Camberwell Grove in south London is a fine street with some of the best-looking Georgian terraces in the capital. Walking its tree-lined length, admiring the handsome five-storey facades, one can get lost in the 18th-century charm – until, suddenly, the terraces stop and give way to blocks of flats from the 1960s and 1970s.
Then thoughts turn to a very different time. As with so many points in London, these modern blocks are permanent reminders that between 1939 and 1945 the city suffered massive, arbitrary and horrendous bombing attacks.
The borough of Camberwell as it then was (comprising modern-day Camberwell, Peckham and Dulwich) was one of the worst hit areas in the second world war. It suffered especially during the Blitz of 1940 to 1941 and again during the flying bombs campaign from 1944 to 1945, when London was at the mercy of the V1s (or Doodlebugs) and the silent V2s. In total 1,014 Camberwell residents were killed and at least 5,700 seriously injured.
It was quarter past midnight on July 29 1944 when a Doodlebug hit Camberwell Grove. It killed two people, demolished 12 houses and left 20 badly damaged. Imagine being awake in the dark, hearing the low thrum of the rocket’s engine approaching and then those terrifying, silent seconds after the engine cuts and the rocket descends.
Tom Upton knows what it felt like. He has lived in Camberwell all his life and was 16 when war broke out. Unable to join the Air Force because of a medical condition, he worked for Samuel Jones, a local gummed paper factory that produced ammunition information labels during the war. He was living with his mother on one floor of a three-storey house in Peckham when a bomb fell on houses across the street, blowing their own windows out.
“There’s a time between a bomb dropping and exploding. It’s only five or six seconds but it feels like forever. There’s the great thump . . . and then complete silence – the fuse has gone off – then all hell breaks loose.”
Camberwell’s Free Library in Peckham Road, where he practised manoeuvres as a Home Guard, was also hit in the Blitz. “That was a beautiful building – got blown to pieces,” he says.
After the war Upton moved with his mother and stepfather to a different part of Camberwell. “It was a small, old slum house, but we made it look pretty decent. All around us were bomb sites. We were just glad the war was finished. You took things in your stride then.” He particularly remembers people’s generosity, “the way they invited you into their home even though they had nothing. “And, blimey,” he says, “you was grateful for it. I don’t think I thanked them enough for it.”
Rosemarie Ryan was younger than Tom Upton – eight years old – when war broke out. She was living in Limehouse in the East End of London and though she was initially evacuated (luckily so since her house was bombed) she returned to her aunt’s two-bedroom flat in Stepney.
“We never really got frightened – being terrified was more for the grown-ups,” she recalls.
Ryan’s son Terry was born in 1950 and remembers East End bombsites serving as his childhood playgrounds. “It was a strange landscape to be brought up in, but it was fantastic,” he says. “I had a great time.”
It is hard to appreciate how long it took London to recover from the war. The 1950s were years of austerity and much of the major rebuilding we have come to think of as postwar regeneration stems from the 1960s, that heyday of high-rise optimism among the city’s councils. As we now know, badly designed and cheaply built tower blocks were not the right solution for desperately needed social housing. Many have since been redeveloped or are awaiting redevelopment.
Camberwell suffered badly at the hands of the planners and by the mid 1970s things were so bad that Charles McKean used the area as an example of inner-city blight in his 1977 book Fight Blight. He berated the local council for decades of poor planning decisions, poor traffic management and poor strategy. “It is as though the self-respect of the community had finally crumbled after all these combined assaults, like a man ceasing to shave or wash himself.”
Thirty years later, the situation is somewhat improved. The traffic is better managed (though there have been traffic jams at Camberwell Green since the 1940s) and some of the blighted areas McKean pointed to have been redeveloped.
Colin Lowman, an estate agent with Wooster & Stock who worked with the the famously honest estate agent Roy Brooks in the 1960s, is of the opinion that Camberwell has always, and will always, have a cheek-by-jowl quality to it. “Families have been here for 30 years and have no intention of moving out. It’s been an area popular with artists and bohemians for a long time.”
Lowman points out one of Roy Brooks’ infamous advertisements from the 1960s (a selection of which he published in 1985 in a book called Brothel in Pimlico), where the heading was “Coming Up Camberwell”. As a resident for 12 years I can confirm its “coming up” status as perennial. And I admit the property-owning gentrifier within me sometimes feels frustrated that it has never quite “up and come” – but maybe that is part of its charm.
