Britain’s standard-issue answer to the bomber was the Anderson shelter — corrugated steel sunk in the garden under two feet of earth — which presented Glasgow with an obvious difficulty: the majority of its people lived up closes in tenements, and had no gardens to dig. The city’s shelter war was therefore improvised around the tenement itself, and its solutions marked the streetscape for a generation.
The first line was the close — the stone stair and passage at each tenement’s heart, already the strongest part of the building. Closes were ‘strutted’: shored with timber and steel props against collapse, their mouths shielded by free-standing brick baffle walls to stop blast driving straight in from the street. Families learned to gather there at the sirens, bedding on the stairs, neighbours counted in the dark — and the strutted close entered the city’s wartime folklore alongside the wireless and the ration book.
Where the close wouldn’t serve, the corporation built: squat brick surface shelters with thick concrete slab roofs rose in streets, school playgrounds and, above all, back courts — the communal drying greens behind the tenements sprouting rows of them. They were grim, damp and unloved, and after the terrible lesson of the 1941 raids — where blast had lifted slab roofs and dropped them on the shelterers below in poorly built examples — construction standards were angrily tightened. Suburban Glasgow with gardens dug its Andersons; later in the war the indoor Morrison cage sheltered families under their own kitchen tables.
The great raids taught bleak arithmetic. At Clydebank in March 1941 the closes and shelters saved thousands even as the tenements above them were wrecked — survival stories from strutted closes fill the testimony — while direct hits spared nothing: the parachute-mine and shelter tragedies at Kilmun Street, Tradeston and Yarrow’s yard, recorded on the Second World War page, killed shelterers where they crouched. Shelter was a bettering of odds, never a promise, and Glaswegians knew it.
Peace demolished the street shelters slowly — some squatted in, some standing for years as gang huts and eyesores — but the archaeology lingers: brick shelter footprints and odd roofless hulks in back courts, prop scars in old closes, and here and there a baffle wall absorbed into a boundary. They are the humblest monuments in Glasgow, and among the most eloquent: the architecture of a city getting its people through the night.