A couple of weeks ago, some friends were sharing pictures of places now that were significant during their childhood in the seventies and eighties, comparing them to photos from the time and discussing how things had changed. They were mostly mundane locations too – the street you walked down to the park; the alleyway behind your friend’s house that became a narrow concrete football pitch when you called around; or the pond behind the school that you’d never be allowed to sit around at lunchtime anymore! I started thinking about similar places we took for granted back then, particularly those that I’m not sure anyone has any photos of, at least that are accessible to me!

Three places sprang to mind immediately… The adventure playground in Jubilee Park, Bedford, that I was a bit too young to fully appreciate before its club-house burnt down (possibly several times) and it eventually fell into disrepair, but I have vague memories of zip lines from its roof, cool concrete tunnels that bigger kids would laze about on top of, and generally more exciting things to do that the regular swings, climbing frames and slides (though they were something else that the fun police would never allow today)! That park was at the end of our road, but right behind it was Kingsbrook School, where we’d be on the lookout of an evening for the teachers and terrifying caretaker to lock it all up and leave so us and the other kids from down the road (none of whom went there) could invade the playground for rollerskating, skateboarding, bicycle racing or wheelie competitions, all the time on keeping an eye out for the police patrols (and scary local punks) that would regularly come by so we could scarper in all directions! That was a bit more difficult during the summer if you’d been over the fence to the school swimming pool, but that only happened to the older kids from next door (regularly) and not us!

We’d play football in there too, with a couple of brick-porched doorways perfectly spaced across a wall for one goal, and a bench opposite across the playground for the other, which was a mere few feet behind our back gate, and the alleyway where we spent most of our lives playing, separated by the rusty chain-link metal fence we’d regularly be getting our clothes stuck on the top of! Anyway, that area of the school was single-storey, which meant we’d forever be kicking balls onto its roof, which was no problem because there were two routes up, depending on where it landed; either a ladder on one side, or up one of the huge, stinky bins on the other, which was a lot quicker, but I’ve lost track of how many times we ended up in them! The roof was alarmed, but we knew our way around up there so well that we could avoid all of the wires, and if we ever got caught up they we knew other ways down, or decent places to hide out from games of hide-and-seek variant, 45 and in, that would inevitably end up on the roof (or back in those bins)! Sounds odd now, but I’d love some photos from up there, or around the corner where the bins were, or even the line of bushes down the side that we knew every inch of too!

Finally, but actually the first place that sprang to mind because I’ve always considered it a loss to our local heritage on the same scale as the admittedly more widely-felt architectural and cultural loss in 1991 of Bedford’s grand old Granada cinema – built in 1934 and host to one of Europe’s largest screens, as well as live music acts like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones – to make way for a Lidl supermarket… Okay, it might not be as grand, but there was a piece of waste ground between where I went to play-school in London Road Methodist Church’s hall (at the end of the road my Mum was born in) and a couple of shops, one of which was a bakery (where my auntie worked) that hasn’t changed in the slightest to this day, very sixties orange signage and all! For years, whenever my brothers and me walked by with our Mum, which was most days, we’d always run in there, because in the middle of that piece of waste ground was a World War II air raid shelter. Nothing special, just a small, partially buried Anderson shelter that was full of rubble, rodents, insects and who knows what else, but we knew exactly what it was and that made it all the more exciting to clamber through and be worth every nettle sting every time! Then one day it was fenced off, and before we knew it that piece of history had been bulldozed and lost forever to make way for a new mosque. Better than a Lidl, I guess, but all the same, a significant piece of local history that was lazily lost to a quick buck forever.

Fast forward a long time, and today I live in the North Bedfordshire village of Keysoe. There’s not a lot in Keysoe – a church, an equestrian centre and a fair dollop of ancient thatched cottages housing a population of about 700 widely scattered around its couple of miles of mostly farmland. Not many people even know it’s here, which is why we like it! Seventeeth century Puritan preacher and author of The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan, visiting to preach in some local woods and subsequently getting arrested for religious dissent, for which the village seems to have been well known at the time, is about the only thing of note that’s happened here in the last thousand years! Our house was about the same age as I am now when that happened too!

Actually, that reminds me of another place I wish I had a photo of – a dusty old track on the other side of the aforementioned Jubilee Park known locally as Bumpy Lane that we’d ride bikes down as kids (because it was bumpy!), and just off that beaten track you’d find the remains of John Bunyan’s birthplace. When I’m out running around here, especially in the height of summer, there’s a byway that reminds me of Bumpy Lane, and somehow that broken up old concrete, gravel and weed-cracked mile or so transports me right back to the seventies, far more than even an old Elton John and Kiki Dee record could ever manage!

And by complete coincidence, if you turn left at the end of that track, you’ll end up on our next port of call here – Thurleigh, one of our nearest neighbours, and slightly better known thanks to its role in World War II, when RAF Bomber Command built an airfield on its outskirts, which would later be handed over to the United States Eighth Army Air Force, who made it home to four squadrons of B-17’s; their time in Thurleigh would then go on to be the basis for the novel and Gregory Peck movie Twelve O’Clock High.

Since we moved to Keysoe in the summer 2016, I’ve driven down the two and a bit miles of the unloved, single-track road, imaginatively called Keysoe Road, that connects Keysoe and Thurleigh at least once, if not twice, every day. It’s all a bit bleak, snaking its way around miles and miles of agricultural fields dotted with the odd distant farmhouse, and as you get closer to Thurleigh, skirting the ominous military-looking barbed-wire fence around what was once part of the airfield and is now home to who knows what, but often involves big helicopter gunships gadding about, and you can see a tank from the road as I write this! Actually, because I’m unlikely to ever record this anywhere else, it’s also the home to one of two Keysoe ghost stories I’m aware of, though it does bear remarkable similarities with one of Thurleigh’s own many World War II era spectres…

People have been reporting spooky goings-on in Thurleigh since the fifties, from hearing disembodied footsteps to seeing entire phantom American aircrews playing cards! One of its best-known ghosts, though, is that of an American airman who became convinced he was going to die every time he went out on a bombing mission, and every time he returned, he became more insistent that the next would be his last. Eventually, his final mission came, and he still made it back in one piece, but not long after he shot himself. His ghost has been seen on a bicycle, on his way to the hangar that he committed suicide behind.

And I assume thats the same American airman on his bicycle that one of our older neighbours here in Keysoe told me that he and his friends would go looking for along Keysoe Road when he was a teenager here in the 1950s. Not sure if its the same story simply moved a few hundred yards to make it happen somewhere more accessible to a bunch of pesky kids, but being on the lookout when I drive down there of a winter’s night always keeps me occupied!

While I’m here, and because I’m unlikely to do it anywhere else anytime soon, for completeness I’m going to describe the other Keysoe ghost story I heard from a musician and archaeologist friend just after we moved here, when we discovered that by complete coincidence he and his then future wife had babysat for previous owners of our house many years before. She’s from Keysoe, and was familiar with the story of Matcham, another former resident who was caught stealing sheep after the post-medieval Enclosure Act caused poverty as use of common land was taken away from the common man. He was hanged in a field just off of Keysoe Row West, which, together with our own road, Keysoe Row East, intersects the main road through the village that connects Bedford and Kimbolton. Apparently, if you go to the stump that’s all that’s left of the elm tree he was hanged from and say “Matcham, Matcham, I’ve brought you some broth,” you’ll hear him answer, “Cool it!”

Right, let’s get back to Keysoe Road’s non-supernatural features… After we’d moved in, it didn’t take me long at all to clock a once-familiar overgrown mound about 20 metres into a field full of crops as you drive out of Thurleigh, just beyond the memorial to the 306th Bombardment Group. As late summer saw the fields stripped of their crops, and Autumn started to clear away all those weeds, my suspicions about this being an air raid shelter were confirmed as a glimpse of concrete appeared.

And then, for more than five years, I’d keep driving past, and keep thinking I really need to stop and get a photo of that one before it disappears too – after all, the powers that be in this part of the world can’t resist building a housing estate whenever they notice a piece of green they’ve missed, so it’s only a matter of time before it’s brushed from history too. But it took that discussion about old photos and thinking about the loss of the one back in Bedford to properly prompt me, so when I was out on a 10km run yesterday morning as I write this, in mid-Septemebr 2021, I decided to go that way and make a stop at what turned out to be exactly my 5km halfway point!

I’m not sure why this shelter is located where it is, in a farmer’s field, but it must have been part of something going on around the USAAF’s Station III facility at Thurleigh at the time. It looks like there might be more buried about fifty metres across the field* – I can make out some concrete, so it’s possibly another one, or the foundations for something like an anti-aircraft battery, which would explain the presence of this one. That said, a local told me it was possibly an enlisted soldier camp. Anyway, I also believe it’s a kind of miltary-grade, souped-up take on the Anderson shelter variety, named after Sir John Anderson, who was Home Secretary during the Battle of Britain. That was designed to be used in people’s gardens though, and 1.5 million of them were handed out by the British government just before the war, ramping up to almost 4 million by the time it was all over. They consisted of both flat and curved sheets of corrugated steel, and the idea was that they were half buried about four feet down then covered by at least a foot of soil. The domestic ones were meant to protect up to six people from bomb fragments, and could absorb a lot of energy without falling to bits. A lot of them were returned after the war so their metals could be re-used, but many were also repurposed as sheds and the like, and some, like our dearly-departed original one back in Bedford, were simply left as they were.

Back in Thurleigh, this one is bigger (although, just to highlight my amateurism in this field, I can’t tell you exactly how much), but I reckon we’re taking about 8m long and maybe six feet high – I should also apologise for my mixed use of imperial and metric measures here too, but that mix is precisely the age I was born into! And while I’m apologising, this was all done on a non-malicious whim, but does constitute trespassing because I didn’t ask the landowner’s permission to either jump over the ditch and into their field or their property within. If they are reading this, I am sorry because I should have known better, but it was done with respect and the best of intentions.

The other thing to note is that it’s made of corrugated concrete and not steel like its domestic counterparts. The entrances are also part-brick, and are accessed by what are now the crumbling remains of what look to have been concrete steps downwards.

These three elements lead me to believe that it might actually be a Stanton air raid shelter, and I’d like to credit andersonshelters.org.uk for helping me fill in some blanks in reaching this conclusion. Stanton Ironworks were a Derbyshire company that manufactured what became standardised Ministry of Defence shelters for up to fifty men, made from pre-formed concrete arches. In turn, made from iron moulds, in case you’re wondering, though I understand that this part of the company was previously manufacturing concrete lampposts and switched to these shelters as demand (seemingly especially from the air ministry, which fits here) grew during the Blitz.

This excellent resource also tells us that they they were designed to be positioned both above or partially below the ground, but were often concealed by a layer of earth and turf. Before I looked into this, I did wonder if that thicker covering had simply weathered away to the thin or non-existent layer of earth and weeds on it now, but maybe it was only ever meant as camouflage more than protection in this case. As a final piece of confirmation, the Anderson shelter site also gives examples of surviving Stanton shelters close to barracks for the protection its men, which again makes sense here, especially as we’ve learnt elsewhere that a lot of their production went to the air ministry.

That’s about all I had to say! I’ve no expertise in this area, as anyone who has will have noticed already, but as I’ve alluded to, I simply wanted to avoid the mistakes of the past and document some history while it’s still there. And I hope you didn’t mind me doing the same for some of my own past while I was at it!

*Updates

Since I originally wrote what you’ve just read, a second visit confirmed that there are indeed what might be the remains of concrete foundations further east across the field, although they’re in such a state of disrepair that it’s hard to tell. However, what I originally saw was indeed a second air-raid shelter. This one is really inaccessible, virtually buried in the middle of some very thick undergrowth and some crops that I didn’t want to disturb. It appears to be the same, except for what I think is a large ventilation shaft at one end of the roof; given that at least the end that I can make our is almost fully blocked by earth, I assume that means this one is full of stagnant water too!

While I’m here, after reading the original piece a friend sent me a couple of aerial shots of Kingsbrook School they’d seen on a Facebook group, and that roof I mentioned at the start that we probably shouldn’t have been clambering about on! I’ve no idea of the original source to credit, but I’ll leave both here – the first looks like it’s slightly before my time, maybe sixties, but the second looks more contemporary (mainly because our kitchen extension has now appeared just beyond the third chimney from the bottom in the row of terraced houses on the left)!

Finally, these aerial photos gave me the bright idea of having a look at a satellite image, and here you can see the position of both shelters in relation to Keysoe Road, as well as where those potential concrete foundations are located right in the middle of the two.