Head Deep into the WWII Stockport Air Raid Shelters

 

Head Deep into the WWII Stockport Air Raid Shelters The crash of bombs. The crackle of flames consuming homes. The screams of the wounded and the eerie silence of the dead. In late 1938, this was the dreadful soundtrack of the future so feared by the Stockport town council. As part of Greater Manchester, the town was likely to be targeted by Luftwaffe bombing raids when war finally came. Desperate to avoid mass-casualties on an industrial scale, the local authorities scrambled to build a vast network of bomb shelters, capable of housing tens of thousands. The result: a deep underground air raid complex (extending for nearly a mile) almost unparalleled in wartime Britain. At the time, the official government position was that huge shelters would be detrimental to the war effort. Far better, according to Whitehall, to have people dispersed around cities in smaller groups, rather than in one place where disaster could strike (as it sadly would at Bethnal Green station in 1943, when over 170 people were crushed). They UK government even went as far as to refuse funding to any town that contemplated building large-scale shelters. Nonetheless, Stockport went ahead – and the results rightly became famous. Carved from a collection of old cellars and mine shafts, the Stockport tunnels were the Ritz of British bomb shelters. The largest of them all, Chestergate, wound up becoming a relatively sought-after place to spend the night, thanks to its chemical toilets, bunk beds, and good ventilation. Residents eventually dubbed it the ‘Chestergate Hotel’; a name not without a hint of irony, as the shelter was frequently forced to hold upwards of 6,000 people. Still, it proved so morale-boosting that the government eventually relented and allowed funding. Amazingly, this grand temple to wartime camaraderie and northern blitz spirit was practically forgotten after the war. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the Stockport air raid shelters were rediscovered, sparking an interest in the town’s World War Two history and life on the Home Front. You can even visit key parts of the shelter today on a guided tour, and experience a section of the tunnels similar to the lost world captured in these photographs. The images show the gloomy interior of the Dodge Hill air raid shelter, one of the less restored section of the haunting Stockport tunnels.