NHER 53667 (Monument record) - World War Two hut-like communal air raid shelters erected in residential streets in Norwich

June 2010. Norfolk NMP.
Large, hut-like World War Two surface air raid shelters are visible as extant structures/buildings on 1940s aerial photographs of Norwich, including (S1)-(S6); the individual frames on which each shelter is visible are recorded as Object/Attribute Data within the mapping. The identification of the structures as probable air raid shelters was confirmed by [1]. Those recorded here fall within the Ordnance Survey 1:10,000 quarter sheets TG20NW and TG21SW, covering central and parts of suburban Norwich. They have been sketch mapped, using rectified aerial photographs where available, but otherwise using scaled unrectified aerial photographs or by eye using a modern or historic Ordnance Survey base map. The mapping should therefore be regarded as only an approximate guide as to their location and size/shape.
Restrictions on time, and the sheer number of sites, has meant that it has also not been possible to conduct a thorough check for such shelters on all of the available aerial photographs; rather, the shelters have been mapped as and when they have been spotted, and while most of those visible on the later low-level photographs (taken in 1945 and 1947, for example) will have been spotted, the dataset cannot be regarded as comprehensive.
Across the two quarter sheets a total of 189 such shelters have been identified; all fall within Norwich and only three fall within quarter sheet TG21SW. There are clear clusterings of such shelters in certain residential areas of the city, in particular the inner western suburbs, between Newmarket Road and Armes Street (north of Dereham Road), and north of the city centre. It is also notable that these communal shelters proliferate in areas where the small Anderson-type shelters usually found in private gardens (NHER 53667) are absent; these larger public shelters were presumably erected in areas where gardens were too small to safely house an individual shelter.
S. Tremlett (NMP), 16 June 2010.