36 CONTEXT 176 : JUNE 2023 Central Line from the City to the Essex suburbs. The unfinished tunnels, some located in Tower Hamlets, were used at Bethnal Green as an air-raid shelter capable of holding thousands of eastenders. A further 4,000 workers were employed round the clock in shifts farther along the line from Stratford onwards, in a vast factory making and assembling aircraft equipment in the security of an underground location invisible from the air. Bombing began soon after the outbreak of the war. A total of 257 lives were lost in London in the year from 3 September 1939 to 6 September 1940. In the remaining months of 1940, 13,000 people were killed in London in the Blitz, and a total of nearly 30,000 in the whole of the second world war. About 70,000 buildings were demolished or damaged beyond repair in London’s core boroughs and a further more than 100,000 required major repair. These were not only peoples’ homes and workplaces, but also character areas and monuments. There were no conservation areas or listed buildings in the 1940s. Only ancient monuments (such as the Tower of London in Tower Hamlets), old churches and major secular pre-Queen-Anne buildings were recognised as being of significance. Dropping bombs in patterns proved highly effective in destroying the docks on both sides of the Thames and other strategic sites. Heavy losses of Tower Hamlets housing were suffered on the western bank of the River Lea. Nicholas Hawksmoor’s St George in the East, whose construction had begun in 1715, was gutted by fire. Reconstructed and listed Grade I (awarded in 1950), it is the centrepiece of a Tower Hamlets conservation area. An article by John (later Sir John) Summerson (1904–92) in the Architectural Review in 1941 recorded the serious damage to the church. The article was the first of a series of notices in the press about wartime losses of heritage, which led to the beginnings of listing, as architectural historians set about the task of reckoning the cost to the nation’s past being paid due to war. Concerns extended to unease in the same circles about Bomber Command’s own raids being conducted in Europe as the war swung in favour of the Allied side. We are able to make some sense of the patterns of the bombings shown on the London County Council maps, but not for the attacks by rocket that followed. The first V1 rockets were unleashed only a few days after the Normandy Landings in June 1944 and the V2 rockets later that year. The trials for the flying bombs and rockets had been secretly monitored for a year at least by British security and intelligence agencies, revealing the essential unreliability of these weapons, which could deliver only small amounts of explosives, compared to air-dropped bombs. It was the random nature of these rocket attacks and the difficulty of intercepting them that caused the greatest concern. V2 rockets came out of the sky without warning. The terror at home did not end until their launch sites in Europe had been overwhelmed by the army, and the production and transport of the rockets had been disrupted. A final V2 fell in Stepney, Tower Hamlets, in March 1945, in the last bitter weeks of the war in Europe. A block of flats was demolished and 125 residents died. Altogether Tower Hamlets suffered about 60 of these rocket hits, including some in the Thames or on its banks, and three near Tower Bridge. The Nazi regime is said to have regarded the Victorian bridge as the most important target in London. Many rockets overshot and the non-strategic area of South Kensington took several hits, including to the Natural History Museum, which narrowly escaped destruction. The walls of the Victoria and Albert Museum opposite still carry the marks left by flying bomb debris. With the clearance of millions of tons of debris, the aftermath of bombing left whole areas devoid of buildings. Beyond these, depots of reclaimed bricks stretched across acres. The flavour and appearance of London in the immediate post-war era is vividly caught in the 1949 Ealing Comedy film ‘Passport to Pimlico’, many of its scenes having been shot at bombsites or in the surviving back streets of the capital. The reconstruction of popular housing in the post-war era is another story. Those who wish to visit Tower Hamlets are directed to Poplar, where a number of estates of houses and their shopping centres are to be seen, with new churches in the modernist style. Following the rapid rebuilding, a second phase of rehousing saw the construction of tower blocks of flats, including some that have been listed, such as Erno Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower of 1965. In the meanwhile, many inhabitants had left such central areas when docks and industries were closing, to settle in Essex or Hertfordshire, or to occupy new homes in new towns such as Stevenage and Basildon. When London’s population fell in the 1960s, the East End’s half-empty streets and boardedup houses were the scenes of gangland violence, and the old pubs that stood on nearly every street corner took on a louche and edgy ambience that brought in hordes of pleasure-seekers who found pubs in more respectable locations to be too bland or genteel. These East End pubs have since become the object of strenuous efforts in Tower Hamlets planning policy to
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