Pelaw, Shields Road, air raid shelters

Six World War Two underground air raid shelters lie within a grassed area between the CWS shirt factory and the pyjama factory. These are shown on a 1989 plan found in the shirt factory and are labelled 'bomb shelters to be fully collapsed and infilled'. This appears to have been carried out thoroughtly with only isolated elements surviving of the shelters after their destruction. A watching brief in 2013 was held while three shelters were exposed and recorded prior to the redevelopment of the site. The shelters were of the covered trench type (constructed from 1939 onwards) and were regular in plan with an entrance projecting from the north-west corner where a stairway would have originally ran, an example of which survived insitu at shelter 2 protected by thick reinforced concrete walls. The shelters were constructed using prefabricated materials with concrete wall panels cemented against concrete slabs that lined the trench.