this is brilliant site - my grand parents (and fathers) house was destroyed by an indirect hit. They just moved further down the same road.
this is bit of Dalston my dad was born in and brought up in. This was just off of Ridley Road Market, where Oswald Mosley tried to organise rallies. My grand parents organised counter rallies and Mosley and the black shirts. Their is a family story that my grandmother attacked Mosley with an umbrella at one such rally
I so hope that’s true.
who knows? My Dad thinks it is more likely to be one of the local fascist leaders. But there are plenty of reports of riots in Ridley Rd as a result fascist rallies, which apparently started just after the war when Mosely was released from prison, right up until a few years before I was born in 1965
This is a StreetView snap of George St, Boston showing the last two pre-war houses still standing on the east side of the street. Most of the others were demolished relatively recently.
You can see that the brickwork on the corner of the nearer house has been rebuilt. That’s because all the houses were originally joined at first-floor level. There was a ground-floor alley between each pair giving access to the back yards.
My grandparents’ house once stood where the flowerbed is now. They lived there with my mum and uncle who were kids during the war. The houses were tiny (the remaining ones have been extended backwards). So when the Luftwaffe took to dumping on Boston any bombs that they had left over from their raids on the Lincs airfields my nan and grandad, who had no room for a shelter, took to sleeping at my great-grandparents’ place, which was larger and did have one. In any case my nan was scared and she liked the company. My mum remembered coming home one morning to find that their house was rubble. They would probably all have been killed.
I remember the place was still a bombsite, looking like a missing tooth in the row of houses, when I was a kid in the 60’s.
VB
Wow, just wow !
Plymouth, like Coventry was bombarded during the blitz. Of course there were strategic targets but in order for many of the German bombers to make it home they had to lighten their load so Plymouth received supplementary bang bang - Death from above.
What the Germans didn’t flatten the council in their wisdom decided to tear down and replace with nice creative concrete (Coventry’s council shared the same need / vision)
Pour example
It’s such a shame for a city by the sea to have been brutalized from home and away. Some of the old pictures of the City look architecturally fantastic.
Bye bye pier
Mostly gone
All gone
All but gone
That could be Abingdon (or any other town that underwent development in the 50s.)
Good point - Concrete cock punch to instant soulless city architects of yore.
Took me a while to figure out where that was. All gone now of course.
This gives a wider view. The church & Guildhall still there but everything to the right of (& including) that striped St Andrews Cross was destroyed.
Many hundreds of towns and cities have an identical tale to tell.
New is always better. More is always better. Someone, somewhere is making money.
And that’s why our species is unrelentingly destroying its own habitat - so the stupid can breed like rats and the billionaire can become a trillionaire.
I’m all about Despair these days… 
But not wrong
Southampton was bombed really fucking heavily during the war with pretty much all the city and most of the historic walls destroyed.
The Southampton Blitz was the heavy bombing of Southampton by the Nazi German Luftwaffe during World War II. It was targeted mainly in the first phase of the Blitz.
Southampton suffered badly from large-scale air raids during World War II. As a large port city on the south coast, it was an important strategic target for the Luftwaffe. There were fifty seven attacks in all, but nerves were frayed by over 1,500 alarms. According to A.R.P. (Air Raid Precautions Department) reports over 2,300 bombs were dropped amounting to over 470 tonnes of high explosives. Over 30,000 incendiary devices were dropped on the city. Nearly 45,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed, with most of the city’s High Street being hit. There were reports that the glow of the firestorm of Southampton burning could be seen from as far away as Cherbourg on the coast of France. Nazi publicity declared in propaganda that the city had been left a smoking ruin.[1]
Of the 57 air raids, by far the worst were on 23 and 30 November and 1 December 1940 and these attacks are generally referred to as “Southampton’s Blitz”. During this three-day period, much of the town centre was destroyed, including All Saints’, Holyrood[2] and St. Mary’s churches,[3] although St. Michael’s escaped with only minor damage, allegedly because the spire was used by the German bombers as a landmark and their pilots were ordered not to hit it.[4] Altogether, Southampton lost seven churches during the blitz,[5] as well as the Audit House, the Ordnance Survey offices[6] and many shops, factories and homes.[5]
The last casualties of air raids in the city were in a small raid on the suburbs of the city in May 1941 and on 8 July 1941 in the area of Victory Crescent, Millbrook with the loss of at least three lives. The last major raid of over 50 bombers was in June 1942, after that the worst was over. There were occasional single bombs and in 1944 the only two V1 flying bombs to land on the city were the last to fall in the area.
How tragic is that wanky ‘magical transformation’ ?
Makes you want to give up !
Didn’t it have a valid ticket?
It can hardly use the excuse that it forgot…
At the risk of being boring…
I have been doing a bit of research regarding the bomb that dropped in my father’s street. I now have a book- Chingford At War- which has an account of the incident. The bomb that was dropped was in fact more than twice the size I thought it was. This is a pair of them:
They were called SC1000- the 1000 refers to kilos, so 2200lbs. They measured 2.78 metres in length! These apparently were dropped from Heinkel HE 111 bombers and were too big to go into the bomb bay, so were strapped to the underside of the aircraft and usually followed by incendiary devices which would ignite the debris once there had been an ‘opening up’ by the larger bomb
It killed 10 people and not 8 as I had thought and seriously injured several others. 14 houses were demolished and “hundreds of others were damaged.” As far as I can work out, the bomb detonated just to the left of the property and probably no more than a few feet from my dad’s front door. Incendiary bombs then set fire to the buildings and a ruptured gas main.
An absolute miracle that he, my grandmother and great grandmother survived.
Top sleuthing and an incredible story
I think dropping the HE followed by the incendiaries was a common tactic. The blast wave damages the surrounding roofs and so the incendiaries get a better chance of doing damage by burning on the interior. Horrible, horrible times.
This. Quality sleuthing Ritchie. They were blessed indeed.
