An interactive map showing every German bomb dropped on London during WW2 Blitz

"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall--soon--it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.

Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage's frame, a poising, an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, second sheep, all out of luck and time: drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more children than it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about among the rest of the things to be carried out to salvation. Only the nearer faces are visible at all, and at that only as half-silvered images in a view finder, green-stained VIP faces remembered behind bulletproof windows speeding through the city..."

My father, who was a member of the crew of a Sunderland flying boat, didn't talk about it very much. He was a moody bastard with a quick temper, probably as a result of several years of flying sorties over the Atlantic that lasted many hours—a dreadful combination of boredom and intense anxiety and fear.

My mum was more forthcoming. She told me once of going into work in Fleet Street—she was a sub editor on a magazine—and seeing a bomb caught by its tail fins in a tangle of wires, just hanging there above the street. The authorities had cordoned off the immediate area but people were just detouring around it and going to work as usual.

Of course I checked out the area where I grew up in north London—ten years before I was born a stick of four bombs appears to have fallen across the street I lived in. It's possible to see additional information about any of the bombs by clicking on the symbol of the one you are interested in.

Anyone interested in how civilians experienced the second world war in London could have a look at 'Civilians at War' by George Beardmore, who kept a journal between 1938 and 1946 which he later published.