[jamesicus]

On my own Message Board, Derry reminded me about brick surface air raid shelters with concrete slab tops.....

..... they could be death traps. I recall a newspaper story of one collapsing and killing several people -- I believe in Manchester. I remember that several schools in the Burnley area (I'm sure throughout Lancashire) used them. At Towneley senior school we had a great air raid shelter -- extensive reinforced concrete "tunneling" covered with a thick layer of earth (ala Anderson shelter methodology) that became our school project Victory garden -- we grew every kind of vegetable imaginable throughout the War. I actually attended Burnley Municipal College (Junior Engineering School) during most of the last year of the war -- they used the brick surface shelters mentioned previously, but by then the air raids were over.