A visit to the Stockport Air Raid Shelters is a standard school trip for a lot of local schools so we thought we’d go along and check it out for ourselves. At just £5 per adult and accompanying children going free, it really is a bargain trip out.
The girls’ knowledge to date of WW2 has mostly come from Horrible Histories so it was good to explore this new period of history together.
These air raid shelters are carved into the natural sandstone cliffs and the network of underground tunnels, totalling nearly a mile long, provided shelter and protection to the local residents during the bombings of the 1940s. Opened in 1939, the shelters were the largest purpose-built civilian air raid shelters in the country and ended up accommodating 6,500 people.
You are provided with an audio-guide which you point at various signs as you walk around. You can hear an explanation for what you can see and also accounts from local people of what it was actually like.
It was an incredibly interesting place to visit. We were there for just under an hour but we talked all the way home about what we’d seen. When the girls got home, they each wrote a diary entry pretending they were children going into the shelters after the siren had sounded. They wrote about who was down there, what it was like and what they were feeling. We all decided that those experiences made Covid Lockdown seem super easy.
