The air raids by German Luftwaffe planes on English cities and towns in 1940 and 1941—attacks known collectively and famously as the Blitz—were terrifying, but they failed in their key aim: namely, to ...

"I wrote the poem “London October 3rd 1940” published in a book of poems in 1941 and later the subject of a broadcast alongside poems by Eric Gill and Edith Sitwell." LONDON, OCTOBER 3RD, 1940. A ...

There is only one precedent of a modern democracy besieged under rocket attacks. During the afternoon of September 7, 1940, 348 Nazi bombers appeared over London’s skies. For the next two months, ...

The photographer Ernst Haas captured life at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park and on bustling Shaftsbury Avenue. Anny Shaw speaks to his son, Alex The Austrian photojournalist Ernst Haas (1921-1986) is ...

At 16 I became a despatch rider for the London Fire Brigade. At 17 I was made a Junior Fireman, I was stationed at M.S. 7 Wale Road, South Tottenham N15. I had been on several fires dealing with ...

I wasn’t quite eight when war was declared in September 1939. I don’t remember Mr Chamberlain’s wireless broadcast announcing the imminence of hostilities. Nor any sense of incipient panic at the ...

Flames and smoke billow all around as the unmistakeable shape of St Paul’s Cathedral rises out of this scene from hell. This picture was to become one of the Second World War’s most iconic ­images.

London's Underground System is internationally famous and is the oldest transport system of its kind in the world, opening on January 10, 1863. Not only that, but the tube map is iconic and many ...