42 C O N T E X T 1 4 5 : J U LY 2 0 1 6 Book reviews Raining death The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps, 1939–1945 LaurenceWard,Thames and Hudson, 2015, 288 pages, 195 illustrations, black and white photography, maps in colour, hardback, ISBN 978 0 500518 25 0, £48 Cities and their destruction, whether from natural causes or due to war, are abiding subjects and no strangers to illustrated books that leave us in no doubt about the costs of war: physical, economic and moral. This book has been republished by Thames and Hudson to bring the original London Topographical Society (LTS) volume of 2005, now obtainable only from specialist booksellers at prices hovering around £1,000 a copy, to a new readership who can not afford these prices or enjoy access to the libraries where original copies are kept. Although I have previously handled copies of the LTS original, the present review has been compiled without the privilege of direct comparison between the two versions and without recourse to Robin Woolven’s introduction to the 2005 LTS edition of the original maps. The new book is more than welcome: a reasonable price, a new set of explanations by Laurence Ward, and the addition of photographs by Cross and Tibbs recording the immediate aftermath of bombs and rockets falling on London in these six dreadful years, during which thousands of deadly raids damaged every part of the capital, and killed or wounded many of its inhabitants. The photos are not mere snapshots but consist of dignified fullplate representations of such subjects as the apse and roof of St Paul’s Cathedral, with masonry from its roof deposited like an offering on the site of the altar. As the Luftwaffe and the RAF exchanged assaults on their respective territory, the second world war escalated. Cities in Germany would eventually face almost complete destruction, but this was not before London, and many other British cities and places in Northern Ireland, suffered damage on a level not seen before. The LCC recorded every degree of damage to streets and individual buildings, and the sites where bombs or rockets fell harmlessly into the Thames or the parks. These open spaces seem to have had more than their fair share of hits, perhaps due to the skill of defenders in bringing down V1 rockets in uninhabited places. Destroyed buildings and those damaged to a lesser degree were charted on Ordnance Survey editions already over 20 years old. This leads to numerous oddities (for example, only Victorian tube sites and none of the inter-war deep stations). The unexplained omissions do not end here. Buckingham Palace and Holland House, Kensington, were famously bombed but neither shows any recorded damage according to the maps. We get a picture of London with a war from the reign of George VI superimposed on maps dating to the beginning of his father’s reign. The colour coding of damage levels is sometimes difficult to interpret when shades of red merge confusingly with orange and yellow. Even with the use of my best magnifying glass I can not always read the lettering on the printed maps. The LCC area reached only from Hammersmith to Woolwich, and from Highgate to Streatham. Areas that we now think of as London were also heavily bombed but are not recorded here. The nearby parts of east London, Croydon or Kent, where so many raids took place, were the subject of similar survey work but were not LCC areas and thus are not included. This publication brings to a wider public, whether architectural historians, planners or those who merely share the universal fascination that attends on the wars of the past, a record of London’s history during six vital years. Even before the war was over the plans for regeneration had been started. Patrick Abercrombie was at work on his famous vision of London in 1943–44. Soon a regional strategy extending from Stevenage and Harlow to Crawley in the south would give us the truly ‘greater’ London that we all accept. Returning to the street-by-street destruction: losses of Wren’s City churches, of livery halls and of the dignified Victorian commercial areas and their industrial or suburban outskirts must be seen in this book to understand what happened in the war. The flickering images on the screen are replaced here with something more solid. Graham Tite, conservation officer, BEAMS, Hertford One-stop reference Practical Building Conservation: Earth, Brick and Terracotta Historic England, Ashgate, 2015, 1,020 pages, profusely illustrated, ISBN 978 0 754645 53 5, £95 The Practical Building Conservation series, first authored by John and Nicola Ashurst 28 years ago, had become a key reference for many practitioners. Originally of five volumes, the series has recently been expanded to 10 volumes by a team at Historic England with the assistance of expert contributors. More than simply a revised edition, the volume on Earth, Brick and Terracotta has been comprehensively rewritten by Alison Henry, Iain McCaig, Clara Willett, Sophie Godfraind and John Stewart. It is now physically so large as to warrant dividing into two separate volumes, totalling 1,020 pages. Each of the three materials is introduced with a review of how it has been used in England through history. In this respect the volume is much more than a technical handbook. Regional variations are explained in
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