Main London Blitz Local Response: Metropolitan London

Wrote Kensington housewife Mrs. Gertrude McMullan to her sister Miss. H. Buckenham during one of the most intensive raids of the main London blitz. Eighteen months previously, just before war was declared, Irene Mary Anderton Naylor (a 41-year-old LCC social worker) recorded in her diary a scene in the same borough which could not have been more contrasting in its tranquillity: “Two of us lunch in Kensington High Street. It is a lovely day and everybody is going about their normal business, wearing summer frocks and looking very calm. By turning first to the local response in the three inner metropolitan London boroughs of Finsbury, Bermondsey, and Kensington one shall be able to see how locality would come to shape the seminal experience of the London blitz.