London is under there somewhere
I was equally fascinated and appalled by the new interactive Bombsight map which shows the site of every bomb which fell on London during the blitz, from October 1940 until June 1941.
I had tended to think that the bombs were concentrated on the East End and the Docks with a few stray ones over central London. The reality is staggering. Even out as far as where I live, in Oxshott, there were dozens in the immediate area. This is a quiet suburb (it would have been even quieter seventy years ago) about nineteen miles from the centre of London and yet each one of these dots is a bomb impact. I live along the bottom edge of this map which covers an area of about four and a half miles by two and a half miles. Not a lot of area for such a lot of bombs! Scary
We really don't have any appreciation of what our parents and grandparents had to live through...
Fascinating! I wonder if there is something similar for other areas of the country?
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, the LOTR symphony in your sidebar - is that any different to the individually released movie soundtracks?
Yes it's an arrangement of themes from the film by Howard Shore. It was played in a concert in Switzerland.
ReplyDeleteIt's a live recording but you wouldn't know it. It's about an hour and forty minutes in length and well worth getting!
My mother was a very young girl during the war and lived near Sevenoaks in Kent (miles away from central London, for overseas readers). That area was very badly bombed. My mother tells two stories: first, that her mother was hanging washing on the line in the garden at a time when there wasn't an air-raid and a German fighter came out of nowhere and raked the garden with machine gun fire (his aim was awful - my grandmother wasn't harmed); secondly how my mother was late for school one day and arrived to find it on fire, having been bombed an hour earlier. We really can't imagine what living under the daily threat of aerial bombardment must be like.
ReplyDeleteGiles