January 1941, and craters scarred the cobbled streets of Maze Hill like a beach scooped by toddlers’ artless hands. The tramway that carries bleary war workers to Woolwich was an abstracted mass of twisted metal. A few nights earlier, a Messerschmitt flew so low along the length of the Thames at Greenwich that its fuselage could be seen above: yellow with a black cross.
Siemens typist Iris Bryce was more preoccupied with attending dances in New Cross than by the air-raid sirens that shrieked, most nights, into the fathomless blackout sky. As she recorded in her 1995 memoir Remember Greenwich, Bryce had been at a dance at Charlton Dance Hall on the first night of bombing with a gangly, Brylcreemed boy called Jim. It had been a dream: Iris’s silver-slippered feet clicking the perfect heel turn of a slow foxtrot as Jim held her close. Later, despite the ominous drone of approaching aircraft, the giggling couple tripped over sandbags and shared a kiss before Iris descended into the damp Woodland Grove air-raid shelter and Jim hared to safety down the old Trafalgar Road.
That night, 250kg of incendiary thermite fell on Tyler Street, one of three high explosives that pummelled Maze Hill’s tight cross-hatch of Victorian streets during the Blitz, razing half of the neighbourhood’s dwellings. She lived in a two-bedroom back-to-back rental on nearby Woodland Grove with her parents, older sister Daisy and brother Fred. Oil cloths dressed the floor, skinned rabbits sat in enamel bowls for tea and Iris’s parents were too stingy to electrify more than one socket in a house rented from the board. Her house was swept away for a block of council flats in the 1960s that are now a favoured spot for fly-tippers.
I live on a nearby rank of similar Victorian terraces that survived the war. From the 1840s to the 1940s they were home to generations of Irises and their families: manual labourers, women piece workers, the naval wounded and their many lodgers, squeezing ten-plus bodies into two-bedroom dwellings. Today, the character cottages are catnip for the middle classes. We have bought and extended them: L-extensions in the 80s, 1990s side returns, loft conversions and, for my generation, ugly top-floor box extensions to wring an extra 100 feet out of our 900-feet floorplans. In 2021, one of these modestly-sized terraced homes, flipped by a toothy young couple from the shires, sold for £1.1 million. Like so much about London’s overheated housing market, it’s a case of lipstick on a city mouse.
In the centre of the street, where two Blitz bombs landed, it’s a different story. Here, like an angry red eruption, sits a 1970s housing estate rendered in orange brick, dominated by a vast car park that recently saw an arson attack on a tradesman’s van in the retaliative volley of a drugs turf war. Many of these homes are occupied by elderly council residents who moved in when the homes were new; though one in three entered private ownership under Thatcher’s Right to Buy. A handful of the latter are now colonised by the middle classes, who rip out their large airing cupboards and knock the rooms through into sunlit walk-through spaces as older neighbours gripe. But, for these few incursions, it’s largely a tale of two streets: an invisible class line occupying the craterline where the bombs fell.
Historian David Ramzan, 69, is the author of many books, including Greenwich at Work. He grew up in the 1960s on Old Woolwich Road, a five-minute walk from Iris and I. Ramzan’s mum and dad and grandparents all lived on that road, as was common in working class communities in the 1960s. Two high-explosive bombs fell on the street during the 1940–41 Luftwaffe campaign.
‘They had a big crater in their back garden from the bombs, which they filled with cement,’ he recalls. ‘The back of my parents’ house was also blown off by an impact but they’d got sick of going down the shelter by then and were just sitting at the table having their tea when a bomb blasted their windows out.’
Ramzan remembers a childhood enlivened by the adventure playgrounds of Greenwich’s numerous bombsites, where purple buddleia bloomed amid wobbling turrets, dust and bricks. There was a rubble site on Ramzan’s street and, best of all, a site just off Blackwall Lane where the walls of the bombed houses still partially stood. A seven-year-old Ramzan and his mates would make a camp with an old piece of door mounted on two walls, light campfires and snack on the food they had pocketed from home. One of Ramzan’s schoolmates fell through what was formerly the first four landing of one of the bombed-out buildings and came into school one day with a broken arm. There was little in the way of health and safety on the old bombsites back in the 1960s,’ Ramzan laughs. ‘These days, they’d be all fenced off.’
