One of the nice things about doing this blog is discovering that something you have walked past a hundred times or played near as a child turns out to be something that you least expected. In fact the moment I uploaded this blogs first post regarding the air raid shelter in the memorial park and the surrounding barrage balloon anchors I realised I would be writing a further post about similar items but in a different location. Not far from where I live is Banner Lane. Once quite a heavily industrial road in rural Coventry, large companies such as Massey Ferguson and Wickmans used to have large manufacturing plants here. The Massey Ferguson site (which has now been replaced by housing/retail) was originally a shadow factory for the Standard Motor company based not too far away by the current A45 (where Sainsburys now is). Shadow factories were set up on the outskirts of cities to allow continuation of the work carried out by the parent factory with less threat from the bombings targeting industry rich city centres.
Above is a view of the Standard Aero Engines plant (before it became Masseys after the war) (Image copyright: 'Britian from above') The factory itself is painted in a camouflage arrangement to blend in and the surrounding fields indicate its rural setting. Just above the top of the factory from this view is Banner Lane. The road itself runs off down towards Tile Hill Village and it's at this point that something interesting still exists today, long after the end of the war and the disappearance of most of the industry on this road.
Something familiar we've seen before!
Barrage balloon anchors, where Banner Lane meets Tile Hill Lane. There are 4 still there today (one is slightly hidden to the left). As a barrage balloon was designed to make enemy bombers fly at a height greater than the balloon itself and therefore restrict their accuracy it seems perfectly logical that we would have wanted them high enough to either miss the shadow factories just up the road or to not spot their location entirely. Either way they offer us a clue to the industrial past of the area (especially with regards to the 2nd world war).
I suppose these giant cubes of concrete are just too heavy and cumbersome to remove. In fact a nearby modern housing estate has had its perimeter fence built around them!
One more interesting thing to notice is that these match the ones in the memorial park exactly. Below are the Banner lane anchors:
And below are the Memorial Park anchors by the air raid shelter
A quick Google image search of barrage balloon anchors shows up all different manner of shapes and sizes (that don't look similar to these) so clearly this style was installed Coventry-wide. Maybe they were supplied by a company who made them exclusively for Coventry or the Midlands as a whole. Theres probably even a chance that they were put in location on the same day in both the Memorial park and Banner Lane by the same crew and have sat there ever since!
