Explosive Revelations

[thom]

If you live in London, you can see if your house was bombed during WW2 on Bombsite.
There's quite a cool map, made by Portsmouth University people using National Archive info.
My flat is in a pre-WW2 building but seems to have had 3 close shaves with High Explosive bombs.

So many important buildings appear to have got off lightly - why were 4 bombs dropped on Duck Island in St James's Park? Did the axis powers have something against the pelicans ?

 

[Night Train]

Looks like three high explosive bombs landed where I used to live in London, and a parachute bomb landed on my secondary school.

 

[deptfordmarmoset]

The house my parents moved into when I was about 10 was built on the site of a bomb, and 2 doors away there was still a bomb site that we used to use as an adventure playground. Come to think of it, the previous home had a bomb site a few doors along which also doubled as an adventure playground from about the age of 5.

 

[dellzeqq]

I always knew no. 40 Carson Road looked out of place.

 

[slowmotion]

Our humble 1880s mid-terrace front wall bulges out alarmingly due to implosion damage from one of Herr Goering's finest, dropped somewhere nearby. It is a magnificant testament to the amazing flexibility of ancient lime mortar, as somebody else wrote on a different thread recently. I suspect that the front wall is entirely un-keyed to the party walls.... but hey!...it's still standing.

Edit: NCP built their amazing property portfolio on bomb sites bought for farthings, I read somewhere.

 

[colly]

All the addresses lived at in London had bombs close by. Interesting to see how many bombs and how wide ranging it was.
I had so much fun as a nipper playing on bomb sites. So many interesting things to find. One place, near the Thames on the Putney side of Chelsea, must have been a museum or some kind of store for a museum because there were hundreds of fossils and fossil fragments.

 

[biggs682]

wow must show to my father as born in london pre war

 

[Drago]

Out here in the sticks there are still bomb craters where the Hun missed town by several miles. There's one spot in the forest where an aircraft must've dumped it's whole load ( there were AA batteries concealed in there so they might've been aiming for them) and it makes for some gnarly riding.

Useless fact - circus elephants were used for logging work in the forest due to lack if manpower and machinery

 

[asterix]

Of course some of the bombs are probably still there

 

[Jefferson Meriwether]

(There were AA batteries concealed in there so they might've been aiming for them.)

Or they might have been aiming for the AAA batteries that were hidden nearby.

 

[asterix]

Or they might have been aiming for the AAA batteries that were hidden nearby.

That jokes a bit flat.

 

[Globalti]

Not very current either...

 

[ianrauk]

Wow... one hit where I currently work, at Greenwich Quay.

 

[thom]

It mostly seems the bombs landed pretty evenly across central London but Hyde Park seems to have had a lot.
I guess there were anti aircraft guns based there ?

 

[ianrauk]

It mostly seems the bombs landed pretty evenly across central London but Hyde Park seems to have had a lot.
I guess there were anti aircraft guns based there ?

I am also surprised that Biggin Hill airport got off very lightly. I would have though the Luftwaffe would have tried to raze the place to the ground.