Shropshire Star

Flashback to 2011: Air raid shelter is rebuilt at RAF Cosford Museum

It was the year the England cricket team won The Ashes in Australia and the film The King's Speech earned four Academy Awards.

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The group of teenagers who were building the shelter at RAF Cosford Museum

Back in 2011, a team of volunteers were helping to install a piece of history at RAF Cosford Museum.

Visitors to the attraction were going to get a better understanding of what it might have been like for those spending time in an Anderson Shelter during the Second World War.

The attraction had taken delivery of shelter donated by Etruria Industrial Museum in Stoke-on-Trent.

It was to be placed in the museum’s Second World War garden, which was visited by thousands of school groups each year.

Designed in 1938 and named after Sir John Anderson, Home Secretary during the Battle of Britain, Anderson Shelters were intended for use in the garden.

A shelter was built using six curved panels of corrugated steel that were bolted together at the top with steel plates at either end.

When covered with earth the shelter would give some protection from shell fragments and bomber splinters and could withstand compressive forces created by bombs as they exploded - they could not withstand a direct hit however.

A family huddle in their corrugated iron Anderson shelter in London in 1940
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