Recovery and Legacy
All in all, the Luftwaffe targeted London with 71 major raids in 1940 – 1941, and dropped nearly 20,000 tons of bombs on the city. When the Blitz finally ended on May 11th, 1941, over 28,000 Londoners had been killed, and more than 25,000 had been injured seriously enough to require hospital care. Property damage was extensive, and by the time the war ended, over a million and a half Londoners had been made homeless. It took years after the war had ended to fully repair the damage and restore the city to normalcy.
During the war, over 600,000 specially designed stretchers were made for Air Raid Protection (ARP) officers to tote the casualties. Made of steel – the easier to wash them after use or disinfect them in case of gas or biological attacks – they were sturdy, reasonably lightweight, and easy to maintain. When the conflict ended, there was a massive surplus of stretchers, and a massive dearth of resources in a Britain bankrupted by six years of war. Lest the costs sunk into the stretchers be forever lost – the quality of steel was not the most suited for melting and reusing – people cast around for the best means to reuse them.
Looking around London recovering and dusting itself, it was noted that the street railings of many of the city’s housing estates had been removed during the conflict to serve the war effort. Thinking outside the box, somebody had the bright idea of using the surplus ARP stretchers as street railings, by welding them vertically together and affixing them to posts. Thus were born London’s stretcher fences, easily recognizable from their steel wire meshing, and the two indents at the end of each railing, originally designed to raise the stretcher slightly off the ground.
Eight decades later, many London housing estates, particularly in the southern and eastern parts of the city, are still surrounded by those recycled ARP stretcher fences. Hundreds of thousands of Londoners walk past those railings each day, most of them oblivious to their fascinating history. With the passage of time, many of the stretcher fences have degraded, and today are in increasingly poor conditions, leading local authorities to remove and replace them with modern fencing. That prompted some activists to form the Stretcher Railing Society, in a bid to preserve at least some of that historic heritage – among the last tangible legacies of the Blitz.
Today, conservationists hope to raise awareness of the historic fences, raise money to preserve them, and place plaques to inform the public about the living history they walk past every day. As a leading conservationist put it: “I think it would be wonderful if more people knew about them and could engage with them. Anyone who we tell gets really excited and it’s a really fascinating social part of our history. … It’s quite hard to think of physical reminders of the Second World War. It’s extraordinary that they are still here.”
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
British Library – London During the Blitz: A Landscape of Fear and Shadows
Encyclopedia Britannica – The Blitz
Campaign Launched to Save South London Stretcher Fences Once Used to Carry Wounded Civilians in the Blitz – Evening Standard, August 13th, 2017
Eyewitness to History – The London Blitz, 1940
JSTOR Daily, August 20th, 2018 – What Life Was Like During the London Blitz
History Collection – Photographs Depicting British Children During the Blitz of World War II
Mashable – Sleeping in the Underground: Keeping Calm and Carrying On Below the Streets of London
History Extra – The Cruel Cost of The Blitz: How Did Everyday Britons Rebuild Their Lives?