Southwest London, including my local neighbourhood of Balham, is lined with neat terraces of Victorian houses. But the symmetry on some streets is interrupted by standalone, incongruous blobs. They are newer buildings, different from the rest.
Often I would stroll around my locale, see one of these streetscape scars and wonder: “Why did they give permission for that, and why demolish part of such a nice terrace?”
A wiser man than I set me straight one Saturday afternoon.
We were walking down Lordship Lane in East Dulwich, a gentrified area a few miles east, past Brixton. The pretty Victorian boulevard was broken by a jarring, cheap-looking retail development at the corner of Shawbury Lane.
I asked my friend how this had happened.
“Bombs,” he replied.
Bombs?
“Yes, bombs from the second World War. The Germans would drop a bomb and wreck a few buildings. There was so much reconstruction to be done after the war, so much new development needed, often they were just pragmatic about the replacement structures.”
The realisation dawned as if a big, heavy penny had dropped from the sky and clattered my pate. I never again looked the same way at residential London’s occasionally wonky design. It was all down to bombs and each told a different story.
The Lordship Lane bombing at the corner of Shawbury Lane is commemorated by a plaque. It happened on August 5th, 1944, a Saturday afternoon. A V1 flying bomb, known as a doodlebug, hit the local Co-Operative Stores. V1s were the first cruise missiles.
It was a bank holiday weekend and the building was crowded with shoppers. Twenty-seven of them were killed. The youngest victim, Robert Marshall, was aged just two. The oldest, Emily McGregor, was 82.
Now, whenever I spot an eyesore building in the middle of a street, I wonder on whose heads the bomb fell.
Back in Balham, there is one particularly unsightly white development at the bottom of Blandfield road where it intersects with Temperley Road. It looks a little bit like a Bauhaus structure – but one that was assembled with a pound-shop kit.
Armed with the fresh insight bequeathed by my wiser friend, I checked the bad-Bauhaus building’s address on flyingbombsandrockets.com. The site is an online listing of the V1s and V2s (the first ballistic missiles) Germany fired at Britain as the war ended.
Sure enough, the Blandfield Road address was struck by a V1 rocket at about midnight on August 3rd, 1944. Three people were killed.
The nearby Lochinvar estate of modest red-bricked houses sticks out compared to the more characterful surrounding Victorian streets. There is nothing particularly wrong with Lochinvar, it just looks different.
It didn’t show up on flyingbombsandrockets.com. Another website, Layers of London, allows you to overlay old “bomb census” maps over modern Google Maps to search for war damage. It shows Lochinvar was devastated by a V2 in late 1944.
The first V1 to hit this part of London fell at 5.15am on June 18th, 1944 on the Jewish Home of Rest, a three-storey nursing home just off Nightingale Lane. It killed 12 people.
However, the deadliest strike on Balham, and one of the most notorious second World War bombings in all of London, came earlier in the conflict during the Blitz.
The sound of German bombers flying overhead prompted people to seek shelter in Balham Underground station on the evening of October 14th, 1940. Just after 8pm, a bomb hit the middle of the main street, Balham High Road, directly above a tunnel.
The explosion tore through the road and burst a water main, which flooded the tunnel below, drowning many of those seeking shelter. It isn’t known exactly how many people died. Estimates vary between 65 and 70 casualties.
A number 88 bus that was driving on the blacked-out streets drove into the bomb crater. A photograph of the bus sticking out of the hole like a child’s toy is one of the most infamous images of the Blitz. The bombing was dramatised in the Keira Knightley movie Atonement.
That bomb fell right outside the front of what is now my local Sainsbury’s supermarket. I walk right over that filled-in crater every time I cross the street to do my shopping. For the first 18 months, I had no idea what had happened beneath my feet.
When I first moved to London, I stayed temporarily in a central location. I would often pass the St Clement Danes church on Strand, known for featuring in an old English nursery rhyme (“Oranges and lemons/Say the bells of St Clement’s”).
The outside of the church wall is badly scarred. I used to think it was damaged in an accident, or that maybe the wall was damp and the stone had fallen way. The church took a direct hit in the Blitz in May, 1941. The rector, William Pennington-Bickford, died a broken man a month later. His wife Louie, racked with grief, took her own life soon later.
London is a beguiling city, but with history and tragedy built into its very fabric.
