Simon Marks, 37, thought he had driven onto flowerbed when the wheels of his car got stuck in a hole…
Looking at the damage he’s done on his car he though “well, this day couldn’t get any worse.”
As he was about to take a closer look to the damage, he heard the sickening sound that made his heart race. What the hell was that?
Kneeling down to take a closer look, Simon saw that the pavers of the driveway had cracked, and then right in front of him, the driveway began to give in.
The pavers kept on cracking with an eerie sound, and it opened to a whole new revelation.
The dirt gave way easily and he could see a piece of metal underneath.
He uncovered it with bare hands until he was able to grip it and pulled with all his strength but to no avail.
He decided to go around and uncover as much as he can from the puzzle surrounding a mysterious object.
Simon called for help. His father came along and together they carted away buckets of densely-packed mud.
Finally they saw an opening and climbed down a rusty, old ladder to investigate the hole in the ground.
“My dad saw it and instantly said it’s an air raid shelter,” Simon said. “We googled it and found there are quite a few in this area.”
After a thorough investigation online, Simon found out that the shelter had been built during WW2! “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,” Simon told the reporters.
During WW2, a man named Sir John Anderson was tasked to devise a strategy to protect its citizens from the onslaught and bombings that they knew were coming.
His strategy was to build these underground shelters.
“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,”
Simon told reporters. “If that’s the case we’ll just have to leave it,” he added. But it wasn’t long before the discovery went viral.
Simon and his father plan to restore the shelter and preserve it — they hope that one day it will be declared an important and historical monument.
They believe that just because the war is over and long past, the period shouldn’t be forgotten.
They hope this little physical piece of those difficult times will be a place people can visit and see a tiny glimpse of that part of history.