Single Aspect Blog

St Pauls and the bomb damaged Paternoster Square

Google Earth have had historic images of the UK going back 10 years for sometime but just today I was looking at a street in London and wanted to go back a few years so clicked the history icon and found the screen turning black and white and the image going back to 1945.

https://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/earth/explore/showcase/historical.html

https://mapco.net/bart1908/bart24b.htm

Notice the outline of Paternoster Square in the aerial photograph from 1945 visible in the cleared space of the bomb site and in accordance with the archive map from 1908.

St Pauls survives London firestorm

I’m not sure quite what prompted me to look up Google Earth history on what was the 70th anniversary of the worst night of the Blitz but above is the most famous photograph from that time, linked to the full version.  I can remember my Father, who as a teenager lived in Grays in Essex, telling me how he stood and watched the glow from the fires that night as London burned, a distance of nearly 20 miles.

This is the frontspiece of a book entitled The War in Pictures – Odhams Press Ltd

Full sized image click here

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00d1kd1

It is now possible to view the whole of London as it was in 1945.  Furthermore if you leave the slider on 1945 and zoom out to see Europe, the historic images become apparent as small black and white patches among a sea of green across Europe, you can look at (East) German cities photographed in 1943, for example.