Book to preserve memories of wartime air raid survival

A BOOK about the attempts to protect people in British cities from air raids will be launched in Hull this evening.

Author Stephen Wade interviewed over 100 people from Hull for his latest book Air Raid Shelters of the Second World War as well as looking at the quirky hobbies and public art they inspired.

He writes about “urbexing” – which stands for “urban exploring” and involves people hunting out and exploring large underground structures including air raid shelters – and the amount of finds archeologists are making.

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His front cover features enthusiast Ben Sansum who has turned his home in Godmanchester, Cambridgeshire, into a 1940s shrine – including an Anderson shelter in his garden.

Mr Wade will talk on the theme Family Stories of Survival in the Blitz – Writing and Researching Shelter Stories at 7.30pm in the café at Hull Central Library. Tickets are £2 on the door.

The historian and biographer from Scunthorpe said: “It was very easy to find people with stories to tell. I had some amazing conversations with people in their 80s and 90s in which they spoke about some horrendous experiences, being machine-gunned outside the Savoy picturehouse. There were lots of little unsung heroes, from the dogs to the Red Cross, the teenagers on bikes who went to asist the ARPs – every time you looked at one thing you thought this could be a monograph on its own. It is vast.”

Mr Wade said it was “wonderful” some younger people still took an interest: “The number of kids who don’t know who Adolf Hitler was or what the Holocaust was is increasing every day.”