The London County Council Bomb Maps

"Thom: As far as I understand it, the maps themselves were made for practical purposes, they were plotted by the ARP and various other officials working for the government, the council. The idea was to partly understand what the Luftwaffe were trying to bomb, and what their process was, what their plans were, what they were aiming at, and so on, for reasons of defence and preparing for raids. But there was another level to it, which was all about what to do after the war. Even at that time they were thinking, “If we get out of this we’re going to have to rebuild everything, to fix this, what are we going to do?” I think there were other architectural reasons for it as well, safety reasons: which buildings needed to be demolished. If they didn’t keep track of it, people would have been badly hurt. Really, they were just very practical. Thom: They’re essentially very detailed maps, down to the level of individual buildings, and they use a colour code, so each building is marked in a colour depending how damaged it was: black means a building is totally destroyed, purple means it is damaged beyond repair and would need to be demolished, then they get lighter: yellow is light damage, et cetera. We’ve found, anecdotally, that buildings were structurally damaged and people didn’t realise at the time. There’s a process called ‘lift and shunt’, where if a bomb lands at the end of a street it can send an earthquake ripple through the ground, which can damage the foundations of building and they all lift up and land back down again. You might not find out until a hundred years later that your house has a great big crack somewhere beneath the ground. While they were very detailed, they were made under a great deal of pressure in the middle of an air raid. “The desire to record all of that information seems an attempt to control something chaotic, to re-own the city” They’re beautiful maps, and very fascinating if you live in London and know an area; you can start to understand the landscape in a totally new way. Beth: One of the things behind our book is that our Grandad was an ARP warden. We found out, quite recently, that he would work all day in an architectural office, training to be a draughtsman, then all night he would go out and walk the streets, and try to find the damage, which he would then report. That would go on to someone else in charge of collating information. The maps are about walking around and finding things, and I think this desire to record all of that information had really practical implications and reasons and uses, but it also seems to be an attempt to control something chaotic, to re-own the city. Beth: During the Blitz, The Architectural Review was excited about the opportunities it would give to re-shape a city that had grown very organically, and fix some of the town-planning problems that had essentially arisen because London wasn’t designed for cars, or enormous numbers of people, like an American city is. But there was also a huge lack of money, and a large number of people who needed housing. Somewhere near a million houses were destroyed in the Blitz, and people needed a place to live. So you ended up with pre-fab structures and temporary buildings that became long-term buildings. High-rises were built, the Brutalist Utopia emerged: the idea of solving the housing problem with big structures, that have since degraded. Thom: After the war, there was this time of vision and looking forward to rebuilding and making the world better so it never happened again. Of course some of those dreams probably came true, but a lot of them didn’t because there was no money and it was a really difficult time: there was necessity. Thom: It’s a city that has evolved."