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Explore what happened in City of London, London during the Blitz.

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Explore what happened in City of London, London during the Blitz. Discover London during WW2 bombing raids, exploring maps, images and memories. The Bomb Sight web map and mobile app reveals WW2 bomb census maps between 7/10/1940 and 06/06/1941, previously available only by viewing them in the Reading Room of The National Archives.

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The Second World War was a time of major upheaval for children in Britain. Over a million were evacuated from towns and cities and had to adjust to separation from family and friends. Here are 11 ways children were affected by the Second World War.

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KS2 History learning resources for adults, children, parents and teachers organised by topic.

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On Tuesday, the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the second world war, there was a service in St Paul's Cathedral to remember the 3.5 million people, mainly children, who were evacuated to the safety of the countryside from their bomb-threatened cities. I was somewhat surprised to discover that these evacuees were now being portrayed as "forgotten" victims. I had always thought of them as rather lucky, particularly as I, as a baby (and by most standards a very privileged one), had spent much of the war in my parents' flat in St Paul's churchyard, at the heart of the blitz, risking annihilation. The evacuees, I assumed, had escaped from danger and urban squalor to spend the war gambolling gaily across hill and dale, breathing fresh air and eating the fruits of the land.

But, no. That's not how James Roffey, the founder of the Evacuees Reunion Association, which organised the St Paul's event, sees it. The purpose of the service, he said, was to help people understand the truth about the trauma of evacuation. "It's giving us, at long last, recognition," he said. "We never received any certificates or medals - I don't think we expected them - but for years the whole evacuation story has been surrounded by myths. If somebody said to any parent today, 'We're going to evacuate your children; we can't tell you where they're going, we can't tell you who they'll be living with and we don't know when they'll be coming home again,' how many people would say yes to that?"

Well, I would have thought that many people would still say yes to that if the sky was raining bombs and their children's safety was their foremost concern; and it's hard to see why being removed from danger, whatever the disruption to family life, should earn a child a medal. But that said, it is clear from the first-hand accounts published in the media this week that for many children evacuation meant misery and desperate homesickness. And this was often because the British were not always suffused with the warm feelings of national solidarity and goodwill towards each other that are supposed to have characterised the Dunkirk spirit. Snobbery, selfishness, and bloody-mindedness were not, alas, completely extinguished by the Nazi threat.

Michael Aspel, the broadcaster, who was evacuated as a seven-year-old from London to Somerset, recalled the "punch-ups" with local children "who did not want us there at all". Many country people believed that urban children were dirty, lice-ridden and badly behaved, he added. But the worst thing was not knowing how long he was going to be away from home. "It was bewildering and very disturbing," he said. "The fear was that we were never going to go home. A lot of people had a very dark and troubled time."

Aspel himself seems to have stayed relatively cheerful throughout his exile, but take, for example, John Matthews, who was sent with another eight-year-old boy to a large seaside mansion in Devon occupied by a rich widow and her servants. "She refused to come to the door, and the maid who answered, a sour woman dressed in a black-and-white uniform, made it clear that they wanted nothing to do with scruffy urchins from the East End," he said. "The result was that we were kept locked in our bedroom when not at school. We never got any cooked meals. When we complained we were hungry, we were told to consider ourselves lucky - there was a war on." Though his letters home were censored, Matthews managed to smuggle one out to his mother, appealing to her to rescue him. A few days later she turned up and took him away.

My parents were then living between the flat in London, only a short walk from Fleet Street where my father was working, and a large country house in Hertfordshire that my mother had inherited from an aunt. I was born in that house in January 1940, and was subsequently joined there by some 20 children under five years old, evacuees from Wapping. They were all from the Port of London day nursery, which unsurprisingly doesn't exist any more, since it was situated (old photographs show) in a charming house on the north bank of the Thames with spectacular views - now surely the home of a City fat cat.

I have only a fuzzy memory of these children, and that must have been towards the end of the war, when I was four or five years old; but my brother and two sisters, all older than me, have much clearer recollections.

I have asked them whether they resented the presence of these "urchins", and they claim not; though one of my sisters recalls a pervasive smell of urine and says that many of them suffered from ringworm and impetigo, which they passed on to them. The children showed no signs of discontent, as far as my sisters recall, but then they seem to have been pretty well segregated from our family, with separate sleeping quarters, nursery, and eating arrangements.

They were looked after by a uniformed matron and a number of trainee nurses, known as "probationers", from whom most of the trouble seems to have come. One girl set fire to the roof by leaving a cigarette burning in her bedroom, and another upset my mother by canoodling with, and writing a love letter to, my teenage Etonian brother. Most of the time, however, they were offering favours to Canadian soldiers stationed in the neighbourhood in exchange for nylon stockings.

None of us has ever seen any of the evacuees since, and none has sought to get in touch with us. This seems rather sad, but I hope it doesn't mean they were unhappy. My mother was distressed, however, to find at the end of the war some mothers didn't want to have their children back. There was more callousness around than one would like to acknowledge.
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It's time to explode the myth that all children evacuated from the blitz were well treated | Alexander Chancellor

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On Tuesday, the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the second world war, there was a service in St Paul's Cathedral to remember the 3.5 million people, mainly children, who were evacuated to the safety of the countryside from their bomb-threatened cities.

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Gas mask drill at Glasgow primary school

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Children in a primary school class are shown how to fit their gas masks in the event of an air raid. Taken from the film ARP SCHOOLS (1940), which was made to show children how to cope in the event of an air raid. It was filmed at Knightswood Primary, Glasgow.

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Black Saturday; the bombing of London's docks in WWII.

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'Life in an Anderson Shelter during the Blitz of WW2'  written and directed by Jason Gregg

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the Blitz

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The evacuation of children during the Blitz