Pillbox restored

RESTORED WW2 pillbox

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A pillbox was opened a few weeks ago to mark 85 years since the devastating German daytime raid on Filton which killed 149 people at the BAC site and surrounding residential areas, and injured hundreds more.

The pillbox, one of just a handful of surviving such structures in the Bristol area, is a memorial to one of the biggest, and least-noticed, construction efforts in British history, carried out in a very great hurry, and in equally great secrecy, in the summer of 1940.

The crash programme of defensive works followed the defeat of France and the evacuation of the British army from Dunkirk, leaving almost all of its heavy equipment - tanks, lorries, guns and vast stores of ammunition and supplies behind.

As the threat of invasion loomed, war industries desperately worked to make up the shortfall in army equipment. The country did not, however, lack bricks and concrete, so static defences were built along the coast and along designated “stop lines” to hold back any enemy forces that had managed to advance inland.