Despite the summer holidays, a secondary school in east London is bustling with activity having become temporary home to hundreds of residents after an unexploded bomb was found at a nearby building site on Monday afternoon.
At Bethnal Green Academy, people pop out briefly in their ones and twos for a quick morning cigarette before returning to makeshift beds in the school hall. Though most are bleary-eyed from a lack of sleep, the mood is mainly positive and supportive.
“I found out I couldn’t get back into my house on my way home from work yesterday,” says Nicholas Caleie on Tuesday. “I thought, is this a movie? Have we gone back to the 1940s? But I’m not too worried about my possessions, you hear about many other bombs like this. At least I have a place to stay, and there are some really nice volunteers. But it is quiet in there, yesterday people were feeling desperate and today they’re very tired.”
The discovery of the German aircraft bomb led to the introduction of a 200-metre police hazard zone and the evacuation of 700 people from houses and businesses. Experts from the Ministry of Defence arrived at Temple Street at about 5pm to try to defuse the 500lb device and continued to work through the night.
The hazard zone was later extended, forcing more families to be evacuated to Bethnal Green Academy, where Tower Hamlets council has set up a rest centre with beds, food, drinks and washbags.
“I found out I couldn’t get home at around midnight,” says Glynn Russell. “I realised I had to do something, and police told me to come to the school. I stayed awake all night because I couldn’t sleep, I just spoke to my neighbour. It wasn’t very comfortable but staff did their best.
“There were canvas metal bed frames for everyone, like camping beds. People were concerned about getting home to their clothes and medication. I don’t think I’ll be going in to work today, I’ve been up for 24 hours. I haven’t got a clue when we can go home. I don’t particularly look forward to staying here again tonight.”
Emergency services continued to work at the site on Tuesday morning, and a spokesman for the London fire brigade said the bomb disposal unit was still in the process of making the bomb safe.
“The difficulty is that it’s in the basement of a property,” Matthew Burroughs explained. “Builders working within the basement discovered it. All the disposal unit can do is make it reasonably safe, but they’ve then got to get the bomb out. It’s hoped at sometime today the bomb will be removed from the property, but it’s difficult because we can’t just carry it out the doorway, it’s a 500lb bomb.
“The fire service is working alongside the military and police to come up with a safe way of actually lifting it through the floor of the basement. We’ve got specialist teams who know about building construction. We’re doing everything possible to make it happen today.”
He added that a potential blast area would affect the 200-metre radius. “All we can do is ask residents to leave and give advice to the [500] people who chose to stay. If at any point we felt the danger was so great we would have to move to forcefully removing residents, but at this point we can’t do that.”
An MoD spokesman said: “A specialist military bomb disposal team from 11 EOD Regiment, Royal Logistics Corps are on site in Bethnal Green and are assisting the police with the ongoing incident involving a [second world war] German aircraft bomb that was discovered earlier.”
This year, the squadron defused similar bombs in Bermondsey, east London, and Wembley in the north-west and White City in the west of the city.
Back at the academy, students from the school have volunteered to help all those whose homes have been evacuated. They have retrieved beds from the council and moved them to the school hall, made cups of tea and fed the residents.
“My son and his friends volunteered to help out,” says Mandy Hamilton. “They all go to the school, my son’s 14, he’s going into year 10. We heard about the bomb last night and came to the school around 9pm to see what’s going on. We’ve been up all night.”
Her son Jake says: “I felt sorry for the people who have been evacuated so we decided to come and support them.”
Hannah lives in the extended exclusion zone. “I got woken up at midnight. It was fine,” she says. “Everyone was nice, there was lots of tea and coffee. There was space for everyone. The only bad thing was not being in my own bed. I’m not too worried, you hear about these bombs all the time and I’ve never read anything about one of them going off.”
