This air-raid shelter, in the large basement of Courts Furniture Depository, on the east side of Iron Bar Lane, was in preparation by the start of September 1939. Such depositories were often very well-built structures with sophisticated fire precautions, and the building must have been an obvious choice to house an air-raid shelter. On 10 October the Emergency Committee ordered that a brick wall be inserted in place of the existing sandbag wall which divided the shelter. Toward the end of that month, a sign was ordered to be placed at the entrance to Iron Bar Lane, directing the public to the shelter. The shelter was approved for use in January 1940; the shelter was originally intended to hold 350 persons, but space seems only to have been found for 200. Around the start of 1942, under the Canterbury Fortress defence scheme, the shelter was held in reserve as a potential hospital, to be operated by civilian personnel (and available to the military), with a hundred bunks. Further steelwork was inserted, as reinforcement, late in May 1942. It is not clear whether the shelter survived the ‘Baedeker’ raids of June 1942, but it was in any case thereafter abandoned because the surrounding area had suffered so extensively, and so few people would have been likely to use it.
Owner : Unknown
Publicly accessible : Unknown
How accessed for survey :
Tourism Potential :
Condition : Destroyed
Date of visit :

Canterbury City Council Emergency Committee, 01/01/39, Canterbury City Council Emergency Committee Minute Books 1 to 6 (Unpublished document). SKE14886.

Canterbury City Council Emergency Committee, 01/01/39, Canterbury City Council Emergency Committee Minute Books 1 to 6 (Unpublished document). Ske14886.