ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to consider air raid shelters not as empty monuments but as extensions of the home. As lived, inhabited, social spaces the crowded, damp, noisy, often unhygienic air raid shelters were mostly built with the expectation of short-term use, but with the introduction of night bombing by the Luftwaffe they became places where families slept, ate and socialised. The chapter considers a variety of different aspects of shelters and shelterers including shelters’ construction and installation. The domestication of shelters as simulacra of the home through adaptation and ornamentation and their nature as ‘gendered spaces’; children’s pastimes and activities; health and wellbeing in the shelters and the sense memories of smell, sound, moisture and movement that characterize the memory narrative sources. Between the First and Second World Wars the bomber aircraft rose to prominence in military doctrine, in colonial strategies of control, and in the popular and political imaginations.
