London destruction blitz

Science Deepest earthquake ever detected struck miles beneath Japan. Science Signs of an extreme planet found in another galaxy. Paid Content UAE's giant leap into space. Pfizer says its vaccine is Science Coronavirus Coverage Pfizer says its vaccine is Science Earliest evidence found of dinosaurs living in herds. Travel Inspire young minds with these winter getaways.

Paid Content A yearning to return. Travel How to travel the world—by radio. Travel Lessons from nature for young autistic travelers. Travel This sacred valley could become the next national monument. Subscriber Exclusive Content. Why are people so dang obsessed with Mars?

How viruses shape our world. The era of greyhound racing in the U. These church ruins, we suggest, would do this with realism and gravity. Christ Church barely fulfils this remit. Its remains have been laid out as a neatly landscaped garden, overshadowed by the large Merrill Lynch building. In , two surviving walls were demolished in a road-widening scheme and in , neo-Georgian offices were added in imitation of the vestry — these currently house a dentist.

Even the church tower has been transformed into a storey private home. The entire complex is a mess, but a very polite mess that evokes no great thoughts of human sacrifice; a campaign in to turn it into a more meaningful memorial was short-lived. Columbia Market is a good example of how this process worked.

On the first day of the blitz, a bomb hit a shelter in Bethnal Green, killing Columbia Market, where it hit, was a Victorian development founded by Angela Burdett-Coutts, a philanthropist and friend of Charles Dickens. It was a combination of market and social housing constructed in a dramatic neo-Gothic style.

Although the damage was repairable and the building was historically and architecturally significant, Columbia Market was demolished in It was replaced by a dismal modern tower block, named Old Market Square in a half-hearted nod to what was lost. Some planners think we conserve too much.

In fact, the fate of Victorian buildings such as Columbia Market partly explains why postwar buildings are already being replaced — anything older has a conservation order slapped on it. At any rate, conservationism arrived too late for Columbia Market, which now only survives as a section of railing outside a nursery. This is a thought echoed by Alan Lee Williams. He was 10 when his home in Mayday Gardens, near Blackheath, was hit by a parachute mine.

Eventually the fire services built a water tank on the bomb site, which Williams and his twin brother would swim in. This was the issue over which the Battle of London was fought. The British people seemed determined to fight on — alone and against the odds. The Blitz was to be the great test of whether this resolve could be broken. On 15 September, the RAF won a decisive victory over the Luftwaffe, shooting down 60 aircraft involved in a massed attack on London for the loss of only 26 fighters.

Thereafter, daylight attacks were greatly reduced, and the Germans concentrated on night bombing. Operation Sealion was indefinitely postponed. The strategy was no longer to win air supremacy by drawing the RAF into action and destroying it in a battle of attrition. The aim now was to pulverise London until the British gave up. And with the shift to night bombing, the advantage switched to the attackers. The British air-defence system combined radar, ground observation, massed gunnery, and aerial interception.

At night, the defenders were half-blind, dependent on the moon and searchlights to track bomber formations moving at perhaps mph. Fighter pilots scrambled to intercept night-bombers faced an equally hopeless task. In the whole of December , ack-ack fire brought down only 10 enemy planes, fighter attack just four. Not until the British night-fighters — principally the Bristol Blenheim and the Bristol Beaufighter — were equipped with effective Aerial Interception AI radar did the tide turn.

This techno-fix gave the defenders 75 kills in April , the last full month of the Blitz. But by then, anyway, Hitler was planning to redeploy the Luftwaffe to the eastern front for his long-intended assault on Russia. It was Londoners themselves. The German plan had been to reduce the city to rubble and ashes, to shatter the infrastructures of everyday life, to paralyse administration and industry, to leave the population exhausted, terror-struck, and cowering in shelters. From this, it was hoped, would come the request for peace.

As such, they faced a choice: they could be mere victims, waiting in the damp and muck of a crowded shelter for the bomb that destroyed them — or they could become combatants in their own right and fight back. Britons in the Summer of Almost a million people were enrolled in Civil Defence, the great majority volunteers, working as ARP wardens and ambulance drivers, staffing decontamination units and communication centres, and employed in heavy rescue and demolition teams.

At the height of the Blitz, moreover, one in six ARP wardens was a woman, and 50, women worked full-time for Civil Defence. Under fire doing essential work, they were as much combatants as the soldiers, manning AA guns, searchlights, and barrage balloons. The ARP suffered 3, casualties during the war, 1, of them killed. Preventing a firestorm depended on thousands of men fighting fires while the bombs continued to fall. The Chamber failed to reach its centenary, however, following an incendiary attack on the nights of 10 and 11 May The sympathetic but simplified version of the original chamber was formally opened by George VI in October and remains an iconic backdrop to the British political process.

You can still see a fragment of the old chamber in Antrim Park, Belsize Park. A plaque in Burgess Park, showing another aspect of the area's history of tragedy. Image by M. The vast sports fields and large ornamental ponds are a relatively recent arrival, and the land was formerly covered in an urban sprawl of housing and industrial buildings. The idea of establishing a park from an existing urban area came from the Abercrombie Plan. This plan considered the reconstruction of post-war London while suggesting solutions to existing issues of city living such as traffic congestion, substandard housing and the need for more open spaces.

Many of the industrial sites in this area had been severely damaged in air raids, but the plan was highly contentious as it also meant demolishing residential properties that had survived the war intact.

The area officially became Burgess Park in , and the former Grand Surrey Canal became a bike path stretching the length of the park.

Image by David Crausby in the Londonist Flickr pool. While most of the buildings on this list changed significantly following the destruction of war, The Tate Gallery as it was then known got off pretty lightly, but not completely scot-free. The grand Millbank building, which first opened in , received damage to the roof and offices by a high-explosive bomb on 16 September , and was hit again on 19 December by two incendiary bombs, which set fire to the roof and floorboards of the gallery.

The artworks, put into storage at the start of the war, remained safe, but the pockmarked wall at the Atterbury Street gallery entrance still bears the scars of shrapnel.

It was not until that the bombed chapel site was redeveloped into a new public art gallery, which continues to display a wide selection of the royal art collection from the past years. View of the bombed out church by David Swindell under Creative Commons licence.