Blitz London

1. Lead

The Blitz in London was the sustained German bombing campaign against the British capital from 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941, the longest and most intense part of the bombing of Britain in the Second World War. For eight months, German bombers came almost every night, dropping high-explosive bombs and incendiary bombs on the docks, the factories, the railways and the homes of ordinary Londoners. About 43,000 civilians were killed across Britain during the Blitz as a whole, and roughly half of them — about 20,000 people — died in London. More than a million houses in London were damaged or destroyed, and whole streets in the East End, around the docks and along the Thames, were reduced to rubble. Yet London did not surrender, and it did not collapse. People slept in Anderson shelters in their gardens, in Morrison shelters in their living rooms, and on the platforms of Underground stations, and they went to work in the morning through streets that had been bombed the night before.

The Blitz began after the Battle of Britain. In the summer of 1940, the German Luftwaffe had tried to destroy the Royal Air Force in daylight, and had failed. In September, Hitler and the Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring changed the plan: instead of attacking airfields, they would attack London itself, in the belief that bombing the capital would break British morale and force Britain to sue for peace. The first great raid, on the afternoon of 7 September 1940, sent about 350 bombers against the London docks, and the fires they started could be seen from miles away. That night, and for the next 57 nights without a break, the bombers returned. Londoners called it “the Blitz”, from the German word Blitzkrieg, “lightning war”, and the name has stuck ever since, not only for London but for the bombing of other British cities — Coventry, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol, Plymouth and many others — that followed.

This article tells the story of the Blitz in London as it was lived: the decision to bomb the city, the nights in the shelters, the work of the firemen and the rescue services, the damage to the city’s great buildings, and the memory that Londoners carried with them for the rest of their lives. It is a story of destruction, but it is also a story of endurance, and of the way a city learned to live with bombing as a nightly fact of life.

2. Key Facts

What	Sustained German bombing of London, the main phase of the Blitz on Britain
Where	London, especially the East End, the docks, the City and the Thames riverside
When	7 September 1940 – 11 May 1941; 57 consecutive nights of bombing at the start
First raid	7 September 1940, about 350 bombers against the London docks in the afternoon, followed by a night raid
Deaths	About 43,000 civilians killed across Britain in the Blitz; about 20,000 of them in London
Damage	More than 1 million houses in London damaged or destroyed; the docks, the City and many landmarks hit
Worst single night in London	10–11 May 1941, the last major raid, with heavy damage in the City and Westminster
Famous survivals	St Paul’s Cathedral survived, though damaged; Buckingham Palace was bombed; the Houses of Parliament were damaged
Shelters	Anderson shelters in gardens, Morrison shelters indoors, Underground stations, public shelters
Today	Memorials, the Imperial War Museum, St Paul’s, the ruins of churches kept as memorials, and the Blitz in school history

3. Background

In the summer of 1940, Britain stood alone. France had fallen in June, the British Army had been evacuated from Dunkirk, and Hitler expected Britain to make peace. When Britain did not, Germany prepared Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of southern England, and the Luftwaffe was ordered to destroy the Royal Air Force first. From July to September 1940, in the Battle of Britain, German fighters and bombers attacked British airfields and radar stations, and British Spitfires and Hurricanes fought them in the skies over southern England. By early September, the Luftwaffe had failed to win control of the air, and the invasion was postponed. It was at that point, on 7 September, that the Luftwaffe turned to London.

Why London was bombed

London was bombed for two reasons, one military and one political. The military reason was that London was the centre of Britain’s war effort: the docks on the Thames handled the food and raw materials that Britain imported, the factories of the East End made munitions and aircraft parts, and the railways that ran through London carried troops and supplies to the south coast. The political reason was that Hitler and Göring believed that bombing the capital would break the morale of the British people and force the government to negotiate. Both reasons were wrong in the way they were understood: the docks and factories were hard to destroy from the air, and bombing civilians, as the war would show again and again, usually hardened their resolve rather than breaking it.

The docks were also the most visible target from the air, because the Thames guided the bombers to London, and the warehouses, with their timber and their oil, burned easily and for a long time. That visibility made the East End the most bombed part of the city, and it is why the East End suffered the heaviest losses of the Blitz.

London before the Blitz

Before the Blitz, London had prepared for bombing, but no one knew what it would be like. The government had issued gas masks to every civilian, had built public shelters, had distributed Anderson shelters — small corrugated-steel shelters that families buried in their gardens — and had evacuated children from London to the countryside in September 1939. The blackout had been imposed, so that no light would guide German bombers, and the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) service had been formed, with wardens in every street, fire services, first-aid posts and rescue teams. Londoners had practised air-raid drills, but the first great raid on 7 September 1940 was still a shock: the scale of the fires, the noise of the bombs, and the realisation that the bombing would come again the next night, and the night after that, were unlike anything the city had known.

The preparations were also a source of anxiety, because the gas masks, the shelters and the blackout reminded Londoners every day that bombing was expected, and that the government, for all its planning, could not promise that the shelters would be enough. That anxiety, and the determination to carry on despite it, is part of the story of the Blitz.

The defences of London

London’s defences against the bombers were limited, especially at night. Anti-aircraft guns fired from parks and rooftops, but in 1940 they were few, their fire was often inaccurate, and they were as much a source of noise and falling shrapnel as a protection. Night fighters were few, and radar could guide them only roughly to the bombers. The balloon barrage — large barrage balloons tethered over the city to force bombers to fly higher — was a visible symbol of defence, but it could not stop a determined raid. The real defence of London was therefore not in the sky but on the ground: the fire services, the rescue teams, the ARP wardens and the ordinary people who learned to put out incendiary bombs with sand and water, to help their neighbours out of damaged houses, and to keep the city working the next morning.

The searchlights, which swept the sky at night, were another visible part of the defence, and Londoners watched them from their shelters, hoping that a bomber would be caught in their beam and shot down, although that happened less often than people hoped. The lights, the guns and the balloons together gave the city a sense that it was defended, even when the defence was thin.

4. What Happened

The first night: 7 September 1940

The first great raid began on the afternoon of Saturday 7 September 1940. About 350 German bombers, escorted by fighters, crossed the coast and flew up the Thames to the docks. The docks were the target: warehouses full of timber, rubber, sugar, rum and other imported goods caught fire, and the fires burned for days. That night, a second wave of bombers came, and the raid continued until dawn. Londoners who had expected a short raid discovered that the bombing would not stop at nightfall, and that the sirens, the searchlights and the sound of bombs would become a nightly routine. The newspapers the next morning reported heavy damage in the East End, and the government, which had feared panic, was relieved to find that the city had not panicked — it had gone to work, it had queued for food, and it had begun to clear the rubble.

The fires from that first raid burned for days, and the smoke could be seen from the south coast, and the newspapers, which were not allowed to name the places that had been hit, reported only that London had been heavily bombed. Londoners who lived through that night remembered it for the rest of their lives, because it was the night when the war, which had seemed distant, arrived in their own streets.

Fifty-seven nights without a break

For the next 57 nights, the bombers came every night without a break, a period that Londoners remembered as the worst of the Blitz. The raids were heaviest in the East End and the docks, but no part of London was safe: the City, Westminster, the West End and the suburbs were all hit, and the pattern of bombing shifted from night to night as the Luftwaffe tried different targets. The death toll rose steadily, and the newspapers, which were censored, reported the raids in general terms — “a town in the south-east”, “heavy damage in London” — without naming the streets that had been hit. Londoners learned to read the damage for themselves, by walking to work past the ruins, and by listening for the names of streets in the casualty lists.

The strain of those fifty-seven nights was enormous, because people could not sleep properly, could not work properly, and could not know when the bombing would end. The government worried that morale would break, and it sent observers to report on the mood of Londoners, and the reports, on the whole, showed tiredness and anger, but also a determination to carry on.

Life in the shelters

Shelter life became the defining experience of the Blitz for most Londoners. Families with gardens slept in Anderson shelters, small steel huts half-buried in the earth, cold, damp and cramped, but safer than a house. Families without gardens used Morrison shelters, steel tables with wire sides that were placed in the living room and slept under. Thousands of people slept in public shelters, in church crypts, in school basements, and, most famously, on the platforms of Underground stations, where families spread blankets and slept in long rows while trains stopped running. The Underground shelters were at first discouraged by the government, which feared that people would refuse to leave them, but after public pressure the stations were opened, and they became one of the enduring images of the Blitz.

The shelters were also a place where the differences of class and neighbourhood were, for a night, set aside, because people who would not normally have spoken to each other shared a shelter, shared food, and looked after each other’s children. That sharing, which was often remembered with pride, is one reason the shelter is such a powerful image of the Blitz.

The Underground and the shelters at night

A night in the shelters was noisy, uncomfortable and frightening, but it was also social. Neighbours shared food, told stories, sang songs and looked after each other’s children, and the shelter became a small community for the night. The dangers were real: a direct hit on a shelter could kill everyone inside, as happened at the Balham Underground station on 14 October 1940, when a bomb burst a water main and flooded the station, killing about 66 people, and at the Bethnal Green station on 3 March 1943, when a crush on the stairs killed 173 people, the worst civilian disaster of the bombing of London. Those tragedies are remembered alongside the endurance, because they show that the shelters, for all their safety, were not safe enough.

The Underground shelters were also noisy and crowded, with trains stopping and starting, with people coming and going, and with the smell of food and of unwashed bodies, and yet many Londoners preferred them to the Anderson shelter in the garden, because they felt safer underground, and because they were not alone.

Firemen, wardens and rescue

The work of saving London was done by the fire services, the ARP wardens, the rescue teams and the hospitals, and their story is central to the Blitz. The London Fire Brigade, reinforced by the Auxiliary Fire Service, fought fires that sometimes covered whole streets, with water supplies cut by bomb damage and with hoses that had to be laid across the city. Firemen worked through the night in smoke and heat, and many were killed by collapsing buildings and by bombs that fell while they worked. ARP wardens, in their tin hats, patrolled their streets during raids, directed people to shelters, reported unexploded bombs, and helped the injured. Rescue teams, often volunteers, dug through rubble with their hands to reach people trapped in cellars, and the hospitals, which had been evacuated in part before the war, treated the wounded in wards that were themselves sometimes bombed.

The rescue teams also included volunteers who had no training, but who dug with their hands, and who stayed at a bombed house for hours, listening for a voice from under the rubble, and that work, which was often unsuccessful, was remembered by the rescuers as the hardest work of the Blitz.

5. The Site Today

The Blitz is still visible in London today, not as a single site but as a layer of the city: in the gaps between buildings, in the churches that were left as ruins, in the plaques on walls, and in the memorials that mark where people died. A visitor who walks through the City and the East End can still see the shape of the bombing, because the streets that were rebuilt after the war look different from the streets that survived, and because some of the most damaged buildings were never rebuilt at all, but kept as memorials to what was lost.

St Paul’s Cathedral and the City churches

St Paul’s Cathedral is the most famous survival of the Blitz. The great dome, designed by Christopher Wren, was hit by bombs and incendiaries, and on the night of 29–30 December 1940, in the raid that became known as the Second Great Fire of London, the City around it burned, but the cathedral survived, protected by the fire watchers who worked on its roof through the night. The photograph of St Paul’s standing above the smoke, taken on that morning, became one of the most famous images of the war, and it is still reproduced today as a symbol of London’s endurance. Other City churches were less fortunate: many were destroyed, and some, such as St Dunstan-in-the-East and Christ Church Greyfriars, were left as ruins, with their walls and towers standing in gardens, as memorials to the Blitz.

The fire watchers on the roof of St Paul’s worked in shifts through the night, with buckets of sand and water, and they put out the incendiary bombs that fell on the roof, knowing that if one bomb was missed, the cathedral, with its wooden roof and its lead dome, could burn. Their work is remembered in the cathedral today, and their names are recorded there.

The ruins kept as memorials

The ruined churches are the most direct memorials of the Blitz in the City. St Dunstan-in-the-East, destroyed in 1941, is now a public garden, its ruined walls covered in ivy, and visitors sit among the stones where the congregation once sat. Christ Church Greyfriars, also destroyed, is a garden of ruins in the heart of the City, and the tower of St Alban Wood Street stands alone in a small garden. These places are quiet, and they are deliberately left as they were after the bombing, so that a visitor can see, without a plaque or a museum, what a bomb did to a stone church, and can imagine what it did to the houses around it.

Those gardens are now places where office workers eat their lunch, and where visitors sit in the sun, and the quiet of the gardens, in the middle of the busy City, is itself a reminder that the ruins are not only a memorial to the past, but a place of rest in the present.

The East End, the docks and the Thames

In the East End, the Blitz is remembered in the docks and in the streets that were rebuilt after the war. The docks, which were the target of the first raid, were heavily damaged, and the warehouses, the cranes and the workers’ houses around them were rebuilt in the post-war years, so that the East End of today looks very different from the East End of 1940. The Imperial War Museum in Lambeth, which was itself bombed, holds the Blitz collections, and the Museum of London holds the photographs, the diaries and the objects of the Blitz. Along the Thames, plaques mark the places where bombs fell, and the river itself, which guided the bombers to London, is still the line that a visitor can follow to understand why the city was bombed where it was.

The Thames itself was a target, because the river was used by the bombers to navigate to London, and the docks, the warehouses and the bridges along the river were all bombed, and the river, which had been the heart of London’s trade, became, during the Blitz, the line that the bombers followed to the city.

6. Survivors and Testimony

The testimony of the Blitz is one of the richest bodies of civilian testimony from the Second World War, because Londoners wrote about it at the time, in diaries, in letters, and in the reports of Mass Observation, and because they continued to talk about it for the rest of their lives. The testimony is not a single story but many stories, and they differ by class, by neighbourhood, and by age: a child who slept in a Tube station remembers the Blitz differently from a fireman who fought the fires, and a dock worker in the East End remembers it differently from a clerk in the West End.

Diaries, letters and Mass Observation

Mass Observation recorded the Blitz in extraordinary detail, asking ordinary Londoners to keep diaries and to answer questionnaires about the bombing, the shelters, the food, and their morale. The diaries show that Londoners were frightened, tired and angry, and that they complained about the shelters, the blackout, the queues and the government, but they also show that they were determined to carry on, and that they took pride in the fact that London had not broken. One diarist wrote that the worst part of the Blitz was not the bombs but the waiting — the hours in the shelter listening for the sound of a bomb that might fall on your street — and that the best part was the morning, when the all-clear sounded and the city went back to work.

The Mass Observation reports were read by the government, and they influenced policy, because they showed that Londoners were not panicking, but were tired, and that what they needed most was sleep, and food, and a shelter that was dry and warm, rather than speeches about morale.

Children of the Blitz

Children remember the Blitz in a particular way. Many were evacuated to the countryside in 1939, and then returned to London, or were evacuated again after the bombing began. Those who stayed in London remember the shelters as a game as well as a fear, the shrapnel they collected as souvenirs, the fires they watched from rooftops, and the schools that were closed or moved. Oral-history projects have recorded these memories in old age, and they show that the Blitz, for children, was both terrifying and, in the way that childhood memories are, strangely vivid and even exciting, a fact that adult survivors often mention with a sense of guilt.

Many of those children, when they were interviewed in old age, said that they had not understood, at the time, how dangerous the Blitz was, and that they had thought of the shelters and the fires as an adventure, and that it was only later, when they were parents themselves, that they understood what their own parents had feared.

Firemen, wardens and nurses

The testimony of the firemen, the ARP wardens and the nurses is different again. Firemen remembered the heat, the smoke, the lack of water, and the buildings that collapsed without warning, and they remembered the camaraderie of the fire station and the pride of saving a street. ARP wardens remembered the long nights on patrol, the unexploded bombs, and the families they helped out of damaged houses. Nurses remembered the wards full of the injured, the operations carried out by torchlight during raids, and the children who arrived at hospital alone, separated from their parents. These testimonies, held by the Imperial War Museum and by the London Fire Brigade Museum, are the most direct account of what the Blitz cost the people who fought it.

The nurses also remembered the children who arrived at hospital alone, and who had to be cared for until their parents could be found, and the hospitals, which kept lists of the children in their care, became, for a time, a place where families were reunited, as well as a place where the wounded were treated.

7. Trials and Justice

The Blitz produced few trials, because the bombers were in Germany and could not be tried in London, but it produced a great deal of discussion about justice, and that discussion continued after the war in the trials of German leaders and in the debate about bombing itself. The most important trial was the Nuremberg trial of 1945–1946, at which Hermann Göring, who had commanded the Luftwaffe, was tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and was sentenced to death, although he killed himself before the sentence could be carried out. The bombing of London was not the main charge at Nuremberg, but it was part of the evidence against Göring and against the German leadership.

Looting, blackout crime and the courts

In London itself, the courts dealt with the crimes that the Blitz made possible. Looting — stealing from bombed houses and shops — was the most serious of these, and it was punished severely, with imprisonment and, in the early months of the war, with sentences that were deliberately harsh to deter others. The newspapers reported looting cases with anger, because looting from a bombed house was seen as a betrayal of the community, and the courts treated it as such. Other crimes rose during the blackout, when the dark streets made theft and assault easier, and the police, who were themselves stretched by air-raid duties, struggled to keep order. The records of the London courts during the Blitz, held at the National Archives, show a city under strain, but also a city in which the law continued to function.

The courts also dealt with cases of people who had taken food or clothing from a bombed shop, and who said they had taken it because they were hungry or cold, and the judges, who had to decide between compassion and deterrence, often gave sentences that were lighter than the law allowed, but still severe enough to send a message.

The debate about bombing

After the war, the justice of bombing itself was debated, and it is still debated today. The British bombing of German cities, which began in earnest in 1942 and reached its height in 1943–1945, killed far more civilians than the Blitz killed in Britain, and historians and moral philosophers have asked whether the bombing of civilians, by either side, could be justified. The debate does not change the facts of the Blitz, but it is part of its legacy, because the Blitz was the first time a great city was bombed night after night, and it set the pattern for the bombing campaigns that followed. The Imperial War Museum and the National Archives hold the records of that debate, and the subject is still taught in schools as a question, not as a settled answer.

The debate is also about memory, because the Blitz is remembered in Britain as a story of endurance, while the bombing of German cities is remembered in Germany as a story of suffering, and the two memories, which are both true, are difficult to hold together in a single history of the war.

Compensation and rebuilding

Justice after the Blitz also meant compensation and rebuilding. The government paid compensation for houses and businesses that had been destroyed, under the War Damage Act, and the rebuilding of London after the war was one of the largest building programmes in British history. The new housing, the new roads and the new public buildings that rose in the East End and the City in the 1950s and 1960s were, in a direct sense, the answer to the Blitz, and the families who moved into the new flats and houses were the people who had lived through the bombing. The rebuilding was slow, and for many years Londoners lived among ruins and building sites, but it was also a form of justice: the city would be rebuilt, and the people who had endured the Blitz would live in it.

The rebuilding was also a chance to improve London, and the new housing, with its bathrooms and its central heating, was better than the old housing that had been destroyed, and many Londoners, who had lived in crowded and damp houses before the war, moved into new flats that were, for the first time, warm and dry.

8. Visiting Information

London is the best place to learn about the Blitz, because the city itself is the museum. A visitor can walk the streets that were bombed, visit the museums that hold the collections, and stand in the churches that were left as ruins, all in a single day. The most useful visits are to the Imperial War Museum, to St Paul’s Cathedral, and to the ruined City churches, and a walk along the Thames, from the Tower to Westminster, will show the line of the docks and the river that guided the bombers.

The Imperial War Museum and St Paul’s

The Imperial War Museum in Lambeth, in south London, holds the largest Blitz collection in Britain, including photographs, diaries, shelters, ARP equipment and the objects of daily life during the bombing. The museum is free, and its Second World War galleries include a Blitz experience that recreates the sound and the atmosphere of a raid. St Paul’s Cathedral, in the City, is open to visitors, and the cathedral’s crypt and its displays tell the story of the fire watchers who saved it, and of the night of 29–30 December 1940, when the City burned around it. Visitors should allow at least half a day for the museum and the cathedral together.

The museum’s Blitz galleries are designed to be experienced, not only looked at, and visitors can hear the sound of the siren, feel the vibration of the bombs, and see the shelter as it was, so that the history is not only read but felt, and that feeling is what visitors remember when they leave.

Walking the Blitz

A walk through the City, from St Paul’s to St Dunstan-in-the-East and Christ Church Greyfriars, and then to the Tower and the Thames, is the best way to see the Blitz in the landscape. The ruined churches are open as gardens, and the plaques on the walls of the City mark where bombs fell and where people died. In the East End, a walk around the docks, now rebuilt as offices and flats, will show how completely the area was changed by the bombing and by the rebuilding that followed. Comfortable shoes, a map, and time to stop and read the plaques are all that is needed.

The walk is also a way to understand the scale of the bombing, because the distance from St Paul’s to the Tower is not far, and yet, in 1940, that short distance contained some of the heaviest bombing in London, and the plaques along the way mark the places where people died, street by street.

Practical information

Most Blitz sites in London are free to visit, including the ruined churches and the memorials, and the Imperial War Museum is free. St Paul’s charges for admission, with concessions for students and older visitors, and the cathedral’s opening hours vary, so visitors should check before travelling. The Underground stations that were used as shelters — Balham, Bethnal Green and others — are working stations, and visitors can pass through them, but they should remember that they are memorials as well as stations, and that plaques in the stations mark the people who died there.

Visitors who come by Underground should remember that the stations they pass through were themselves shelters, and that the plaques in Balham and Bethnal Green mark the people who died there, so that even a journey to the museum is, in a sense, a visit to a memorial.

Visitors should also allow time to stop, and to read the plaques, because the Blitz is best understood slowly, street by street, rather than in a hurry, and a slow walk is often the most memorable part of the visit.

9. Commemoration and Education

The Blitz is commemorated in London every year, and it is taught in every British school. The commemoration is not a single ceremony but a series of memorials, services and school lessons, and it is kept alive by the families of those who lived through it, by the museums, and by the city itself, which still bears the marks of the bombing. The most important commemoration is the Blitz itself in public memory: the phrase “the Blitz spirit”, the idea that Londoners endured the bombing with courage, humour and solidarity, is still used in Britain today, whenever a crisis calls for endurance.

Memorials and services

The main Blitz memorials in London are the National Firefighters Memorial near St Paul’s, which honours the firemen who died in the Blitz, the memorial at Bethnal Green station, which honours the 173 people who died there in 1943, and the memorial at Balham station, which honours those who died there in 1940. Services are held at these memorials on the anniversaries of the raids, and the Blitz is also remembered at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, when the dead of all wars are honoured. The services are quiet and local, and they are attended by the families of the dead, by firemen and by local people, rather than by large crowds.

The services at those memorials are attended by the families of the dead, by firemen, and by local people, and they are quiet, without speeches from politicians, because the families have asked that the commemoration be about the people who died, and not about the war in general.

The Blitz in schools

In schools, the Blitz is taught as part of the Second World War, and children are often asked to imagine life in the shelters, to write a diary as a child of the Blitz, or to visit the Imperial War Museum and St Paul’s. The teaching materials include photographs, diaries, and the sound of the air-raid siren, and the aim is not only to teach the facts of the bombing but to teach the values that the Blitz is thought to represent: endurance, solidarity and the refusal to give in. Historians note that the “Blitz spirit” was more complicated than the simple story — there was fear, looting, and resentment as well as courage — but the teaching of the Blitz as a story of endurance remains central to British school history.

The teaching of the Blitz in schools also includes a visit to the Imperial War Museum, where children can see the shelter, hear the siren, and try on a gas mask, and that visit, which is often the first time a child has thought about war, is remembered long after the lesson is over.

The Blitz spirit today

The phrase “Blitz spirit” is still used in Britain, in newspapers, in politics and in everyday speech, whenever a community faces a crisis — a flood, a pandemic, a terrorist attack — and is called upon to endure it together. The phrase is sometimes criticised as a myth, because it simplifies a complicated history, but its survival shows how deeply the Blitz entered British public memory. The Blitz is remembered not only as a bombing campaign but as a test of a city, and the fact that London passed that test, at great cost, is the reason the story is still told.

The phrase is also used by people who were not alive during the Blitz, and who use it to mean that a community can endure a crisis if it works together, and that meaning, which is simpler than the history, is one reason the phrase has survived for more than eighty years.

10. Legacy

The legacy of the Blitz in London is still visible in the city, in the law, and in the way Britain thinks about itself. The city was rebuilt, but it was rebuilt differently: the new housing, the new roads, the new public buildings and the gaps where buildings were never rebuilt all bear the mark of the bombing. The law was changed, too: the experience of the Blitz led to better civil defence, to better fire services, and to a system of compensation for war damage that is still the model for disaster compensation in Britain. And the way Britain thinks about itself was changed, because the Blitz became the central story of the Second World War in British memory, the story that is told to children, that is shown on television, and that is invoked in times of crisis.

Rebuilding and the city today

The rebuilding of London after the Blitz took decades, and it changed the city in ways that are still visible. The East End, which had been a dense network of small streets, warehouses and workers’ houses, was rebuilt with new housing estates, new roads and new public buildings, and the docks, which had been the heart of the East End, were eventually closed and rebuilt as offices and flats. The City, which had been a dense network of small streets and churches, was rebuilt with larger office buildings, and the churches that were destroyed were left as gardens. The result is a city that is, in part, a post-war city, built on the ruins of the Blitz, and a visitor who knows the history can read the bombing in the shape of the streets.

The new buildings in the City are taller and larger than the old ones, and the streets are wider, and a visitor who knows the history can see, in the shape of the streets and in the gaps between the buildings, where the bombing was heaviest, and where the rebuilding was most complete.

What the Blitz teaches

The Blitz teaches two lessons, and both are still relevant. The first is that bombing civilians does not break morale, and that a city can endure far more than its attackers expect, if its people are determined to carry on and if its services — fire, rescue, medical care — continue to work. The second is that endurance has a cost: about 20,000 people died in London, more than a million houses were damaged, and the city took decades to rebuild. Remembering both lessons, the endurance and the cost, is the proper legacy of the Blitz in London, and it is the reason the story is still told, still taught, and still commemorated.

The second lesson is also about the future, because it shows that a city can be rebuilt, and that a people can recover from bombing, but that recovery takes time, and money, and a determination to rebuild, and that the cost of bombing is paid not only in lives but in the decades that follow.

The Blitz in memory

In memory, the Blitz is London’s war. It is the story that Londoners tell about themselves, and it is the story that Britain tells about the Second World War. The images — St Paul’s above the smoke, the families sleeping in the Tube, the firemen fighting the fires, the streets of rubble in the morning — are among the most famous images of the war, and they are still reproduced, still taught, and still remembered. The Blitz is not the whole story of the war, and it is not the whole story of London, but it is the part of the story that London remembers best, because it is the part that happened to everyone, every night, for eight months.

The images of the Blitz are also used in films and in television, and they have become the way that Britain remembers the Second World War, even though the war was fought in many other places, and even though the Blitz was only one part of it.

Frequently Asked Questions

When was the Blitz in London?
The Blitz in London ran from 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941. The first 57 nights were bombed without a break.

How many people were killed in the Blitz in London?
About 20,000 people were killed in London, out of about 43,000 civilians killed across Britain during the Blitz as a whole.

What was the worst night of the Blitz in London?
The last major raid, on 10–11 May 1941, caused heavy damage in the City and Westminster. The raid of 29–30 December 1940, the Second Great Fire of London, was also among the worst, with the City burning around St Paul’s.

Did St Paul’s Cathedral survive the Blitz?
Yes. St Paul’s was hit by bombs and incendiaries, but it survived, protected by fire watchers on its roof. The photograph of the dome above the smoke became a famous symbol of London’s endurance.

Where did Londoners shelter during the Blitz?
In Anderson shelters in gardens, Morrison shelters indoors, public shelters, church crypts and Underground stations, where thousands slept on the platforms.

What was the Bethnal Green disaster?
On 3 March 1943, a crush on the stairs at Bethnal Green Underground station killed 173 people, the worst civilian disaster of the bombing of London. It happened during an air-raid alarm, not from a direct bomb hit.

Sources

1. Imperial War Museum, “The Blitz” (iwm.org.uk) — dates 7 September 1940–11 May 1941, 57 consecutive nights, shelters and the Blitz collections.
2. The National Archives (UK), Home Front and Blitz records — ARP, fire services, courts and compensation.
3. Museum of London, Blitz collections and photographs — London damage, St Paul’s and the East End.
4. Richard Overy, The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 (2013) — the Blitz, the Luftwaffe’s change of plan in September 1940, and civilian deaths of about 43,000 across Britain.
5. Juliet Gardiner, The Blitz: The British Under Attack (2010) — daily life, shelters, Mass Observation and the Blitz spirit.
6. Wikipedia, “The Blitz” — dates, deaths, Balham (about 66 killed, 14 October 1940), Bethnal Green (173 killed, 3 March 1943) and the 29–30 December 1940 raid, cross-checked against museum sources.