Missing buildings, the blitz, town planning, etc.

[Jamiel]

I recently watched the BBC series on the blitz, which I thought was really excellent.

Surprisingly it brought up thoughts about modelling British streets in the post war years.

 

In the 1987 I worked close to London Bridge Station on Southwark Street. At the time the building I was working in, the old Corn Exchange was being renovated and turned into some very nice offices. The top floor had one end blown off during the blitz and until the renovations of the late 80’s had remained that way for forty years.

A couple of years later I was at University in Hull, one of the most extensively bombed cities in the war, and there were rows of houses that would still have an empty space where one had obviously been destroyed in the bombing.

 

These days I cannot think of any remaining physical evidence of the blitz, apart from the odd building preserved as it was during the war like the Bristol church in the programme, but I suspect that I am wrong and have missed obvious examples through lack of local knowledge.

 

Railways were an obvious target for the Luftwaffe, although accuracy in bombing in the 1940s was not the laser guided accuracy we see on the news these days, there must still have been a lot of damage around such obvious targets.

 

Due to the damage cities like Sheffield removed a huge amount of the old buildings and built new post war architecture, it seems Bristol too from the BBC programme. Some have said that many town planners as much, or more damage to our building heritage to than the Luftwaffe.

 

I am modelling an urban layout set in a fictitious northern town set in the early 1960’s, and am starting to undertake the buildings around the railway. I am wondering what the mix of buildings might be. I know this would be different from town to town.

 

I would be interested to hear what people think of the possible mix of original undamaged buildings, restored buildings, gaps and derelict spaces and post war architecture might be.

I would also love to see any reference photos or hear people’s recollections.

I hope this is the best place to post this?

Jamie

Edited January 26, 2018 by Jamiel

[Ben Alder]

Wick, first victim of daylight bombings, had a bomb site until the last few years , when it was turned into a memorial . Here are a couple of links - I think this was the last original site but I stand to be corrected.

 

http://www.centuryuntold.co.uk/wick-bombings/

 

https://www.warmemorialsonline.org.uk/memorial/251423/

[LBRJ]

There is quite a lot of info on line about the bombing of, and particularly the Blitz on Sheffield.

this map is one of many that show where the bombs fell (there are quite a lot of them!)

https://www.sheffieldhistory.co.uk/forums/topic/13560-london-ww2-bomb-map-website/

Edited January 26, 2018 by LBRJ

[sb67]

I think that would be an interesting subject to model. I live in Romford, Essex, an area that had, I believe, quite a bit of bombing during the war and you can still see some evidence. In some places there is row's of semi detached houses interrupted by one or two big detached houses that just look out of place. Turns out that the original houses were flattened during the war , even the flat I used to live in was built on the site of war damaged houses. I only found this out when someone released a book about my local area during the war.

There used to be a pub in London called The One They Left Behind and it was a single ex terrace house on a green in the middle of a load of new buildings that I think was the result of bombing.

Steve.

[rockershovel]

Here’s a few screenshots from google earth, of the area I lived in as a small child - Dalston, North London. A mostly residential area, but close to the North London Line

 

Corner of Mildmay Road. Original, although much altered Victorian terrace to the left of the picture, looking across to an area which was a bulldozed site (levelled brick rubble, but with the street plan and Kerbs remaining) in the early 60s, completely redeveloped as a single tower block in the 1970s

 

 

Queen Margarets Grove. 1950s flats. The small green area was the site of a pair of bomb damaged, but largely intact houses into the 1970s

 

 

Looking towards the railway, a good idea of the original Victorian appearance

 

 

St Jude St - single 80s dwelling inserted into cleared space which served as a back entry to the arcade of shops, for many years

 

 

Looking towards Boleyn Road, various building styles (mostly flats, of various periods) infilling the gaps caused by bomb damage

 

 

Queen Margaret’s Grove. 1950s flats, adjacent to previous picture but mismatched style.

 

Edited January 26, 2018 by rockershovel

[phil gollin]

.

 

The 1960s was an interesting time in "inner cities", as apart from rebuilding after damage from bombing there was the wholesale replacement of slums, road improvement schemes, and starting in the mid-60's the reuse of redundant railway land for development (redundant due to the huge reduction in railway freight use and then Beeching cuts).  In addition, in SOME "northern" towns the main industries might be in decline  even then.

 

As from the title, one good source MIGHT be your local history library.  They "should" have copies of things like "town plan", or "town planning schemes", etc....  These WON'T give details but should contain maps showing areas to be developed, and if any road schemes were planned.  In addition, some local history libraries have the records from the ARP/Civil Defence which might give details of bomb damage.

 

They can be VERY variable, but local history libraries tend to have online photo libraries, and SOME can be searched by date. 

[rockershovel]

More from google earth

 

Mildmay Road again. Victorian terraced houses. Note the variegated appearance of the parapets - I remember a section of such a parapet collapsing in the early 1960s, attributed to long-term structural weakening resulting from bombing

 

 

Victorian terrace, 1930s flats from slum clearance project, 1950s school on site of previous school damaged by bombing

 

 

Victorian terraces, 1950s flats replacing bombed terraces

 

 

[Fat Controller]

In Folkestone, there are still traces of WW2 bombing, though it can be hard to distinguish them from subsequent council activity.

One is this church tower; the rest of the building was destroyed:-  https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.0775248,1.1739344,3a,60y,270h,90t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sEJBhaYC9zr_UJMnLtFMNfg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en

The church tower has been conserved as a memorial.

Another, I believe, is the building just beyond Ceramica Tiles in this view:-

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.0866425,1.1503174,3a,75y,90h,72.72t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1ssgBuZxO9JPRdDaVrbqTlRQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en

I'm fairly certain that, when I moved to Folkestone, about 25 years ago, some of those fireplace openings still had parts of the cast-iron grates in situ, and traces of wallpaper.

There are other instances of a row of Victorian/ Edwardian buildings, with a solitary 'modern' building in the middle.

[Jamiel]

Thank you to everyone for the replies.

The changes in the style of architecture where a building has been replaced are a real giveaway of missing buildings, also seeing where part of a building has been rebuilt but with less period detail is very interesting.

I worked on a TV series where one half of a building in north London has a very different brick and mortar colour, which it turned out was due to that corner of the building had been rebuilt due to bomb damage. I was asked to paint out the difference.

The 70s and 80s style of building inserted into row of house are very obvious, the plainer style of architecture. Being in my 50s I am aware of the rebuilding that happened in those decades are house and land prices made the empty spaces more valuable.

I think my question is during the 50s and 60s how much bomb damage remained as either buildings shored up but showing damage, and how many empty spaces were unused after a building had been demolished.

 

I presume some rebuilding was happening then as well, and what style did those buildings have? Were they built to pre-war designs but with newer bricks and mortar, so less weathering on the model, or was the start of 'modern' architecture taking hold.

I know this all depends on the wealth of an area, I am sure some areas we beautifully rebuilt in a matching style, and some areas, perhaps like the (fictitious) northern town I m modelling would still have evidence of the war clearly visible. I know this is a how long is a piece of string question, but the BBC programme really sparked my interest on how the streets of this country fared as rebuilding took place.

Jamie

Edited January 26, 2018 by Jamiel

[GeoffAlan]

Middlesbrough didn't get blitzed, but it did get a few bombs on it over the war. One landed in the station wrecking my mother's desk and killing  one of her friends who, unlickily, was in the office at the time. As a kid in the 1950s there were odd buildings missing from otherwise identical streets and when I got interested in the war, as all us boys did back then, I tracked sticks of bombs dropped from 'lone raiders' as they made nuisance raids in daylight or night-time.

 

So a reasonable modelling of a post war town might show these bombsites. They were cleared of rubbish and left to stand, some into the 1960s before someone decided to build on the plot. Gresham Road, a terraced secondary link in the network of roads and streets, had one house that was very different to all those around it, being for a start twice as big as neighbouring properties and of a very different style. It's still there as far as I know, it certainly was in 2006 when I cleared my late mother's house when she moved in with my sister. My mother knew it was a bomb site built on in the late 1940s.

[Jamiel]

Here are some before and after images of the wall I painted in for the TV show. I left the more modern brickwork to form the bricked up windows and just replaced the surrounding areas.


It is a sort of detail that I have seen on many railway buildings, possibly due to bombing, and also possibly due to accidents.

Here is Thorpe Gates signal box a couple of miles out from Selby, which I used to cycle past every day on my way to school. I suspect the damage on this one was due to a car or lorry taking a swipe at the edge of the building. It still shows how a building changes throughout its lifetime though. Sadly the box was demolished a few years ago, no great beauty, but it was part of my childhood, but that is not valid grounds for preservation though.



Jamie

Edited January 26, 2018 by Jamiel

[Fat Controller]

One thing that was often seen where buildings had been destroyed as a result of bombing were a framing of large wooden baulks (about 12" cross-section) vertical and horizontal against the surviving wall, with further timbers at 45 degrees to brace them. I've seen some examples fairly recently, but can't remember where.

Quite often, bomb-sites would be screened by advertising hoardings; again, examples have remained until quite recently. Similarly, sites became adapted as car parks; NCP started like this, employing mainly ex-servicemen.

Sometimes, consequences of German bombing were less obvious...

My parents met when dad was sent to examine land-mine damage to my grand-parents' house, which his uncle had built. A 1000kg parachute mine had been dropped on a 'Starfish' site about a mile away, bringing down the ceiling. 

[LBRJ]

There are a lot of post Blitz pictures of Sheffield in this link.

http://www.picturesheffield.com/frontend.php?action=search&keywords=Popular_Themes;EQUALS;Blitz

[allan downes]

 This might help and having been bombed out as a kid three times I remember it well !

 

https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=A0LEVvhnQGtao0MAzEEPxQt.?p=the+london+blitz&f

 

And this says it all.

 

 

Cheers.

 

Allan.

Edited January 26, 2018 by allan downes

[rockershovel]

Rebuilding in the 70s was frequently in a modern style. People wanted new amenities.

 

I remember seeing obvious bombsites in some Northern towns, as recently as the 1990s. They were usually more-or-less landscaped over, but their location made it apparent. Places like Stoke and Mansfield, where old housing stock remained in use, accommodating the dwindling workforce of declining industries and it was not worthwhile to rebuild piecemeal.

Edited January 26, 2018 by rockershovel

[Fat Controller]

Rebuilding in the 70s was frequently in a modern style. People wanted new amenities.

 

I remember seeing obvious bombsites in some Northern towns, as recently as the 1990s. They were usually more-or-less landscaped over, but their location made it apparent. Places like Stoke and Mansfield, where old housing stock remained in use, accommodating the dwindling workforce of declining industries and it was not worthwhile to rebuild piecemeal.

Don't know about Mansfield, but most of the missing buildings in Stoke were down to the local council: rumour had it that the Luftwaffe recce'd the area, and thought they'd already bombed it.

[allan downes]

A Mk 1 'doodlebug'- or flying bomb - Silently glided on its decent over the roofes of our block of flats in Deansbrook road, Edgeware and  totally flattened Langley Park, a small private estate just off Bunns Lane, Mill Hill. - I remember it well as it appeared to be heading straight for our bedroom window as my Mother stood there, hands clasped, praying out aloud "Lift it ! Lift it ! Please  God, Lift it ! "  Well, I'm not a religious man, far from it, but I swear someone acted in our favour that night

 

 Anyway, about 65 years on and totally rebuilt, my brother and myself went back there once and, surprisingly, not one of the residents that we spoke to on the estate knew  anything at all about it and some didn't even know what a 'doodlebug' was !

 

Cheers.

 

Allan

Edited January 26, 2018 by allan downes

[rockershovel]

Don't know about Mansfield, but most of the missing buildings in Stoke were down to the local council: rumour had it that the Luftwaffe recce'd the area, and thought they'd already bombed it.

... a widespread urban legend, that, referring to any local town or area thought particularly ill-favoured!

 

I don’t know about Stoke, but certainly Mansfield (like quite a few mining towns) had long-standing problems with mining subsidence, which meant that some housing stock couldn’t be rebuilt, once demolished.

[rockershovel]

This one popped into my mind... Chiswick High Road, obvious infill building which (according to the proprietors of the shop opposite) had been built on the site of a bomb strike.

 

I was working there in the early 90s, which would have been just about the limits of living memory for that sort of thing - 50-odd years before. The proprietor was selling up and retiring, having run the business since the 1950s

[sb67]

A Mk 1 'doodlebug'- or flying bomb - Silently glided on its decent over the roofes of our block of flats in Deansbrook road, Edgeware and  totally flattened Langley Park, a small private estate just off Bunns Lane, Mill Hill. - I remember it well as it appeared to be heading straight for our bedroom window as my Mother stood there, hands clasped, praying out aloud "Lift it ! Lift it ! Please  God, Lift it ! "  Well, I'm not a religious man, far from it, but I swear someone acted in our favour that night

 

 Anyway, about 65 years on and totally rebuilt, my brother and myself went back there once and, surprisingly, not one of the residents that we spoke to on the estate knew  anything at all about it and some didn't even know what a 'doodlebug' was !

 

Cheers.

 

Allan

Wow, that,s some story Allan, I remember my mum telling me about the V1,s when she lived in various parts of London, she said 'as long as you heard them someone else was going to get' it was a different kettle of fish with the V2's though. I spoke to a guy once who sutvived one and he said he heard a rush of air and then everything got turned upside down!

Steve.

[Arthur]

 

Fifty yards from my Gran’s terraced house in Patricroft, Manchester, there was an end of terrace where the house was missing, just a cleared site.

 

Self inflicted WW2 damage, the house had been nearly demolished when a barrage balloon which had broken free from it’s moorings came down on top of it. Such was the damage the house was flattened and the site remained so until all of the terraces were demolished around 1970.

 

In this particular place the surviving end wall, effectively then the end wall of the terrace, was unsupported. There were none of the heavy supporting timbers, mentioned by Brian above, which were widely seen elsewhere.

 

.

 

.

[peach james]

I think that would be an interesting subject to model. I live in Romford, Essex, an area that had, I believe, quite a bit of bombing during the war and you can still see some evidence. In some places there is row's of semi detached houses interrupted by one or two big detached houses that just look out of place. 

 

Are you sure they weren't just various houses of Chuck, the muddle engineer?  (he went from a row house, to a semi detached, to a fully detached, to a hole in the ground...)

 

If you don't know, it's in the wartime Model Engineers .  And yes, on a more serious note, lots of deaths of civvies.

 

James

[Nearholmer]

Several (all?) of the London main termin were hit at one time or another, and the resultant missing bit at kings cross even got named https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2012/03/14/photos-behind-the-hoardings-of-the-new-kings-cross-station/

 

The London Transport HQ at 55 Broadway, over St James’s Park Station, was also hit and I’ve seen detailed photos of the damage - quite odd looking at the room you work in every day, with the wall blown off. It’s now very hard to pick out the repairs from the original from the outside, but inside there are small differences in fixtures etc.

 

And your story, Mr Downes ...... astonishing. I can’t conceive what it must be like having that as a memory.

 

PS: prefabs? Might a bomb gap in a northern city have been used to accommodate a few, or was that strictly a London thing?

Edited January 26, 2018 by Nearholmer

[PhilJ W]

I think that would be an interesting subject to model. I live in Romford, Essex, an area that had, I believe, quite a bit of bombing during the war and you can still see some evidence. In some places there is row's of semi detached houses interrupted by one or two big detached houses that just look out of place. Turns out that the original houses were flattened during the war , even the flat I used to live in was built on the site of war damaged houses. I only found this out when someone released a book about my local area during the war.

There used to be a pub in London called The One They Left Behind and it was a single ex terrace house on a green in the middle of a load of new buildings that I think was the result of bombing.

Steve.

I was born and brought up in Romford. One particular feature of the mid 30's semis that had near misses was roofs that had received minor damage. The original dark red tiles had been replaced with bright orange tiles giving a patchwork effect. Also in parts of London, near the docks in particular where several adjacent terraced houses had been destroyed prefabs had been put in their place. Also the severed ends of the terrace were often rendered and sometimes still retained the chimneys and fireplaces of the missing house. The house my mother was born in, an Edwardian semi in Dalston, London the other half was destroyed and never rebuilt and is now the access to a block of flats which has taken the street number of the missing house.

[pH]

This is the approach to Gourock station, just about where Gourock No.1 box stood. The modern blocks on the left of this picture were built in the 1950s to replace buildings bombed during the war. The local story was that the blackout sheet on a locomotive had slipped, and the glare from the firebox was spotted - impossible to verify. However, the pier is just to the right of this shot, and at times during the war there were convoy escort vessels tied up 3 and 4 deep along the pier, so a possible target.