There has been a great deal of interest in recent years in the cultural and social history of the bombing threat in the inter-war period, and the subsequent reaction when real bombs began to fall. Adam Page has added to that literature a study that focuses in particular on the architectural response to the perceived threat, since the object of bomb attack was almost exclusively the urban area where the built environment was subject to unpredictable and severe damage. He carries the story on past 1945, which most of the literature does not, to assess the extent to which the wartime experience of bombing affected the way government and planners conceived of the post-war city.
This is an original and thoughtful addition to the existing literature, and a reminder that fear of bombing and bombing itself reflected current perceptions about the potential instability of urban populations facing catastrophe, and the extreme vulnerability of the urban milieu and its many services. Page describes the ‘condition of uncertainty’ (p. 4) that faced urban planners (and air force strategists) when faced with the tension between constructing better functioning future cities and the possibility of their destruction. This was a dilemma even more acute in the post-war nuclear age, where the desire to reconstruct bombed cities using modern town planning concepts jostled with the knowledge that a cluster of nuclear bombs might obliterate what had been carefully planned and rebuilt.
His account of the architectural response is particularly useful, and he is careful to avoid dealing with all the crackpot schemes put forward in the 1930s for underground cities or vast bomb-proof towers. But even more modest proposals were disregarded as too expensive or impractical, and one of the conclusions implicit in this study is how limited was the influence of architects when it came to persuading the authorities to plan imaginatively. Page uses Abercrombie's plan for London as his example, but there were many more, and they might have featured more fully in his account. The one case where planners and government seemed to have converged was the post-war nationalization of the gas and electricity industries (and one assumes the railways too), which were too important as fundamental urban utilities to leave to local chance if bombing ever happened again. Page makes good use, too, of post-war planning documents on the probable effects of nuclear bombing (the imagined ‘war of 1957’), and shows that there developed a symbiosis between the official view of dispersal and city zoning and the town planner's desire to build a more functional, spread-out city, with zones and rings more easily adapted to coping with at least conventional bombing. He might have added the committee set up under the government scientist Solly Zuckerman in 1959, whose brief was literally to explain how to ‘kill a city’.
There are some claims that need to be put more fully into context. At the start of the war, no air force was in a position to launch a bombing offensive, and when they began in 1940 the object was not to obliterate an enemy city in the hope that civil life and civilian morale would collapse, but to pursue specific economic warfare strategies. It was the impossibility of bombing with even the remotest degree of accuracy, given contemporary technology, that made urban raids appear to be random and deliberate destruction. Massive and indiscriminate bombardment was only developed in the end by the RAF, where Bomber Command was told to attack the working-class residential districts with fire to destroy morale and undermine production as workers were killed or ‘dehoused’. This strategic shift reflected the commanders’ views that the working class was a legitimate and vulnerable target, likely to crack under strain. And it is indeed worth stressing that bombing was aimed principally at the industrial working class and their sub-standard, often shoddy residential zones, whose congested streets burned down easily, whether in Hull or Hamburg.
Another point concerns the degree of vulnerability actually displayed by British cities when they were bombed. The pre-war apocalyptic visions, and the wartime literature about bombing, all stressed the utter nature of the destruction and its insupportable effects, yet in reality most of Britain's urban area was not bombed, and even where it was bombed heavily, emergency work on rehabilitation ensured that within months most people could live again in their homes, or at least a familiar street. Damaged utilities were up and running within hours or days and production was dented only very marginally. Page writes about bombing from the perspective of a planner sensing an opportunity once bombs had fallen, but it was the building trade that put much of battered Britain back together, and ironically made it harder to sweep everything away in 1945 and build cities anew. This sense of durability is conveyed very well in Norman Collins’ wartime novel, London Belongs to Me, which illustrates the mundane ways in which very ordinary people came to embrace bombing as something that cities survive.
Page makes the point that his book is not intended as another history of the Blitz, but of a particular set of discourses surrounding the nature of the modern city and its future in an age of permanent threat. He makes the intriguing suggestion that in the current ‘war on terror’ cities are being reconfigured as zones for heightened security, linking the present anxieties with past realities. This is a challenging conclusion, and one that would be well worth developing more fully than Page has room for here.
