this area during the war. He was born in 1919 which would put him in his twenties when the war broke out. 

Interestingly his father was also called Douglas Woosey and he was a police officer. He would have been in his forties around the time that these were done.

But again, we have no way of knowing if either man is the man in the picture.

J.dl.T is an interesting one. The common theory is that her surname is "de la something."

In the corner we can see the toilets. If you look closely, the row of bricks on the floor marks where the cubicles were once divided. Evidently someone somewhere needed bricks, but they left the buckets. 

Just think, there's a good chance that the people depicted on these walls have pissed in these buckets. 

Regarding FMF, I did initially suspect her of being a woman named Florence May Flett, another member of the women's air force. But there are photos of her online and the resemblance just wasn't there. The hairstyle was the same, right down to the parting, but that was the style of the time. The face is completely different. 

I'll include a photo just for the sake of it.

(photo not mine, obviously)

But then my flavour of neuro-spiciness does give me a degree of face blindness. Some people have said there's a resemblance if she put on some glasses, but I don't see it. Perhaps you do. 

And it's a huge shame because as soon as I saw a contender for FMF in the women's air force, I was positively giddy.

Why'd you do this to me, Florence?

M R gives us an excellent example of how attempting to identify these people may well be an exercise in futility. Members of the women's air force, in this area alone, include Mary Rogers, Marjory Ralston and Margaret Rudman. And that's just scratching the surface! 

There was also a local air raid warden named Mary Rutherford. Any of these women could be the mysterious M.R, but then none of them could be. 

And you see, this is why it frustrates me. Without photographs of these people for comparison, it's just blind guesswork. I'll be no more successful at this than I would be at firing a bullet through a bullet-sized hole on a slightly larger moving bullet. 

While riding on a bullet train. 

I've never tried that but I don't think I'd be very good. 

In all honesty, I don't think the identities of the bunker portraits will ever be found. It's the sort of thing that requires resources and funding beyond the capabilities of a regular guy on the internet, and me. It's a huge puzzle and loads of people may have the pieces without even realising it. 

But then perhaps the mystery doesn't need to be solved. For surely this place is impressive enough without every fact being squeezed out of it. These were still real people, huddled together in the dark while bombs dropped outside. 

I might as well check out the rest of the shelter. I have heard it said by urbexers that the furthest reaches of it are too dangerous to go down, but to me that just sounds like the talk of quitters. I didn't save all that money by not going to therapy just so that I could live my life making rational decisions. 

Allegedly, according to one urban explorer, this shelter was last used in 1945. I think maybe his war knowledge is a little rusty though. This end of the war is not synonymous with the end of the blitz. This city was last bombed in January 1942, after which point the Germans took their focus off the British citizens and directed it more towards the Soviets. 

Interestingly enough, the last bombing in this city destroyed the home of Alois Hitler, half-brother of Regular Hitler. 

Winston Churchill came to visit the city and said "I see the damage done by the enemy attacks, but I also see the spirit of an unconquered people."

There's a reason why people liked the guy. He boosted people instead of dividing them and making it all about him. The Mango Mussolini could learn something from that. 

If this shelter was used at all after 1942, it was for storage. I imagine once it became apparent that it would no longer be used, the benches were removed, along with some of the ladders, perhaps to be recycled to serve some other purpose. 

The shelter was then blocked off. 

It had become mostly forgotten about until the 1980s when the park keeper accidentally discovered it and went to the media. At that point the Littlewoods Pools building was still in use, and it would remain so until 1994 when it closed down and left empty. It was on my urbex radar for a bit, until a huge fire gutted it in 2018. It's now set to be converted into a film studio, which is great. 

But what about this place?

How the hell did these huge fucking rocks get down here? 

Turn Right and... uck.

See, here's a reason why this needs to be preserved. This place is pretty much inviting vandalism. 

The councils apathy is by far the most infuriating aspect of this entire subject. We have some real history down here.  We have the faces of the cities former citizens, who aided in the war effort, and they're just down here waiting for some imbecile to come along with a marker pen and draw cocks on their heads. The council knows this, and yet they do nothing. The newspapers have been talking about this place since 1984, with each instalment getting more and more clickbaity. The council say they'll block it off. It's somehow always open.

Why not just invest in it? Clear it out, make it safe, do something to preserve the portraits, and open it to the public. I bet there's hundreds of people who would pay to come down here if it was added to the local tourism checklist.

Here the floor is getting a bit more cracked, and slanting upwards. I'm not sure what's causing it, but it sure made traversing the corridor interesting. 

There's a toilet seat on the floor there. Despite the number of buckets, the actual seats are comparatively rare. 

Check out the little row of stalactites on the ceiling. Wouldn't it be cool to see how those are getting on in a decade or so?

Another blocked entrance. What's interesting about all these numbered entrances and ladders is I can see no sign of them on the surface. It's just inconspicuous parkland, with the exception of the entrance that I used to get in here. Even then, you have to know where to look. 

So I can kinda see the urbexer's point when they said that the furthest parts of this place get a bit unsafe. The ceiling is holding out okay but the floor is cracking, and it's only really a matter of time before these portions of the tunnels collapse.

But I wouldn't say it's off-putting. I was led to believe that it was untraversable, but I've definitely been in more dangerous situations. I've swam out to a shipwreck, I've been down to plane wrecks 17 meters under the surface of a lake (sadly without my camera for obvious reasons) and I've explored all manner of abandoned mines. I haven't found my limit yet, but I know that this isn't it. 

But that's not to say I don't love it. Things don't need to threaten to kill me in order for me to love them. 

It just makes it sexier when they do. 

There's a pretty ominous crack forming on the wall here. 

See, again we can rant about the council here. They've had knowledge of these tunnels for decades. Perhaps it can be argued that making them safe, preserving them, maintaining them and opening them to the public is a bit too expensive for them. I get that. But someday years from now, some poor dog walker is going to come crashing through the ceiling from the park above, and the council will act like it isn't something they could have done something about years earlier. 

Over here someone took the time to collect the toilets. Perhaps at some point after the shelters closure the goal was to repurpose them, but there was a change of mind. Perhaps out of all the jobs to do on the home front, retrieving a billion makeshift toilets from a pitch black tunnel wasn't on top of everyone's to-do list. 

Here we can see where the old bench used to fix to the walls. 

It get's samey, and it goes on seemingly forever. I'd walked for... well depending on who you ask, it ranges from 300ft to a mile. I was getting thirsty and I missed the sunlight. At some point it's time to call it a day. But I'm a completionist. I had to see it all. 

And finally at the furthest entrance we see signs telling people to turn left as well as right, into sections 15 and 14. The fifteenth section is the last.

And it's just more of the same. But notice that there's a distinct lack of graffiti. Not many people venture this far in. 

And that would be that. 

Just for the sake of it, I'll include an image that I found of the women working in the old Littlewoods Pools building.

(Photo not mine, obviously)

And just think, any one of these women could have come down into this air raid shelter. Some of them may even be the women depicted in the portraits. We may never know. 

But look how many people there are. This is just one room of the factory. Is it any wonder that an air raid shelter of this size was required? 

But what's surprising is how much of a poorly kept secret it was. Staff who got the bus to work would regularly hear the bus driver say "All aboard for the blue pencil," blue pencil being a euphemism for censorship. It's pretty wild for an era that put a lot of emphasis on secrecy. 

That's all I've got. 

What a fun little mooch. 

I think I've said all there is I have to say on the matter. In my opinion it's an absolute travesty that nothing is being done with this place. It's definitely something that tourists would love. If it was fixed up and opened to the public, I would come here and bring people! It offers a very real window into the past, showing us the faces of people who waited out the blitz together. These people helped with the war effort, huddled down here when things got messy, and then went to work the next day. Seeing them immortalised down here somehow brings to life the spirit of the British during the blitz, and in a world that's now so polarised and divided, maybe that's what we need to be reminded of. 

One things for sure- as long as these tunnels are open but not protected by the powers-that-be, it's only a matter of time before those portraits and all this history get ruined by idiots. 

I have a sad feeling that someday I will look at newer photos of this place, and think "Thank God I saw it when I did."

If you ever come here and see someone vandalising it, just remember one thing:

Nobody goes all the way to the fifteenth section. You can hide the body there. 

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