The Garden

The most dominant feature of the 1940s garden was the Anderson shelter. It took its name from Sir John Anderson, who led the development of air raid precautions (ARP), in preparation for bombing attacks by German aircraft. Under Anderson, spending on ARP rose from £9.5 million in 1937-8 to £51 million in 1939-40.

150, 000 Anderson shelters were distributed to houses with gardens, coming as a kit of six sheets of steel that had to be bolted together. These simple corrugated steel shelters were dug four feet into the ground and covered over with earth.

A familiar wartime sight up and down the country, these shelters may have been poorly constructed, cold and damp, but they helped save the lives of many. Anderson shelters enabled Londoners who owned gardens to take private shelter during 57 consecutive nights of bombing during The Blitz.

Many families grew vegetables in the soil covering their Anderson shelter. Indeed, the garden became an important part of life on the Home Front. In a bid to make Brits more self-sufficient, the government's Dig For Victory campaign encouraged people to replace their flowerbeds with vegetable patches. Dig for Victory was a desperate request as farmers could only produce 30% of the country's food, hence, one advertising campaign said, 'Use Spades, Not Ships'. By 1943, over a million tons of vegetables were being grown in gardens and allotments.

Once the government lifted restrictions on home-reared meat, many wartime families kept rabbits, chickens, or even pigs to supplement their food rations. The sound of clucking in back gardens and porcine grunts on bombsites became a familiar, if incongruous, one!

During the war, it was illegal to waste paper and feed pets human food. As a lesson to all those animal lovers on the Home Front, Miss Bridget O'Sullivan of Barnet was fined £10 with 2 guineas costs in 1942 for feeding bread to the birds!

Also punishable by the law was the failure to conceal the slightest chink of light after dark. The Blackout was introduced in September 1939. Blackout curtains were made to stop light escaping from house windows. ARP wardens were charged with patrolling the streets after dark, reporting any aberrations to the local police and collecting fines. Without proper lighting, over 4000 people were killed in road accidents by 1939 - double the number of road deaths during peacetime. In addition to blackout curtains, many 1940s homeowners put strips of masking tape on their windows to stop them shattering in a bomb blast.