The imitation game

Feats of cunning and creativity, Britain's thousands of defensive pillboxes were disguised as Gothic lodges, haystacks, public loos or even branches of WHSmith, discovers Harry Pearson

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DURING my childhood in the 1960s, the Second World War pillboxes that lined the Yorkshire coast were as much a feature of the summer as sunshine. More so, in fact—it was the North Riding, after all. We'd mow down imaginary Stormtroopers in a blaze of mouth-made sten-gun fire (ah-ah-ah-ah-ah!) from their roof tops, feast on potato crisps washed down with cream soda in them and occasionally be forced into retreat by a volley of invective from some angry couple whose afternoon love-nest we'd invaded. All we knew of the history of these sturdy, abandoned fortifications came from older relatives. An uncle who'd served in the local Home Guard as a teenager recalled them as 'ruddy freezing because the door-ways all faced the sea', adding, after a pause: 'I suppose that was so nobody inside would run away if the Germans came up the beach.'

That, of course, was a very real fear in the months following the Dunkirk evacuation. In response, in the summer of 1940, Gen Sir Edmund Ironside, the commander-in-chief of Home Defence, ordered the construction of a massive network of land defences, designed to thwart what most considered the inevitable Nazi invasion of Britain.

'After Dunkirk, the British Army had very limited mobile forces,' explains Roger Thomas, assistant listing adviser at Historic England and a committed member of the Pillbox Study Group. 'A series of stop lines were built to prevent any invading German forces rampaging unchecked across the country, as they'd done in France and Belgium.' At the core of the network were lines of pillboxes that stretched from the Isles of Scilly to the Shetlands.

The man in charge of overseeing the design and building of hardened defences was Maj-Gen G. B. O. Taylor. With admirable swiftness,