When you move into a home, you tend to think that you know everything there is to know about it. Of course, there are going to be things that are discovered from time to time, but we don’t expect them to be so large that they are shocking.
For a 37-year-old homeowner named Simon Marks, however, there was something strange hiding and when he discovered it, he had no idea what he had stumbled onto. It didn’t happen at first, because he had been living in the house for quite a while before it was discovered.
It all started when he was parking his car one day and he found what he thought was a flower bed. The wheel of his car got stuck and he heard crackling noises coming from the driveway. He immediately thought he was just having a bad day.
When he crouched down to inspect what was going on, however, he saw that the pavers of the driveway had actually cracked and the driveway was caving again. Those crackling paving sounds led him to an incredible discovery.
He removed the dirt from the area and found a piece of metal under it. This fueled his imagination, as he was now wondering why there was a metal piece and he could not pull it out from the area.
He was not sure what to do at this point so he called his father for assistance. They hauled away a lot of mud that was packed into the area and eventually found an opening with a rusty ladder. They climbed down to find out what was hiding.
“My dad saw it and instantly said it’s an air raid shelter,” Marks said. “We googled it and found there are quite a few in this area.”
It seems as if the entire yard was built over an air raid shelter that was built during World War II. “The previous owner must have known it was there and when he built the house and put a garden in… he must have filled it in,” Marks explained.
The shelters were there to protect the family when bombings were taking place during the war. They had no idea it was there.
“One of the walls has been bricked up. I’m 90 percent sure we won’t find out any more rooms but we don’t know. They might have bricked up one of the walls when the house was built to make way for the foundations,” Marks said. “If that’s the case we’ll just have to leave it,” he added.
Fortunately, Mark and his father are going to restore the old air raid shelter because they feel it is a historical monument that needs to be shared.
