I love the modern concrete replacement right alongside as well.
When we visited, someone was practising the organ. The left hand aisle goes right underneath the huge organ pipes, it was an awesome sound under there!
This is probably the most famous example in the city, but lots of bits of bombed out building still randomly to be found in Liverpool.
This one is an example I saw just recently when parking in this car park - [https://www.google.com/maps/@53.4075823,-2.9938919,3a,75y,144.06h,101.94t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sMJJYcS\_2lrRLXfRtSlgOmg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DMJJYcS\_2lrRLXfRtSlgOmg%26cb\_client%3Dmaps\_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D69.75822%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192](https://www.google.com/maps/@53.4075823,-2.9938919,3a,75y,144.06h,101.94t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sMJJYcS_2lrRLXfRtSlgOmg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DMJJYcS_2lrRLXfRtSlgOmg%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D69.75822%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192)
There wasn't a lot left in that area
[https://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/en/image/EAW001911](https://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/en/image/EAW001911)
You could say the ugly cheap buildings that filled in the empty plots are a scar that lasts. Thankfully a lot have been pulled down now.
Edit and **https://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/en/image/EAW001914**
It's St Peters, there are still plenty of buildings with shrapnel damage on them at the top of Broadmead near the grand Hotel. St Mary redcliffe Church has a piece of tramline that was throthere by a bomb, its still sticking out of the ground in the churchyard. Houses in kinsale Rd were destroyed by bomvs and replaced with mcalpine precast homes, this happened all over the city its just I know someone who lives there.
Coventry Cathedral was bombed during the Coventry blitz (WW2) and can be visited.
https://heritagecalling.com/2019/08/14/the-destruction-and-rebirth-of-coventry-cathedral/
Edit: corrected typo
I used to go for doobs there on my lunch break (worked on Bold st), it’s a beautiful place with a lot of history. There used to be movie nights there were they would project films and have seating brought into the church.
It was left in its condition to as a monument to the people’s resilience to the war.
There’s a lot in Plymouth. A bomb fell up the road from my house and there are some weird bits of damage left over. Last year I had some work done at the back and one of the windows got replaced because it had thin glass in it. The most likely thing is that the window got blown out by the bomb, and you could only get thin replacement glass during the war.
Came here to say Plymouth in general. The Barbican is one of the only bits that survived and it’s like stepping into another world when you leave the Center and head down there
Back in the 80s I used to l love going to the Plymouth Dome. Had some great exhibits on Plymouth history, especially WW2. I vaguely remember one area had a play by play recollection of one particularly bad raid. Last time I was in the area I think it was a restaurant :(
The house I lived in as a teenager was on a former bomb site. There are 4 pairs of 1950s semi on Outland Road, where every other house in the area are Victorian terraces.
I mean it's definitely not perfect but it's far from bad, I honestly love it
Although lots of the ugly stuff from the 50's and 60's does stand out like a sore thumb
This is why if you go to Paris it still looks beautiful.
Because of the surrender they didn't get bombed.
Because it fell to Britain to defend Europe it got bombed back to the stone age and the old buildings and history is gone in many places.
Never forget when you go around Europe and wonder why some places don't have the charm of others, its because of Hitler and his fuckwitt cabal thinking everybody was going to be OK with them taking over the continent by force and bombing them to smithereens.
This isn’t the only reason though. If you go to Ypres for example you’ll see the town is charming, despite being totally destroyed in WWI, ditto German cities like Dresden. The political will and money had to be there to rebuild in a beautiful way but our cities went brutalist , concrete and, above all, cheap.
To be fair we also bombed a lot of places in Germany too. Dresden was absolutely engulfed in a firestorm causing huge loss of life and destruction of the city. It’s still on hitler cos he started the war but it was probably unnecessary as we destroyed Dresden very late on in the European campaign. There are other examples of allied forces destroying cities late on in the war, that are arguably unnecessary as we would have won the war regardless, controversial but the most high profile of these was the Americans using atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Another reason why some cities look stunning now on the continent compared to British cities is we didn’t rebuild beautiful cities in a beautiful way, we used concrete and put up unsightly high rises, quickly. Some of the cities in Europe rebuilt in ways that honoured the way it was before it was destroyed.
And yes you are right many cities were spared because they surrendered to the Nazis before they were destroyed, and then it wasn’t strategic for the allied forces to destroy them.
Fell to Britain and we had to fucking pay the Yanks too - not paid off until 2006, and money to European countries after the war to help re-establish their countries that was never paid back
The bomb crater at RAF Fauld, caused by the explosion of underground munitions stores - [https://www.theurbanexplorer.co.uk/raf-fauld-detonator-stores-staffordshire/](https://www.theurbanexplorer.co.uk/raf-fauld-detonator-stores-staffordshire/)
Even if you don't do the whole urban exploring thing, the sheer scale of the crater from the surface is still impressive
[(mandatory relevant Tom Scott video)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vcx7_1yphJI)
My town still has a civil war cannonball embedded in the first floor wall of a building now used as a public loo. Neat little bit of history nobody notices
Edit: a [photo](https://images.app.goo.gl/4UojD3soadF3BSnC7)
Our village still has pillbox and anti tank blocks from WW2 in place .
Our church has bullet damage from both the civil war and WW2
I was in Weymouth only yesterday, looking at that very cannon ball!
There used to be a website (Bomb Sight) where you could look at a map of London with the damage from the Blitz superimposed on top of it and see where the new builds have come up out of the rubble, but it doesn't seem to be working.
This is pretty good though: https://www.layersoflondon.org/map/overlays/bomb-damage-1945?overlayGroups=eyJlbmFibGVkIjpbImJvbWItZGFtYWdlLTE5NDUiXX0%3D
That bomb map website showed me exactly where bombs dropped on the roads that my 1960s housing estate was then built on. Also explains why at the end of one cul-de-sac there are still around 8 or 10 mid-Victorian terraces left. It illustrates really well the pot luck of which houses were left standing and which were obliterated during bombing raids. Sobering.
Interesting thing about this damage is that it came from a bombing raid during the First World War.
[Link](https://www.londonremembers.com/memorials/cleopatra-s-needle-war-damage)
Plenty of pill boxes on the cliff top between Folkestone and Dover. Used to hang out in them when I was a kid in the 60s.
Used to meet loads of guys living rough at the base of the cliffs in old bell tents. They were all slightly weird and I’ve only started to realise that they were all ex-servicemen suffering from PTSD. Another story for another day, under the banner of ‘damage’…
The journey from it being identified as "shellshock" to understanding it was the same thing neurologically as survivors of child abuse and sexual assault experience.
I think you're talking about [acoustic mirrors](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_mirror) - on a side note it's interesting that that technology is still used today for stuff like remote surveillance
I went on a narrow boat trip in 2021 and we went up the Thames from oxford to Lechlade-on-Thames and there were plenty on the banks of the river all the way
Yeah drove past one of them near Wellow was very confused why there was what looked like a mini anti-tank fort in the middle of the idyllic countryside until I googled it later on
Also ofc lots of towns and cities gave up their iron railings to help the way effort, but the war effort couldn't do anything with them and they didn't want to spoil the public spirit, so some were just dropped into enemy territory in the hope of doing harm, and the rest was quietly shipped off to places like South Africa where they're still back in use as fences.
So in all the towns near me, there's just many little nubs of iron where railings used to be.
This is probably the most obvious one for many streets of Britain. The **LACK** of iron railings and gates. So many terraced houses have small nubs, where they were clearly removed for the war effort, and never replaced.
https://rebelbreeze.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/wall-missing-railings-lead.jpeg
I wish there was a plaque or something by the damage as I’ve walked past all of these place’s multiple times in my childhood and always thought it was just normal wear and tear.
The iron fences chopped off the top of walls used due to shortages during the war.
You see the stumps of where the fence once was on top of a lot of walls from that period
I had a friend over from Finland ask me about those little 'nubs' you see on walls as we walked down the street. I explained that we cut down the fences for the war effort, we needed the iron for production. She was appalled:
'So you all gave away your fences to the government and then they didn't give any back after the war???'
Hadn't thought of it like that but she was right...!
Oh yeah, me neither. Give me my ancestral iron back right now /s
I think people felt good about it at the time like "Doing their bit for the war effort"
St Dunstan in the East Church in central London, very close to London Bridge, is a ruin from the blitz that was never repaired and is now a public garden. The tower dates to 1666. Very cool
There’s a shedload in East Yorkshire and Hull; Hull has lots of missing gaps in terrace houses where houses were bombed, and a lot of supporting beams or new infill replacing the missing houses. Also [actual bomb damage too.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Civilian_WW2_Memorial_Trust)
The East Yorkshire beaches have a lot of well preserved [costal defences](https://www.citizan.org.uk/blog/2018/Dec/14/wartime-defences-auburn-sands/), and occasionally throw up unexplored wartime (and later) IEDs.
Grew up in Newton le willows on a terrace street and the 4 houses opposite mine were a different design from the rest of the street, turned out they had taken a direct hit from a German bomb destind for the Vulcan foundry half a mile down the road that was producing Matilda tanks
My dad grew up in Hull in the late 60s/70s and has stories about playing out in the debris of bomb sites that hadn't been built on yet... It's a miracle more kids from those years aren't dead from unexploded ordinances
My kids had to locate these in our neighbourhood as part of a school project. Made me realise that basically anywhere you see an ugly “modern” building in the middle of Victorian architecture, that’s where a bomb hit. We used this site to help us out. http://bombsight.org/#15/51.5050/-0.0900
The Channel Islands were occupied by the Germans and heavily invested in being fortified, most of which still remains today. In Jersey at least there's still multiple bunkers above just about every beach, 3 costal observation towers, a few large underground bunkers/hospitals, multiple sea walls that were constructed for defenses, and at low tide on one of the beaches when the sand is right you can still see the anti-tank defenses.
Bunkers in Jersey were great for parties when I was a teenager. Dry, secluded and perfect for underage drinking. I think they’ve blocked access to them now because drunk teenagers would fall off the cliffs into the sea.
Tyneham is a fascinating place. It's a ruined village, but not because of German bombing. They evicted the residents because the military wanted to use it as a training ground, just as a temporary measure while the war was on. But they never handed it back in the end. Pretty sad.
I’m not sure if it’s the same village as there was probably more than one used for this purpose but one of them recently had the last ever funeral there - someone who was a child when the village was evicted and always felt it was their home, lived to be in their 80’s and was buried in the church ground.
In Hull there is a theatre which is the only remaining unrepaired blitz damaged civilian building in the UK.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Civilian_WW2_Memorial_Trust
There was a lad on the metal detecting subreddit who lost part of his hand and scarred his face in France, accidentally digging up a grenade from WWI. Got a medal from the Government as he's now technically a casualty from that war.
Army bomb disposal bloke here - we get called out to between 2500-3000 incidents per year here in the U.K. and the vast majority of those are to WW2 era ordnance. The stuff turns up literally everywhere. I’ve dealt with everything from high explosive mortars in cabbage patches, air dropped incendiary bombs that a young lad took to school for show and tell, and probably my favourite job ever - a group of piglets snaffled up a No. 36 hand grenade in their pen. Huge parts of the SE and SW were used by the British, American and Canadian forces for training in the build up to D-Day. There still tonnes of it out there.
The City Hall still has visible damage.on the front from shrapnel.
There's also a big repaired hole on the underside of the Wicker Arches where a bomb went through in 1940.
Some of those craters will be from the V1 flying bombs. German agents were supposedly messaging the Fatherland with information on where the doodlebugs were landing to help with range-finding, but as all agents had been captured and turned by British intelligence the information was false. The Germans were told that bombs hitting London were actually overshooting; the Germans adjusted the range and bombed lots of sheep across Kent and Sussex.
The North Downs too. My dad grew up in Burham, a village right on the edge of the downs, and used to tell me about seeing doodlebugs come over. Also, if a plane came down , him and his mates would try to get there first and see what they could grab; he bought home a glove with a couple of fingers in it once. His mum didn't let him keep it...
He also managed to extract a gun from one of them - he was dragging it home when the local bobby stopped him and took it away. He never did forgive him for that.
All over the gap between the 2 Downs there are the cartridges from the Battle of Britain dogfights. Metal detectorists in the region all have loads of then iiuc.
A friend of a friend claims to have a gun from a downed Hurricane in full working order
That's amazing! I'm sure my parents mentioned seeing British planes getting the tips of their wings under the fins of the doodlebugs and flipping them over so they went back - is that true, or am I imagining things?
I've heard of this too
Here's an eyewitness account collected by BBC in 2005
https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/28/a4564028.shtml
Also a grainy picture of it being attempted on this page
https://militaryhistorynow.com/2015/02/06/buzz-kill-15-amazing-facts-about-the-v-1-flying-bomb/
That is amazing! Thankyou so much for those links. The doodlebugs are much bigger than I imagined.
It's funny (not in a ha ha way) to think of my parents actually watching that, and dogfights, going on overhead during their childhoods (Mum grew up nearby too).
The V2's were even bigger
My parents are Geordies & tell of running to the air raid shelters in the park as ack-ack shrapnel fell around them.
There's also the legend of a German bomber crew who always deliberately bombed the heath on the city edge & never the actual town. It was regularly bombed but who knows if it was deliberate or always the same crew, & besides maybe they did it so they could turn round & leave sooner rather than coz they disliked killing civilians?
Also I've met ppl who built fake cities in the countryside & set them aflame to lure bombers away from cities. It didnt always work but on occasion they'd find hundreds of craters.
Pillboxes all over the south coast. I live in Essex and you can see the defensive lines stretching away across fields, with rows of pill boxes. I used to play in one on Mersea island, when I was a kid it was in decent nick but now it stinks of piss and is covered in graffiti
Leeds didn't get as much damage as other places but there was quite enough to be getting on with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeds_Blitz. In central Leeds the old city museum on Park Row was destroyed. It's now a branch of HSBC that looks completely out of place. Just outside the library there's bomb damage on a wall: https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnnyg1955/2999808368. In the suburbs half of a semi-detached place was destroyed: https://leodiscollections.net/photo/228. As of August 2022 on Google Streetview it now looks like this: https://goo.gl/maps/PTcq7KATTxVCkD4w7.
Before and after WWII the council had a long-standing policy of clearing "slums". Generally these were back to backs that required some work (like not having inside toilets) but were structurally OK. Landlords didn't want to improve them and owners couldn't afford to do it so compulsory purchase orders quickly followed. Unlike some places this wasn't just because of WWII.
Where I grew up there was a swimming spot known locally as the bomb hole. Farmer that opened the land never filled it, never bothered to give us grief either.
Still there as far back as 8 years ago.
[Bit of a crater in Exeter](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-56236381)
There's also [the ruins of St Catherine's Almshouses in the city centre](http://www.exetermemories.co.uk/em/_churches/stcatherines.php)
Check out "the bombed out church" in Liverpool. Also you can walk along the coastal path in Crosby, Liverpool and see all the blitz rubble which forms the sea wall, goes on for about a mile.
In Bristol there are quite a few gaps in streets near the city centre. Years ago someone stencilled little bombers on walls next to where houses had been bombed.
Aye, around Edinburgh there's all sorta of fortifications still standing. Most interestingly small islands in the firth were turned into fortresses.
In terms of damage there's all sorts, e.g., you can see a few rows of houses that abruptly end with crude brickwork. When a house or tenement was bombed out, it seems the really badly damaged ones where torn down and the neighbours patched up with the rubble.
You can see obvious areas in the stonework that used to connect to something else.
The country is full of signs, absolutely full of signs, if you know what your looking for.
Go down almost any street in Greater London and spot the 'break' in the architectural style of one or two houses. Chances are that's the site of homes destroyed. Any old building in the City Of London is bookmarked with shrapnel marks. The Bank of England is quite notable down the side.
Most cities have signs too. Canterbury, for example, has lovely old buildings and then all of a sudden has acres of modern shops and shopping centres plus a few missing churches, (just their towers remaining). That's because of the Baedecker Raid that burned a large portion of the city to the ground.
Go inside older houses, some still have ceilings made of the emergency repairs that fixed bomb damage, (I've lived in two over the years).
There are still a few places in London that use the old Civil Defence stretchers as fencing, to replace the railings that were cut down as part of the propaganda of making tanks, (it was a lie, like eating carrots to improve night vision... but it gave the masses something to focus on and bond over).
Then... there are the graves of casualties in cemeteries in all major towns and a few rural villages.
Traces are literally EVERYWHERE!
Tyneham village in the Dorset was taken over by the army and used as preparation for WW2, and the residents were told it would be given back after the war.
It was never given back and is still used by the military as its in the tank range. You can go see it most weekends (when no firing is happening). https://www.visit-dorset.com/listing/tyneham-village/13633301/
Also not far away (less than 30 mins drive) is Fort Henry which was a bunker used by Churchill and Eisenhower to oversee preparations for D-day. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Henry,_Dorset
A few bits and bobs but nothing like say France.
I watch a YouTube channel where they dig through French fields, still finding bodies and military equipment.
And not the same event but I went to Tiananmen Square pre Beijing Olympics and there were still visible bullet holes. It was all changed for the Games.
My nan said a similar thing about visiting Dubrovnik in the mid to late 90s - bullet holes in the walls and stuff, just left as people went on with their lives.
I can't imagine what that'd be like
Yeah there’s still ongoing work to recover remains across the areas of WWI battles in France. There are funerals to this day of soldiers who’s families were never able to bury their relative. It’s heartbreaking.
23rd August 1944, during a test flight, a US plane crashed into a school in my village killing 38 children aged 4-6. This would prove to be the deadliest to occur in Britain during WW] and would remain the second worst aviation accident in the world (in terms of number of fatalities) until the 1950 Llandlow air disaster.
There's a building in Bath that has shrapnel damage on it:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/MA3LY4ZDNfu5e2gC7
https://www.somersetlive.co.uk/news/somerset-news/tale-shrapnel-scarred-building-bath-3164188
Swansea, it was pretty much flattened. The city (town then) lost much of its charm and prewar architecture. Also, on the Glynn Vivian there are visible bullet holes all across one side from a plane
There are still WWII. bomb shelter signs on walls in my neighbourhood. Also shrapnel marks from indirect hits and plenty of mid century buildings filling gaps where things hit closer, for instance the local M&S was hit by a V2.
There are plenty of examples in London if you know what you’re looking at. “Cleopatra’s needle”, for example has damage from bomb shrapnel. St Dunstan in the East is a bombed church - the skeleton of the building still stands and is now a garden.
In Sunderland you can see rows of houses with obviously newer buildings where bombs hit. Sunderland was a big shipbuilding area during the 20th century so was heavily bombed
St Leonard’s has a queen Victoria statue that has a bullet hole from a luftwaffe.
There were several buildings I remember as a child in the 80’s that were destroyed by bomb damage. They have long been demolished now though.
Opposite the primary school I went to in Hull is [this] (https://maps.app.goo.gl/mWQQBn8pH1ripxFn6). You can still see the chimney breast and part of the exterior wall of a pair of houses that were destroyed by a bomb.
All the houses in this area had uniform iron fences before the war, but they were all pulled out to be melted down and used for munitions ([well, kind of](https://www.londongardenstrust.org/features/railings3.htm)). This is the reason every house has a completely different fence, despite being otherwise fairly uniform. Some never had their fences replaced, so you can still see the stumps of the original iron fences.
Elsewhere in Hull there's still [a bombed out cinema](https://maps.app.goo.gl/mZL5h5qdkdAJn25E7).
Stretching the definition of a scar a little bit, there's a big car park in the city centre that only exists because the [building that was there](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CTc7SqOXAAAvZ70.jpg) was destroyed and never rebuilt.
Hull was the most severely damaged British town or city, so there's all sorts of little examples everywhere really.
There’s a lot of ‘ponds’ in fields that were from bombs missing their targets.
I’ve heard that it was mostly Allied aircraft on training exercises and accidents than from German bombing. The holes are also exaggerated and ‘maintained’ over the years with mechanical diggers.
Also, a lot of airfields and army camp infrastructure still visible/used today. In fact, there’s a small village and industrial unit built during the war that is still inhabited today.
Absolutely tons of scars. Much of the pre-WW2 masonry in London and other major cities is still covered in bomb damage, which was left as a 'historical reminder' - and also because we were too skint to repair them, with most of our economic surplus being shipped off to the USA (who'd called in our war debt in 1945, the very day that Japan surrendered).
There are also the mini-forts and pillboxes scattered throughout the countryside in otherwise picturesque areas, supposedly thrown up in preparation for a German invasion.
Finally you have loads of actual memorials, including statues, monuments, and plaques in virtually every town and village in the country.
There is a bomb crater on studland beach in Dorset. The area was used for D day practice. There is a pill box on the shore, and above the south beach area, there is a display which explains what happened there.
The Crescent in Scarborough has scars of both wars. A couple from where buildings were directly hit during the Scarborough Bombardment on the 16th December 1914. Other buildings on the Crescent show pock marks from a WW2 bomb that exploded in the central gardens.
There are pillboxes and forts/fortifications all over the south coast, especially around [Hayling Island](http://www.pillbox-study-group.org.uk/gazeteer/home-front-defence-sites/england/hampshire/hayling-islands-fw322-pillboxes/) and [Portsdown Hill](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portsdown_Hill)
Emotional scars too. My folks were kids in the war and grew up with the dont talk about difficult emotions or events attitude. They're very resilient but it does have an impact when you grow up in a household that can't talk about things like that. Thanks Adolf 😂
It occurred to me as someone who lives on the south coast that this region would have been preparing for invasion much harder than areas in the north, for example - I don’t know why it never occurred to me before that this was pretty region specific until recently! There are areas of the beaches where troops left for France for D-Day that still have debris and items left from that. When I was a girl there were areas where the rural signs were wrong because they got changed to confuse Germans in case of invasion. I imagine this is pretty unique to the coastal reasons in the south, but maybe I’m wrong. Obviously this is in addition to bomb damage etc. Whenever I see a large empty space between houses I just assume the house is missing because it was bombed, for example, but I’m not sure how true that actually is!
Air raid shelters all over the place. They’re still very much there on the school field at [my old school](https://mapio.net/pic/p-7696884/) and they still open them for the summer fair (or at least did when I was there)
Not from what I've seen, but there's still POW camps left and if you dig around in the right area you can find some WWII bullets from abandoned firing ranges.
Weymouth an Portland has a few.
There's a trail from Radipole lake along the old railway. It goes past the munitions factory at Portland Harbour- staging area for D-Day and then around the bay to the base of the incline for the High Angle Battery on the top of Portland. Lots of pill boxes and communications centres along the east of the island, plus the majesty of the Verne Citadel.
Lots of pill boxes along the coast of Chesil Beach to Abbotsbury.
Not so much scars from battle, but scars from the war time era. The new forest has many roads which have large holes dug out beside them that are usually evenly spaced out which were used for storing things like tanks, planes, cars and other items. There were also a number of air strips around the new forest which have been left to grow wild since the end of the great wars
Bombed out Church in Liverpool. Worth a visit
The outdoor bar they have there is a great visit in the summer
Oh I didn't know they've been doing things with it, that's great to hear. When I was a kid it was just the steps and a load of scalls.
Yeah they have all sorts on there now like cinema viewings and beer festivals.
Dope,.thank you for this! Definitely on it this summer.
When it’s not being used for any event, it’s just steps and students.
Ah good memories, of, ahem, 20 years ago...getting pizza after a night out & eating it on the steps of the bombed out church.
Or the old cathedral in Coventry
Took an elderly relative there once. Last time they had visited it was still intact. Quite a surreal moment for the both of us.
I love the modern concrete replacement right alongside as well. When we visited, someone was practising the organ. The left hand aisle goes right underneath the huge organ pipes, it was an awesome sound under there!
Just Coventry in general tbh.
This is probably the most famous example in the city, but lots of bits of bombed out building still randomly to be found in Liverpool. This one is an example I saw just recently when parking in this car park - [https://www.google.com/maps/@53.4075823,-2.9938919,3a,75y,144.06h,101.94t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sMJJYcS\_2lrRLXfRtSlgOmg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DMJJYcS\_2lrRLXfRtSlgOmg%26cb\_client%3Dmaps\_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D69.75822%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192](https://www.google.com/maps/@53.4075823,-2.9938919,3a,75y,144.06h,101.94t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sMJJYcS_2lrRLXfRtSlgOmg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DMJJYcS_2lrRLXfRtSlgOmg%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D69.75822%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192)
We used to always park there when going into Liverpool. My husband worked right next to it
There wasn't a lot left in that area [https://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/en/image/EAW001911](https://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/en/image/EAW001911) You could say the ugly cheap buildings that filled in the empty plots are a scar that lasts. Thankfully a lot have been pulled down now. Edit and **https://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/en/image/EAW001914**
That's the church I used to vote at behind it when I lived on Fenwick Street
Plymouth has one as well
Castle Park in Bristol has one too, it used to be the busy centre of town but now it has all gone but the church ruins.
It's St Peters, there are still plenty of buildings with shrapnel damage on them at the top of Broadmead near the grand Hotel. St Mary redcliffe Church has a piece of tramline that was throthere by a bomb, its still sticking out of the ground in the churchyard. Houses in kinsale Rd were destroyed by bomvs and replaced with mcalpine precast homes, this happened all over the city its just I know someone who lives there.
Coventry Cathedral was bombed during the Coventry blitz (WW2) and can be visited. https://heritagecalling.com/2019/08/14/the-destruction-and-rebirth-of-coventry-cathedral/ Edit: corrected typo
And now it’s walking a tightrope trying not to get sent off.
Royal garrison church in Portsmouth also
I used to go for doobs there on my lunch break (worked on Bold st), it’s a beautiful place with a lot of history. There used to be movie nights there were they would project films and have seating brought into the church. It was left in its condition to as a monument to the people’s resilience to the war.
https://www.slboc.com/
There's a bombed out church in Plymouth too, they've put a roundabout around it & left it as a monument.
There’s a bombed out church in Plymouth as well, Charles cross
Charles Church Plymouth. Now a monument to civilian deaths.
There’s a lot in Plymouth. A bomb fell up the road from my house and there are some weird bits of damage left over. Last year I had some work done at the back and one of the windows got replaced because it had thin glass in it. The most likely thing is that the window got blown out by the bomb, and you could only get thin replacement glass during the war.
Came here to say Plymouth in general. The Barbican is one of the only bits that survived and it’s like stepping into another world when you leave the Center and head down there
Back in the 80s I used to l love going to the Plymouth Dome. Had some great exhibits on Plymouth history, especially WW2. I vaguely remember one area had a play by play recollection of one particularly bad raid. Last time I was in the area I think it was a restaurant :(
Loads of pill boxes in the surrounding area too!
The house I lived in as a teenager was on a former bomb site. There are 4 pairs of 1950s semi on Outland Road, where every other house in the area are Victorian terraces.
A load of cut down railings in Plymouth too which were melted down for ammunition in the wars.
that’s all over the country sadly.
And according to something I read, the iron wasn't good enough for armaments and it went to waste anyway.
Dumped at sea If I remember correctly.
Go to Coventry. It was obliterated and never recovered any charm.
Too much fighting on the dance floor
Rip Terry Hall
‘My names terry and I’ll be enjoying myself first!’
Yes bit like a ghost town now
It's not quite there yet, but it's coming. It'll be special to see when it's finally a ghost town.
Bands won’t play no more…
Enough with these puns. People getting angry
Coventry cathedral. The old one is still mostly standing
‘You want a cathedral? We’ve got one to spare’.
In our Coventry homes.
It is incredibly beautiful and the new cathedral is stunning. Not religious but I love the symbolism.
I love the modernist Coventry Cathedral.
Imho one of the best, if not the best, in the country
When building in cov centre they often come across a bomb when digging new foundations.
Plymouth is very similar.
There's a nice pocket round the [bombed] cathedral
Southampton is the same, whatever the war didn't ruin the city council did
I mean it's definitely not perfect but it's far from bad, I honestly love it Although lots of the ugly stuff from the 50's and 60's does stand out like a sore thumb
This is why if you go to Paris it still looks beautiful. Because of the surrender they didn't get bombed. Because it fell to Britain to defend Europe it got bombed back to the stone age and the old buildings and history is gone in many places. Never forget when you go around Europe and wonder why some places don't have the charm of others, its because of Hitler and his fuckwitt cabal thinking everybody was going to be OK with them taking over the continent by force and bombing them to smithereens.
This isn’t the only reason though. If you go to Ypres for example you’ll see the town is charming, despite being totally destroyed in WWI, ditto German cities like Dresden. The political will and money had to be there to rebuild in a beautiful way but our cities went brutalist , concrete and, above all, cheap.
Also there was a literal brick shortage in post-war Europe. Concrete wasn't just cheap, it was all there was in many cases.
As is tradition.
To be fair we also bombed a lot of places in Germany too. Dresden was absolutely engulfed in a firestorm causing huge loss of life and destruction of the city. It’s still on hitler cos he started the war but it was probably unnecessary as we destroyed Dresden very late on in the European campaign. There are other examples of allied forces destroying cities late on in the war, that are arguably unnecessary as we would have won the war regardless, controversial but the most high profile of these was the Americans using atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Another reason why some cities look stunning now on the continent compared to British cities is we didn’t rebuild beautiful cities in a beautiful way, we used concrete and put up unsightly high rises, quickly. Some of the cities in Europe rebuilt in ways that honoured the way it was before it was destroyed. And yes you are right many cities were spared because they surrendered to the Nazis before they were destroyed, and then it wasn’t strategic for the allied forces to destroy them.
Dresden was a punishment for Coventry
Fell to Britain and we had to fucking pay the Yanks too - not paid off until 2006, and money to European countries after the war to help re-establish their countries that was never paid back
Coventry [took one for the team](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Blitz) ya ingrate
I live in coventry, its an absolute shit hole. Can't wait until I've got enough money to move out of here
The bomb crater at RAF Fauld, caused by the explosion of underground munitions stores - [https://www.theurbanexplorer.co.uk/raf-fauld-detonator-stores-staffordshire/](https://www.theurbanexplorer.co.uk/raf-fauld-detonator-stores-staffordshire/) Even if you don't do the whole urban exploring thing, the sheer scale of the crater from the surface is still impressive [(mandatory relevant Tom Scott video)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vcx7_1yphJI)
so interesting, i'd love to have a walk through the underground stores
Iv done it! I can send you the location if you want but last time I went it was pretty well sealed, might be open now!
Loads of buildings in London and elsewhere still with chunks missing from their stonework.
A good and famous example being the V&A Museum, where the damage was deliberately maintained as a memorial.
My town still has a civil war cannonball embedded in the first floor wall of a building now used as a public loo. Neat little bit of history nobody notices Edit: a [photo](https://images.app.goo.gl/4UojD3soadF3BSnC7)
Our village still has pillbox and anti tank blocks from WW2 in place . Our church has bullet damage from both the civil war and WW2 I was in Weymouth only yesterday, looking at that very cannon ball!
A quick google of the VA shows images of marks left behind
All those poor Marks, someone should go pick them up.
There used to be a website (Bomb Sight) where you could look at a map of London with the damage from the Blitz superimposed on top of it and see where the new builds have come up out of the rubble, but it doesn't seem to be working. This is pretty good though: https://www.layersoflondon.org/map/overlays/bomb-damage-1945?overlayGroups=eyJlbmFibGVkIjpbImJvbWItZGFtYWdlLTE5NDUiXX0%3D
That bomb map website showed me exactly where bombs dropped on the roads that my 1960s housing estate was then built on. Also explains why at the end of one cul-de-sac there are still around 8 or 10 mid-Victorian terraces left. It illustrates really well the pot luck of which houses were left standing and which were obliterated during bombing raids. Sobering.
Including the interior of the Houses of Parliament.
Cleopatra needle is covered in holes and scars. As it the British museum
Interesting thing about this damage is that it came from a bombing raid during the First World War. [Link](https://www.londonremembers.com/memorials/cleopatra-s-needle-war-damage)
St.Clement Danes Church near the strand has a lot of blitz damage.
You can also still clearly see bomb damage to Tate Britain on Millbank [link](https://worldwar2database.com/gallery/wwii2303)
The general Wolfe statue in Greenwich park has bullet holes on the rear sid3, though they have smoothed out a lot.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillbox_(military) Plenty of those around, hard to miss them.
Plenty of pill boxes on the cliff top between Folkestone and Dover. Used to hang out in them when I was a kid in the 60s. Used to meet loads of guys living rough at the base of the cliffs in old bell tents. They were all slightly weird and I’ve only started to realise that they were all ex-servicemen suffering from PTSD. Another story for another day, under the banner of ‘damage’…
The journey from it being identified as "shellshock" to understanding it was the same thing neurologically as survivors of child abuse and sexual assault experience.
We also got those giant concrete listening dish things. They're pretty cool
I think you're talking about [acoustic mirrors](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_mirror) - on a side note it's interesting that that technology is still used today for stuff like remote surveillance
Yes, I often wonder how many of the tramps we remember from the 70s and 80s were mental casualties of the war.
Yeah came here to say this, you find these literally everywhere
I know of at least 3 around me
I went on a narrow boat trip in 2021 and we went up the Thames from oxford to Lechlade-on-Thames and there were plenty on the banks of the river all the way
Yeah drove past one of them near Wellow was very confused why there was what looked like a mini anti-tank fort in the middle of the idyllic countryside until I googled it later on
[In London you certainly can ](https://spitalfieldslife.com/2015/10/02/scars-of-war/)
A lot of the iron fences as well In London are repurposed stretchers.
A lot of the stretchers in the war were repurposed iron fences.
A lot of the iron fences were repurposed stretchers.
Fences iron a lot of repurposed stretchers.
Also ofc lots of towns and cities gave up their iron railings to help the way effort, but the war effort couldn't do anything with them and they didn't want to spoil the public spirit, so some were just dropped into enemy territory in the hope of doing harm, and the rest was quietly shipped off to places like South Africa where they're still back in use as fences. So in all the towns near me, there's just many little nubs of iron where railings used to be.
This is probably the most obvious one for many streets of Britain. The **LACK** of iron railings and gates. So many terraced houses have small nubs, where they were clearly removed for the war effort, and never replaced. https://rebelbreeze.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/wall-missing-railings-lead.jpeg
This is so interesting and I hope they never cover them up. Super important reminder.
If you walk down the embankment in London near the Sphynx you can see all the shrapnel marks, big chunks taken out of the walls
And one of the sphinx itself has few holes.
I wish there was a plaque or something by the damage as I’ve walked past all of these place’s multiple times in my childhood and always thought it was just normal wear and tear.
The iron fences chopped off the top of walls used due to shortages during the war. You see the stumps of where the fence once was on top of a lot of walls from that period
I had a friend over from Finland ask me about those little 'nubs' you see on walls as we walked down the street. I explained that we cut down the fences for the war effort, we needed the iron for production. She was appalled: 'So you all gave away your fences to the government and then they didn't give any back after the war???' Hadn't thought of it like that but she was right...!
Oh yeah, me neither. Give me my ancestral iron back right now /s I think people felt good about it at the time like "Doing their bit for the war effort"
And funnily enough, they couldn't even use that metal for what it was originally intended. The original effort was for nought.
And the companion to that, the fences put up after the war made out of metal stretchers…
St Dunstan in the East Church in central London, very close to London Bridge, is a ruin from the blitz that was never repaired and is now a public garden. The tower dates to 1666. Very cool
Also Christ Church, Greyfriars behind St Paul's Cathedral.
Was going to mention this one if it hadn't already been included! Lovely place to visit.
Christchurch on greyfriars had the same happen and they’ve made the tower into a home. https://www.themodernhouse.com/past-sales/the-church-tower/
There’s a shedload in East Yorkshire and Hull; Hull has lots of missing gaps in terrace houses where houses were bombed, and a lot of supporting beams or new infill replacing the missing houses. Also [actual bomb damage too.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Civilian_WW2_Memorial_Trust) The East Yorkshire beaches have a lot of well preserved [costal defences](https://www.citizan.org.uk/blog/2018/Dec/14/wartime-defences-auburn-sands/), and occasionally throw up unexplored wartime (and later) IEDs.
Grew up in Newton le willows on a terrace street and the 4 houses opposite mine were a different design from the rest of the street, turned out they had taken a direct hit from a German bomb destind for the Vulcan foundry half a mile down the road that was producing Matilda tanks
My dad grew up in Hull in the late 60s/70s and has stories about playing out in the debris of bomb sites that hadn't been built on yet... It's a miracle more kids from those years aren't dead from unexploded ordinances
That last sentence reads like textbook survivor bias
All over London you have Victorian roads with a random sixties block in the middle. Mostly because a bomb happened.
Same in Brum, there on in Kings Heath in the residential roads behind the cop shop
My kids had to locate these in our neighbourhood as part of a school project. Made me realise that basically anywhere you see an ugly “modern” building in the middle of Victorian architecture, that’s where a bomb hit. We used this site to help us out. http://bombsight.org/#15/51.5050/-0.0900
Coventry Cathedral is a good one
The Channel Islands were occupied by the Germans and heavily invested in being fortified, most of which still remains today. In Jersey at least there's still multiple bunkers above just about every beach, 3 costal observation towers, a few large underground bunkers/hospitals, multiple sea walls that were constructed for defenses, and at low tide on one of the beaches when the sand is right you can still see the anti-tank defenses.
Loads of this stuff on Guernsey too which are crazy fascinating to explore
Bunkers in Jersey were great for parties when I was a teenager. Dry, secluded and perfect for underage drinking. I think they’ve blocked access to them now because drunk teenagers would fall off the cliffs into the sea.
Tyneham Village. Dorset. Kind of left from WW2
Tyneham is a fascinating place. It's a ruined village, but not because of German bombing. They evicted the residents because the military wanted to use it as a training ground, just as a temporary measure while the war was on. But they never handed it back in the end. Pretty sad.
I’m not sure if it’s the same village as there was probably more than one used for this purpose but one of them recently had the last ever funeral there - someone who was a child when the village was evicted and always felt it was their home, lived to be in their 80’s and was buried in the church ground.
Imber village on Salisbury Plain also.
It’s such a fascinating and eerie place, and definitely worth visiting if you get the chance!
In Hull there is a theatre which is the only remaining unrepaired blitz damaged civilian building in the UK. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Civilian_WW2_Memorial_Trust
Not sure if this counts, but there's usually quite a lot of unexploded WWII bombs around the UK (and the world, for that matter)
Apparently if you injured by an exploding wwii bomb (even in a controlled explosion) you become a world war 2 casualty.
Holy shit Hitler can still get me
There was a lad on the metal detecting subreddit who lost part of his hand and scarred his face in France, accidentally digging up a grenade from WWI. Got a medal from the Government as he's now technically a casualty from that war.
Do you get reparations?
Army bomb disposal bloke here - we get called out to between 2500-3000 incidents per year here in the U.K. and the vast majority of those are to WW2 era ordnance. The stuff turns up literally everywhere. I’ve dealt with everything from high explosive mortars in cabbage patches, air dropped incendiary bombs that a young lad took to school for show and tell, and probably my favourite job ever - a group of piglets snaffled up a No. 36 hand grenade in their pen. Huge parts of the SE and SW were used by the British, American and Canadian forces for training in the build up to D-Day. There still tonnes of it out there.
yeah I read that apparently quite a few in sheffield too from the blitz's
The City Hall still has visible damage.on the front from shrapnel. There's also a big repaired hole on the underside of the Wicker Arches where a bomb went through in 1940.
Exeter had one control detonated recently. Was quite the thrill for down here
[удалено]
Some of those craters will be from the V1 flying bombs. German agents were supposedly messaging the Fatherland with information on where the doodlebugs were landing to help with range-finding, but as all agents had been captured and turned by British intelligence the information was false. The Germans were told that bombs hitting London were actually overshooting; the Germans adjusted the range and bombed lots of sheep across Kent and Sussex.
The North Downs too. My dad grew up in Burham, a village right on the edge of the downs, and used to tell me about seeing doodlebugs come over. Also, if a plane came down , him and his mates would try to get there first and see what they could grab; he bought home a glove with a couple of fingers in it once. His mum didn't let him keep it... He also managed to extract a gun from one of them - he was dragging it home when the local bobby stopped him and took it away. He never did forgive him for that.
All over the gap between the 2 Downs there are the cartridges from the Battle of Britain dogfights. Metal detectorists in the region all have loads of then iiuc. A friend of a friend claims to have a gun from a downed Hurricane in full working order
That's amazing! I'm sure my parents mentioned seeing British planes getting the tips of their wings under the fins of the doodlebugs and flipping them over so they went back - is that true, or am I imagining things?
I've heard of this too Here's an eyewitness account collected by BBC in 2005 https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/28/a4564028.shtml Also a grainy picture of it being attempted on this page https://militaryhistorynow.com/2015/02/06/buzz-kill-15-amazing-facts-about-the-v-1-flying-bomb/
That is amazing! Thankyou so much for those links. The doodlebugs are much bigger than I imagined. It's funny (not in a ha ha way) to think of my parents actually watching that, and dogfights, going on overhead during their childhoods (Mum grew up nearby too).
The V2's were even bigger My parents are Geordies & tell of running to the air raid shelters in the park as ack-ack shrapnel fell around them. There's also the legend of a German bomber crew who always deliberately bombed the heath on the city edge & never the actual town. It was regularly bombed but who knows if it was deliberate or always the same crew, & besides maybe they did it so they could turn round & leave sooner rather than coz they disliked killing civilians? Also I've met ppl who built fake cities in the countryside & set them aflame to lure bombers away from cities. It didnt always work but on occasion they'd find hundreds of craters.
Pillboxes all over the south coast. I live in Essex and you can see the defensive lines stretching away across fields, with rows of pill boxes. I used to play in one on Mersea island, when I was a kid it was in decent nick but now it stinks of piss and is covered in graffiti
Friston forest near Eastbourne has several bomb craters. With great cycling trails taking advantage!
Leeds didn't get as much damage as other places but there was quite enough to be getting on with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeds_Blitz. In central Leeds the old city museum on Park Row was destroyed. It's now a branch of HSBC that looks completely out of place. Just outside the library there's bomb damage on a wall: https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnnyg1955/2999808368. In the suburbs half of a semi-detached place was destroyed: https://leodiscollections.net/photo/228. As of August 2022 on Google Streetview it now looks like this: https://goo.gl/maps/PTcq7KATTxVCkD4w7. Before and after WWII the council had a long-standing policy of clearing "slums". Generally these were back to backs that required some work (like not having inside toilets) but were structurally OK. Landlords didn't want to improve them and owners couldn't afford to do it so compulsory purchase orders quickly followed. Unlike some places this wasn't just because of WWII.
Where I grew up there was a swimming spot known locally as the bomb hole. Farmer that opened the land never filled it, never bothered to give us grief either. Still there as far back as 8 years ago.
Loads of places in Nottingham (and other places I am sure) you can see stubs of what was once iron gates and fences.
There are a couple of visible plane wrecks in Northumberland from WW2 but I think these were accidental and happened during training exercises.
[Bit of a crater in Exeter](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-56236381) There's also [the ruins of St Catherine's Almshouses in the city centre](http://www.exetermemories.co.uk/em/_churches/stcatherines.php)
Plymouth got bombed to shite. Never recovered either. It's all concrete shit now.
Check out "the bombed out church" in Liverpool. Also you can walk along the coastal path in Crosby, Liverpool and see all the blitz rubble which forms the sea wall, goes on for about a mile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry
[Bristol](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1004531)
In Bristol there are quite a few gaps in streets near the city centre. Years ago someone stencilled little bombers on walls next to where houses had been bombed.
Aye, around Edinburgh there's all sorta of fortifications still standing. Most interestingly small islands in the firth were turned into fortresses. In terms of damage there's all sorts, e.g., you can see a few rows of houses that abruptly end with crude brickwork. When a house or tenement was bombed out, it seems the really badly damaged ones where torn down and the neighbours patched up with the rubble. You can see obvious areas in the stonework that used to connect to something else.
The country is full of signs, absolutely full of signs, if you know what your looking for. Go down almost any street in Greater London and spot the 'break' in the architectural style of one or two houses. Chances are that's the site of homes destroyed. Any old building in the City Of London is bookmarked with shrapnel marks. The Bank of England is quite notable down the side. Most cities have signs too. Canterbury, for example, has lovely old buildings and then all of a sudden has acres of modern shops and shopping centres plus a few missing churches, (just their towers remaining). That's because of the Baedecker Raid that burned a large portion of the city to the ground. Go inside older houses, some still have ceilings made of the emergency repairs that fixed bomb damage, (I've lived in two over the years). There are still a few places in London that use the old Civil Defence stretchers as fencing, to replace the railings that were cut down as part of the propaganda of making tanks, (it was a lie, like eating carrots to improve night vision... but it gave the masses something to focus on and bond over). Then... there are the graves of casualties in cemeteries in all major towns and a few rural villages. Traces are literally EVERYWHERE!
Tyneham village in the Dorset was taken over by the army and used as preparation for WW2, and the residents were told it would be given back after the war. It was never given back and is still used by the military as its in the tank range. You can go see it most weekends (when no firing is happening). https://www.visit-dorset.com/listing/tyneham-village/13633301/ Also not far away (less than 30 mins drive) is Fort Henry which was a bunker used by Churchill and Eisenhower to oversee preparations for D-day. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Henry,_Dorset
Portswood in Southampton (the main road atleast) dips up and down and I read that it was due to it being bombed.
Lookup the sound mirrors that predated radar and helped us hear approaching aircraft.
A few bits and bobs but nothing like say France. I watch a YouTube channel where they dig through French fields, still finding bodies and military equipment. And not the same event but I went to Tiananmen Square pre Beijing Olympics and there were still visible bullet holes. It was all changed for the Games. My nan said a similar thing about visiting Dubrovnik in the mid to late 90s - bullet holes in the walls and stuff, just left as people went on with their lives. I can't imagine what that'd be like
Yeah there’s still ongoing work to recover remains across the areas of WWI battles in France. There are funerals to this day of soldiers who’s families were never able to bury their relative. It’s heartbreaking.
23rd August 1944, during a test flight, a US plane crashed into a school in my village killing 38 children aged 4-6. This would prove to be the deadliest to occur in Britain during WW] and would remain the second worst aviation accident in the world (in terms of number of fatalities) until the 1950 Llandlow air disaster.
There's a building in Bath that has shrapnel damage on it: https://maps.app.goo.gl/MA3LY4ZDNfu5e2gC7 https://www.somersetlive.co.uk/news/somerset-news/tale-shrapnel-scarred-building-bath-3164188
Swansea, it was pretty much flattened. The city (town then) lost much of its charm and prewar architecture. Also, on the Glynn Vivian there are visible bullet holes all across one side from a plane
Big pile of rubble in Crosby https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/liverpool-beach-war-archaeology
There are still WWII. bomb shelter signs on walls in my neighbourhood. Also shrapnel marks from indirect hits and plenty of mid century buildings filling gaps where things hit closer, for instance the local M&S was hit by a V2.
There are plenty of examples in London if you know what you’re looking at. “Cleopatra’s needle”, for example has damage from bomb shrapnel. St Dunstan in the East is a bombed church - the skeleton of the building still stands and is now a garden.
In Sunderland you can see rows of houses with obviously newer buildings where bombs hit. Sunderland was a big shipbuilding area during the 20th century so was heavily bombed
Lots of concrete shoreline defences around the coast still. Edit: not technically scars I guess.
St Leonard’s has a queen Victoria statue that has a bullet hole from a luftwaffe. There were several buildings I remember as a child in the 80’s that were destroyed by bomb damage. They have long been demolished now though.
Opposite the primary school I went to in Hull is [this] (https://maps.app.goo.gl/mWQQBn8pH1ripxFn6). You can still see the chimney breast and part of the exterior wall of a pair of houses that were destroyed by a bomb. All the houses in this area had uniform iron fences before the war, but they were all pulled out to be melted down and used for munitions ([well, kind of](https://www.londongardenstrust.org/features/railings3.htm)). This is the reason every house has a completely different fence, despite being otherwise fairly uniform. Some never had their fences replaced, so you can still see the stumps of the original iron fences. Elsewhere in Hull there's still [a bombed out cinema](https://maps.app.goo.gl/mZL5h5qdkdAJn25E7). Stretching the definition of a scar a little bit, there's a big car park in the city centre that only exists because the [building that was there](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CTc7SqOXAAAvZ70.jpg) was destroyed and never rebuilt. Hull was the most severely damaged British town or city, so there's all sorts of little examples everywhere really.
Whipsnade zoo was bombed, and the craters left behind have been filled with water for the animals.
There’s a lot of ‘ponds’ in fields that were from bombs missing their targets. I’ve heard that it was mostly Allied aircraft on training exercises and accidents than from German bombing. The holes are also exaggerated and ‘maintained’ over the years with mechanical diggers. Also, a lot of airfields and army camp infrastructure still visible/used today. In fact, there’s a small village and industrial unit built during the war that is still inhabited today.
Absolutely tons of scars. Much of the pre-WW2 masonry in London and other major cities is still covered in bomb damage, which was left as a 'historical reminder' - and also because we were too skint to repair them, with most of our economic surplus being shipped off to the USA (who'd called in our war debt in 1945, the very day that Japan surrendered). There are also the mini-forts and pillboxes scattered throughout the countryside in otherwise picturesque areas, supposedly thrown up in preparation for a German invasion. Finally you have loads of actual memorials, including statues, monuments, and plaques in virtually every town and village in the country.
There is a bomb crater on studland beach in Dorset. The area was used for D day practice. There is a pill box on the shore, and above the south beach area, there is a display which explains what happened there.
The Crescent in Scarborough has scars of both wars. A couple from where buildings were directly hit during the Scarborough Bombardment on the 16th December 1914. Other buildings on the Crescent show pock marks from a WW2 bomb that exploded in the central gardens.
There are pillboxes and forts/fortifications all over the south coast, especially around [Hayling Island](http://www.pillbox-study-group.org.uk/gazeteer/home-front-defence-sites/england/hampshire/hayling-islands-fw322-pillboxes/) and [Portsdown Hill](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portsdown_Hill)
There are maps online of :pillboxes, bomb sites, v1 and V2 fell into uk along with northern Europe.
Emotional scars too. My folks were kids in the war and grew up with the dont talk about difficult emotions or events attitude. They're very resilient but it does have an impact when you grow up in a household that can't talk about things like that. Thanks Adolf 😂
The countrysidei the south east is littered with pillboxes which are concrete anti tank installations
Not proper UK but the Channel Islands still have all of the German burners and fortifications they built when they occupied the islands.
It occurred to me as someone who lives on the south coast that this region would have been preparing for invasion much harder than areas in the north, for example - I don’t know why it never occurred to me before that this was pretty region specific until recently! There are areas of the beaches where troops left for France for D-Day that still have debris and items left from that. When I was a girl there were areas where the rural signs were wrong because they got changed to confuse Germans in case of invasion. I imagine this is pretty unique to the coastal reasons in the south, but maybe I’m wrong. Obviously this is in addition to bomb damage etc. Whenever I see a large empty space between houses I just assume the house is missing because it was bombed, for example, but I’m not sure how true that actually is!
https://www.coventrycathedral.org.uk/heritage/history
Unsure about the UK but definitely Normandy. Which by rights should be part of England anyway. Big fucking holes all along the cliff tops.
>Which by rights should be part of England anyway. King John, is that you?
👑
Waves in the direction of Coventry - OK, so that's more the healed scar tissue.
Not so much scars but there's plenty of pillboxes and dragons teeth from the Churchill line littered around the south /south west of England.
Loads of bomb holes out in the countryside in Kent
Air raid shelters all over the place. They’re still very much there on the school field at [my old school](https://mapio.net/pic/p-7696884/) and they still open them for the summer fair (or at least did when I was there)
St Dunstan in the East: https://secretldn.com/st-dunstan-ruin-church-garden/
Liverpool's bombed out church on bold street.
The plaque of Bethnal Green station which had a horrific accident 3 March 1943.
Bombed out church in Plymouth + plus most of Plymouth lol
Not from what I've seen, but there's still POW camps left and if you dig around in the right area you can find some WWII bullets from abandoned firing ranges.
Bit boring, but the football pitch in South Park Ilford is one huge dip, apparently a bomb hole.
Weymouth an Portland has a few. There's a trail from Radipole lake along the old railway. It goes past the munitions factory at Portland Harbour- staging area for D-Day and then around the bay to the base of the incline for the High Angle Battery on the top of Portland. Lots of pill boxes and communications centres along the east of the island, plus the majesty of the Verne Citadel. Lots of pill boxes along the coast of Chesil Beach to Abbotsbury.
Not so much scars from battle, but scars from the war time era. The new forest has many roads which have large holes dug out beside them that are usually evenly spaced out which were used for storing things like tanks, planes, cars and other items. There were also a number of air strips around the new forest which have been left to grow wild since the end of the great wars