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Shoreditch Park is a welcome green oasis on the northern edge of the City of London. Most people who use it today have no idea that under the grass lies the physical evidence of an extraordinary story – the story of Britain's darkest and, in the words of Winston Churchill, finest hour.
At the beginning of the 1940s, the area now covered by the park was crammed with terraced houses. And between 7 September 1940, when the Nazis' aerial blitz on London began, and 11 May 1941, when it reached its bloody climax, the sky was swarming with German bombers. The consequences for the people who lived in these terraces were catastrophic. By the time the bombing was over, barely a single house had escaped being damaged; many were completely destroyed.
In the summer of 2005, and again for a shorter period in 2006, archaeologists from the Museum of London carried out a pioneering 'community excavation' to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of the second world war. They were searching for what was left of some of the houses that once stood on the site.
The excavation was pioneering in two senses. First, its target was the sort of ordinary 19th- and 20th-century remains that archaeologists normally dig through to get to the older layers underneath. (Martin Brown, one of the archaeologists working on the project, said he was aware of only one other archaeological excavation that has looked at housing bombed during the second world war.) And second, the dig aimed to involve as many people as possible from the local community, including past and present residents, in exploring buried aspects of their own recent history.
Time Team was present to film the excavation and the finds, to help to uncover the history of the area and to talk to some of the hundreds of people – both young and old – who played a part in this unique archaeological project.
The Shoreditch Park excavation involved three trenches. The main trench was located on the northern side of what had been 31-34 Dorchester Street. Digging revealed that each house comprised a front room, dining room, kitchen and outside washroom and toilet, located in a back yard, with an adjacent back garden. It was possible to interpret where rooms were located, as well as where the coal was kept, doors hung and fires were lit.
At some stage in their history, possibly in the early 20th century, the homes were extended to increase the size of the kitchen and to add the washroom and toilet. Previously the inhabitants used cesspits to dispose of their rubbish and sewage. These cesspits produced fascinating insights into the lives of the residents of Dorchester Street because they contained domestic rubbish from the houses. For instance, they showed that the residents of number 33 enjoyed meals of oysters eaten off blue and white decorated plates, washed down with ginger beer.
The finds from the excavations bring us into direct contact with people from the past. They ranged from pieces of a 16th-century stoneware wine jug, which dated from when rubbish wsa brought from the Tudor city of London to fertilise the fields of Hoxton, to a pair of 1950s' nylon stockings.
Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the items found were war toys, such as a model plane, a lead soldier and a toy gun. These items shed some light on the children who grew up surrounded by the debris of war. In one of the back gardens a skeleton of a catw as found. Amazingly, visitors to the site who had once lived in the houses were able to identify it as 'Blackie, the lodger's cat'.
Roy Stephenson of the Museum of London describes how the Shoreditch Park community excavation project helped to put people in touch with the area's past.
Destroyed by bombing
To mark the 60th Anniversary of the end of the second world war, the Museum of London undertook an archaeological dig at Shoreditch Park, Hackney, in east London. The park was formerly the site of high-density housing. During the war much of it was destroyed in bombing raids. After 1945, in response to a nationwide housing shortage, some of the site was used for temporary 'prefab' houses until the whole site was turned into a community park in the 1980s.
The area was first damaged during the Blitz of 1940-41 by aerial mines and incendiary devices. In 1944-45, Hitler's V1 and V2 rockets also hit the area. By the end of the war some houses were still standing while others were in ruins; the area was not completely cleared until the 1980s.
A new discipline
The study of the archaeology of 19th- and 20th-century London is a relatively new discipline. Traditionally we have used historical records to tell the story of this period, and used archaeology to understand the distant past. Recently, however, it has been recognised that by using archaeological practices, the study of people through the remains of their possessions can help us learn about any historical period.
London in the 19th and 20th centuries was one of the most important cities in the world. Through this dig, carried out as a ‘community excavation’ involving past and present residents of the area, we discovered more about everyday life in London during these historically important periods.
The main excavation
The excavation took place between 4-24 July 2005. The main trench, in theory, covered the area from the pavement to the back gardens/yards of three and a bit properties on the north side of the lost road of Dorchester Street. These properties were known to have been standing, but damaged, post-war and therefore were not likely to have been truncated by prefabs found on other parts of the site.
The excavation revealed the same basic arrangement in each building, consisting of a front parlour and rear dining room. All the remains at the front of the buildings were below floor level, the foundations apparently consisting of rough and ready rubble dumping. There was no clear evidence of the road surface or the pavement. The front of the buildings proved to be quite fruitful in terms of finds, presumably objects that had fallen between the floorboards.
Beyond this arrangement of rooms was the kitchen, with clear signs of drainage and support for a range or hearth. Adjacent to the kitchen, the solid yard surface led to the external washroom and outside toilet. As the excavation progressed it became clear that the kitchen was a later build, and superseded an earlier smaller kitchen and a complex of soakaways and culverts. The rear garden or yard area was clearly used for the disposal of ash from coal fires, but also proved to be an ideal area for later finds.
Other trenches
Two other trenches were dug. One was located to investigate the area associated with the impact of a V2 missile, and the other to look at the fronts of two houses on the south side of Dorchester Street, which on the bomb damage map were shown as being totally destroyed. In fact, the buildings showed signs of having been dismantled and were in a more robust state than those on the north side, possibly because different contractors had erected them in the 1830s.
'Milk came in bottles?'
'Milk came in bottles?' was a question asked by one of the children from local primary schools who visited the site, as they helped wash finds from the dig. Altogether, 700 schoolchildren and large numbers of residents, both past and present, participated in the project, which attracted a wide range of interest. Again and again, people said their eyes had been opened to the historic past of their neighbourhood.
In the words of Neil Cossons, 'Where the historic environment is nurtured and harnessed for good it creates real social and economic benefits offering everybody characterful, desirable and distinctive places to live.' In the environs of Shoreditch Park there is little remaining of the historic environment above the surface but there is now an increased awareness of what was once there and what remains under the grass.
Sixty years after the end of the second world war, the 7/7 terrorist bombings in London – which took place just as the Shoreditch Park community excavation was beginning – gave Londoners a taste of the fear and distress that became a normal part of life in the capital for long periods between 1939 and 1945. Yet even the horrors of that day in July 2005 amount to only a fraction of the devastation that was rained down on London during the Blitz of 1940-1941.
The Nazi bombing of London began in the late afternoon of Saturday 7 September 1940. In the next nine hours, 348 German bombers escorted by 617 fighters dropped 600 tonnes of high explosives on the docks and East End. The planes formed a 20-mile wide block of aircraft filling 800 square miles of sky. By the next morning, 448 Londoners were dead.
And that was just the start. There followed 57 consecutive nights of relentless aerial bombardment. The only respite came when the Germans began to turn their attention to other British towns and cities too. On the night of 14-15 November, for example, 449 German bombers dropped 1,400 high explosive bombs and 100,000 incendiary bombs on Coventry, destroying 50,000 buildings, killing 568 people and seriously injuring over 1,000 more.
The incendiaries created terrible firestorms, with fierce winds sucking in air and fanning huge sheets of flame. On the night of 29-30 December, a devastating attack on London created a massive firestorm around St Paul's Cathedral. The image of the cathedral surrounded by flames and dark smoke immediately became a potent symbol of London's battle for survival.
The worst individual bombing incident of the Blitz occurred when an air raid shelter in a school in West Ham sustained a direct hit. Four hundred and fifty people were killed. The worst night of the Blitz was on 10-11 May 1941, when the German air force, the Luftwaffe, carried out one of the biggest raids of the war, leaving more than 3,000 people dead. It was, however, the Nazis' parting shot as the Luftwaffe was then transferred to eastern Europe in preparation for Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union.
In all, more than 20,000 Londoners lost their lives during the Blitz. In the country as a whole, 18,629 men, 16,201 women, and 5,028 children were killed, together with 695 others who bodies could not be identified. Up to the end of 1941, more British civilians had been killed on the home front than British soldiers on the battlefield.
There have been scores of books published about the London Blitz and the experiences of the people who lived through it. This is a selection of some of the most recent ones.
Forgotten voices of the Blitz and the Battle of Britain: a new history in the words of the men and women on both sides by Joshua Levine (Ebury Press, 2006) hardback £19.99.
Drawing material from the Imperial War Museum's extensive aural archive, Joshua Levine brings together voices from both sides of the Blitz and the Battle of Britain to give us a unique, complete and compelling picture of this turbulent time. With first-hand testimonies from those involved, from 'Black Saturday' on 7 September 1940, when the Luftwaffe began the Blitz, to its climax on 10 May 1941, this is the definitive oral history of a period when Britain came closer to being overwhelmed by the enemy than at any other time.
Get this book >
World's End: a memoir of a Blitz childhood by Donald James Wheal (Century, 2005) hardback £12.99.
Best-selling author Donald James grew up in World's End, Chelsea, during the Blitz years. Just on the edge of a fashionable middle class world, his childhood experience was in stark contrast to the privileged, bourgeois lifestyle glimpsed a few hundred yards away. Yet though it was hard, Donald's was a happy childhood until the war came. Soon his world would be torn apart, however, by school drills with gas masks and evacuation plans, evacuation itself then an uneasy return to London just as the Blitz itself began and the nights were spent in terror as bombs rained down.
Get this book >
The longest night: voices from the London Blitz by Gavin Mortimer (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005) hardback £18.99.
Gavin Mortimer's account of the bloodiest night of the London Blitz, as it reached its violent conclusion on 10-11 May 1941, assembles a mountain of material and interviews with scores of survivors in a gripping and exhaustive account.
Get this book >
Blitz: the story of 29th December 1940 by M J Gaskin (Faber and Faber, 2005) hardback £16.99.
The image of St Paul's on the night of 29 December amid clouds of black smoke immediately became the ultimate symbol of Britain's Blitz defiance. But the reality of this 'Second Great Fire of London', in all its unprecedented destruction and indomitable humanity, is almost lost amid myth and counter-myth. In this vivid and immediate work of historical storytelling, Margaret Gaskin tells the true story of London's desperate hours.
Get this book >
Channel 4 is not responsible for the content of third-party sites.
Shoreditch Park community excavation report
www.molas.org.uk/projects/annualReviews.asp?aryear=2005&guid=29
This site report, by Ros Aitken and Faye Simpson, is extracted from the Museum of London Archaeology Service (MoLAS) Annual Review 2005. It provides a short account of the excavation carried out by MoLAS during the summer of 2005.
A brief update on the further small excavation carried out in August 2006 can be found here.
24 Hour Museum
www.24hourmuseum.org.uk
The 24 Hour Museum is the official guide to over 3,000 museums, galleries and heritage sites in the UK, providing news, listings and features. These are two of their reports on the Shoreditch Park excavation:
Local children muck in to dig up WWII bomb site in London park by David Prudames
National archaeology week: digging the past with David Lammy by Richard Moss
Remembering the Blitz
www.museumoflondon.org.uk/archive/exhibits/blitz
This online exhibition looks at what it was like to live through the Blitz in London and at how we remember it now. It incorporates a wide range of personal stories and memories, photographs, artwork, facts, figures, background information and reproductions of objects from museums and other sources. Between 7 September 2000 and 11 May 2001 – exactly 60 years afterwards – visitors to the online exhibition were invited to contribute their own memories. Those memories now form part of the exhibition itself.
Imperial War Museum
http://london.iwm.org.uk
The Imperial War Museum website contains a wealth of information about all aspects of war, including its impact on civilians, the home front during the second world war and the London Blitz. The museum's permanent 'Blitz Experience' exhibition is a carefully researched reconstruction of an air raid shelter and a blitzed street in 1940. Appropriate sights, sounds and smells evoke for visitors a sensation of being caught in the bombing of London during the Second World War. Special school visits can be arranged to the Blitz Experience and the website provides teaching packs and other resources.
Eyewitness to History: the London Blitz, 1940
www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/blitz.htm
Ernie Pyle was one of the second world war's most popular correspondents. His journalism was characterised by a focus on the common soldier interspersed with sympathy, sensitivity and humor. He witnessed the war in Europe from the Battle of Britain through the invasion of France. In 1945, he accepted assignment to the Pacific and was killed during the battle for Okinawa. In an article reproduced on the Eyewitness to History website he describes a night raid on London in 1940.