THE WAR AT HOME AND THE DESTRUCTION AND REBUILDING OF LONDON
One of London County Council’s bomb damage maps is depicted in the fourth plate section.
The Second World War was a ‘People’s War’, in which millions of civilians undertook war work. Britain’s survival as a free nation was sustained on the farms and down the mines as well as in the munitions factories and on the front line. Merchant ships, bringing in essential resources, ran the same risks of being torpedoed as the Royal Navy. This was ‘total war’ and nothing better demonstrated the blurring of its distinction between combatants and non-combatants than the bombing of towns and cities.
During the war more than 60,000 British civilians were killed by aerial bombardment while over 2 million homes were destroyed or seriously damaged. In order to cripple the British war effort, the German Luftwaffe targeted cities like Coventry and Birmingham, where military material was rolling off the production lines, as well as ports and shipbuilding centres like Belfast, Clydeside, Portsmouth and Plymouth. The RAF retaliated, beginning what became the ultimately devastating ‘strategic’ bombing of Germany. Following an RAF attack on the ancient Baltic port city of Lübeck, the Luftwaffe launched attacks on historic British cities such as Bath, Exeter and Canterbury – whose importance was not military but cultural – in what became known as the ‘Baedeker Raids’ after the famous travel guides. In June 1944, with its diminished air force pulled back to defend its threatened European empire, Germany began launching what it described as its ‘vengeance’ weapons: V-1 and V-2 missiles targeted at the civilian population where it was most densely concentrated.
The missiles’ main target was London, the city that had also borne the brunt of the German assault on Britain in the ‘Blitz’ of 1940 and 1941. The battering that the capital received, as well as its citizens’ determination to carry on, revealed a defining aspect of the British character, which was summed up as the ‘Spirit of the Blitz’. Military planners had incorrectly assumed that the war would start with the saturation bombing of London and other major cities, promoting the mass evacuation of children during September 1939. In reality the attacks over the capital did not begin until the following September, in the closing weeks of the Battle of Britain. They intensified at the end of October 1940 when the Luftwaffe concentrated night-time bombing, pummelling London for seventy-six consecutive nights. Through 1941, the raids became more intermittent but no less severe.
The London Blitz (from the German word Blitzkrieg, or ‘lightning war’) represented a switch in strategy by the Luftwaffe whose original aim had been to knock out the airfields and aircraft of the RAF to ensure German air superiority for a full-scale invasion. It was the RAF’s victory in the Battle of Britain, together with the ongoing threat posed by the Royal Navy to a Channel crossing, that forced Hitler to postpone his invasion plans indefinitely. Germany now concentrated instead on trying to obliterate London’s docks and intimidate its citizens and politicians into suing for peace. The Luftwaffe dropped high-explosive bombs, which were intended to blast out buildings, as well as incendiary bombs, which were designed to spread fires. The worst attacks were the massive incendiary raids of 29/30 December 1940 and 10/11 May 1941, which, besides causing widespread damage, destroyed many of London’s architectural jewels, including Baroque churches in the City and the chamber of the House of Commons. The attacks thereafter subsided while Hitler’s attention switched to the invasion of the Soviet Union, on 22 June 1941, until recommencing shortly after D-Day in 1944, with the advent of the missile strikes.
Civilians killed in Britain
1939–1940 |
23,767 |
1941 |
19,918 |
1942 |
3,236 |
1943 |
2,372 |
1944 |
8,475 |
1945 |
1,860 |
Total civilian deaths in Northern Ireland |
967 |
United Kingdom total |
60,595 |
It was in January 1941, while London was still burning, that plans were first devised for post-war reconstruction. To prepare for this, staff of the London County Council’s Architect’s Department were engaged to plot the damaged areas on 110 ordnance survey maps covering the 117 square miles under the LCC’s authority. They continued their work until the last V-2 ballistic missile fell on 27 March 1945, a mere six weeks before Germany’s unconditional surrender.
During the course of the war, over 1 million London houses were hit. The highest density of bombs fell in Stepney, the City of London and Holborn, all of which were struck by more than 600 bombs per 1,000 acres. The LCC maps provide an extraordinarily detailed picture of the extent and concentration of war damage on the capital. The only omissions were a few especially prominent buildings, including railway stations and the Palace of Westminster. Otherwise, the fate of virtually every property – from the giant warehouse to the fine townhouse to the meanest rented apartment – was recorded. Circles marked where the V-1 and V-2 missiles landed. Buildings painted black represented those totally destroyed, and the colour code ranged through the other varying degrees of damage inflicted. Light-blue colouring (which the passage of time has turned greenish-blue) designated areas where the whole area was marked for total clearance and redevelopment.
St Paul’s Cathedral survived the destruction of the Blitz and also outlived the post-war modernist blocks that were built on the bomb sites around it.
Although the human cost appalled all, modern architects viewed with excitement the opportunities for redevelopment on so vast a scale, giving them their chance to put right what they saw as London’s generations of ill-planned growth. In July 1943, the LCC’s architect and chief planner, J. H. Forshaw, and Professor Patrick Abercrombie published the County of London Plan, which went through various changes. There was ambitious talk of creating a modern, integrated city. Comparisons were drawn with Sir Christopher Wren’s (unexecuted) plan for rebuilding London after its last great devastating fire, in 1666.
The Wren analogy flattered the talents of those who recast post-war London. While the loss of many pre-war slums was hardly to be regretted on either aesthetic or sanitary grounds, the quality of what replaced them only rarely set spirits soaring. The crude office blocks that rose around St Paul’s Cathedral were a particularly offensive insult to their setting. Indeed, it was perhaps fortunate that the more sweeping aspects of the London Plan were never put into practice. Aside from the Royal Festival Hall and a few other modern masterpieces, it was a sorry indictment that, over half a century later, most Britons were thankful not for the new buildings that replaced old favourites, but rather for the instances in which badly damaged buildings were repaired and, in many places, successfully restored.