Wanstead’s WWII bomb census

An online map – Bomb Sight – has been produced which shows the location of every bomb which fell on London during WWII. Backed by the National Archives it has extremely detailed information about the bomb sites down to which street they fell on.

In 2010-11, 70 years after the bombs were falling, we ran the Wansteadium Blitz Project in which we published a note of each bomb which fell on Wanstead on the same date and time as the actual incident. It felt to us a vivid way to notice the extended period of weeks and months that our forebears endured with nightly uncertainty.

The new map makes a different point, demonstrating the sheer number of incidents London saw. It’s definitely worth a look – this link should take you directly to the map of Wanstead.

4 thoughts on “Wanstead’s WWII bomb census”

  1. Looks like Wanstead escaped relatively unscathed – presumably why architecturally it’s so well-preserved compared to other parts of east London/Essex borders.

  2. Perhaps Gordon Road and the High Street and the unexploded bomb found a few years back on Chaucer road were dropped before or after the official Blitz but they are not on the map!

  3. Very interesting. The old Wanstead Hospital chapel which is now the Hermon Hill Synagogue was used as a temporary morgue to accommodate victims of the blitz from the east end of London.

  4. The map is a very useful resource, but it actually only covers a period of eight months in 1940-41. This was the most intense period of the “Blitz”, but there was a further German bombing campaign in 1944 (the “Baby Blitz”) which was followed later in the same year by bombardment with the V1 and V2 “terror weapons”, which continued until the last weeks of the war.

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