"Merseyside was the second most heavily bombed part of Britain after London, and its air raid shelters would have seen a great deal of use during alerts and raids. The Littlewoods shelter is approximately 300m long, aligned on a northerly axis parallel to the Littlewoods building. In plan it resembles a chain of rectangles (with pairs of shelter chambers roughly 12m and 9m long along the four sides) joined by 9m long corridor galleries. It had 13 entrances evenly disposed along its length to facilitate filling from the west side of the factory - these sloping entrance passages joined the connecting corridor galleries at right angles giving excellent blast protection. The shelter was semi-buried using a cut and fill method with earth banked on top of it for bomb splinter protection, and may have begun as a Munich crisis trench rapidly dug during a few tense weeks in September 1938. Many of these were then lined with precast concrete wall and roof panels which were slotted together to give a degree of dryness and an illusion of permanence. Littlewoods’s shelter though is built with much stronger reinforced concrete and the clean timber board marks indicate higher quality and more expensive construction than normal.
Its great treasure though is the remarkable series of portraits of men and women at the south end. Several wear helmets and their quality suggests that they may have been painted from life, perhaps to entertain the occupants during the tedious wait for the All Clear. There are men and women, and one portrait even appears to cleverly work round a pre-existing stain on the concrete surface. These appear to be the work of one artist, maybe even one of the MC5 experts since graphic skills were used by MC5 to adjust and add false information to letters before sending them on. It is likely that they are sketches of co-workers at the factory, and some individuals are identified by their initials. Most are of women, while the men shown are either in uniform or middle aged, one appearing with a bow tie and one with a pipe."
