The tunnels under New Brighton's arcades

Available for over a year

During the Second World War, a vault beneath the arcades in New Brighton housed 200 women who made vital small armaments for the war effort. In 1944, a national newspaper report on the ‘underground grotto’ at a ‘north-west seaside town’ described how the female war workers turned out hundreds of thousands of machine gun bullets a week while holiday makers and day trippers strolled, oblivious, along the promenade above. Believed to be one of a kind in the north of England, you can now see the tunnels where the women worked in eight-hour shifts below ground, keeping the machines running around the clock.