The patriotic defiance of cockney London during the Blitz is part of the national folklore many Britons, including me, grew up with. Not everyone believes it was quite as stoutly uncomplaining as the Pathe News story above or the material below, with its contemporary John Humphrys voiceover, would have you believe.
What can’t be questioned is the immense damage the Lutwaffe inflicted on Londoners, especially the less well-off, and on the fabric of the city.
The legacy of that destruction is still very much with us. The starkest reminders take the form of the unexploded bombs still occasionally unearthed. Less obvious but more profound is the successive redevelopment of sites that were levelled by fascist Germany’s bombs, later filled with new buildings and are now being filled with different ones. Some of these are documented in a terrific recent piece for Guardian Cities by Peter Watts.
It wasn’t only the less prosperous parts of the capital that got badly bombed. The amateur footage below was taken by Rosie Newman, an affluent and well-connected woman, of Blitz damage to the wealthiest parts of London, including Bond Street, Piccadilly and around Hyde Park. Note the undaunted milkman, a recurring figure in Blitz mythology.
You can find out more about Rosie Newman’s wartime films from the Imperial War Museum’s online catalogue. The Blitz began on 7 September, 1940 and continued unbroken in London for 57 nights. More than a million homes were damaged or destroyed in the capital and around 20,000 civilians were killed, about half of the total for Britain as a whole. My final clip is a famous government propaganda film, produced in October, 1940. Yes, propaganda. But how moving it still is.
And London took it.
