Simon Marks, 37, had lived in his house for a few years when one ordinary day turned strange. While trying to park his car, the wheels got stuck on what he had taken for a flowerbed, and strange cracking noises came from the driveway as the pavers broke and the surface gave way.<\/p>\n
Kneeling down to look closer, he found a piece of metal buried under the dirt. He tried to pull it out but could not, and, unsure what might lie beneath, he called his father for help. Together they cleared away dense muck until an opening appeared, with a rusty ladder leading down.<\/p>\n
The two men climbed down, and his father recognised it at once: an air-raid shelter from the Second World War. Marks later said there were many such shelters in the area, and he believed the previous owner must have known about it and filled it in when the house and garden were built. The article notes these shelters were built to protect civilians from bombing, and credits a man named Sir John Anderson with their design. One wall had been bricked off, and Marks said he was 99 percent sure there were no more chambers \u2014 if the wall had been bricked up for the house’s foundations, they would simply leave it.<\/p>\n
The discovery was caught on tape, and the story quickly spread around the world. Marks and his father now plan to renovate the shelter, which they see as an important historical landmark \u2014 a window into an earlier era that, as they put it, should not be disregarded just because that period of history is behind us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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