The row of tight little railwaymen’s cottages in the south London street on which I used to live is rudely interrupted by a couple of hideous, boxy Sixties houses. I had always reckoned their existence was courtesy of the Luftwaffe. Now I know for sure. Poring over these bomb damage maps shows with pinpoint precision where an incendiary bomb landed, flattening two homes.
During the Second World War, the Architect’s Department of London County Council diligently recorded, house by house and street by street, the damage inflicted from above by the Germans. The original Ordnance Survey maps the surveyors coloured in — black for total destruction, purple for damaged beyond repair and so on — have been reproduced in this volume.
From Highgate in the north to Streatham Common in the south, from Hammersmith in the west to Woolwich in the east, these maps give testimony to how battered Londoners were. The purple swathes surrounding St Paul’s Cathedral, for instance, shows that it was indeed a miracle that Christopher Wren’s great dome still stood. The fires were so strong on the night of December 29, 1940, when much of the nearby Square Mile was bombed, that people in the suburbs could read their newspaper by the light of the blaze.
As well as nearly 200 pages of maps, there are 39 pages of photographs of the devastation, introductory essays and a variety of tables with the brute statistics of devastation. The death tolls give pause for thought: 60,595 civilians died from aerial bombardment, nearly half within London; 116,483 buildings were totally demolished or damaged beyond repair.
Each of the brief entries in the abridged list of notable incidents tells a harrowing story. On September 7, 1940, the first night of the Blitz, a shelter in Columbia Market in now chi-chi Shoreditch in the East End took a direct hit, killing 38. At 9.40pm on March 8, 1941, revelling abruptly stopped at the Café de Paris nightclub when a bomb struck killing 34.
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On the morning of March 8, 1945, Smithfield Market was hit by a V-2 rocket — 105 people lost their lives; later that month, 125 people died when a block of flats on Vallance Road in Stepney was flattened by another V-2. It is extraordinary that more were not killed by the Vergeltungswaffe 2, which was the first ballistic missile — a 12,500kg (27,000lb) projectile carrying 1,000kg (2,200lb) of explosive. Fire did as much damage as the explosives themselves — 14 firemen paid with their lives at a blazing gasworks in the East India Docks in September 1940.
Two irritations. Sometimes the colours don’t match the coding. That’s not the fault of the publishers but of the varying quality of the original dyes used, and of colours bleeding into each other as civil servants had to re-mark a building when the Luftwaffe returned to the same place. The other is that the tiny size of the street names can be hard to read; you’ll need a decent magnifying glass to navigate yourself around London.
But these are quibbles. Though there is no florid prose or gripping anecdotes, these maps are not mute. This A-Z of destruction tells a powerful story.
The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps, 1939-45 by Laurence Ward, Thames & Hudson, 288pp, £48. To buy this book for £40, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134