NHER 54384 (Monument record) - World War Two earth-covered air raid shelters

June 2010. Norfolk NMP.
Small, Anderson or similar types of World War Two air raid shelters are visible as extant structures and earthworks on low-level vertical aerial photographs taken by the RAF in 1945. Those recorded here fall within the Ordnance Survey 1:10,000 quarter sheet TG21SW, covering central and northern Norwich as well as the margins of neighbouring parishes such as Hellesdon, Old Catton and Sprowston. They have been recorded as point data only, for the most part plotted by eye onto the modern Ordnance Survey MasterMap or 1:2500 LandLine map base; their location therefore should be regarded as approximate.
Due to restrictions on time, it was only possible to conduct the thorough viewing required to identify all such shelters on a random proportion of the available aerial photographs. The NMP mapping of such features in this area should therefore be regarded as both schematic and non-comprehensive; it would in any case only represent those shelters visible and identifiable on the aerial photographs, in itself a proportion of those that presumably once existed.
Across the quarter sheet, a total of 93 such shelters have been identified from the photographs that have been thoroughly checked (S1-S9); the individual frames on which each shelter is visible are recorded as Object/Attribute Data within the mapping. Although the selection of photographs used was largely random, there are clear clusterings of such shelters in certain residential areas of the city, in particular Upper Hellesdon . It is also notable that these small shelters proliferate in areas where the large hut-like communal shelters erected on residential streets (NHER 54382) are absent; the latter were presumably erected in areas where gardens were too small to safely house a small shelter.
E. Bales (NMP), June 2010.