My abstract for the Australian Historical Association’s 2026 conference, being held at Macquarie University from 29 June–3 July, has been accepted. My talk is entitled ‘The Underworld: Living and Dying in London’s Air Raid Shelters, 1917-1918’ and this is the abstract:
London’s first significant experience of air raid shelters came not in the Blitz of 1940–1941 but during the Gotha raids of 1917-1918. Largely in response to civilian occupation of Underground stations in September and October 1917, authorities quickly moved to identify and designate hundreds of buildings, both publicly and privately owned, as public air raid shelters: by May 1918 there was space in these shelters to shelter 1.4 million of the roughly 7.5 million inhabitants of greater London, a substantial proportion. But while the shelter experience was widespread, it was not universal, being mediated by class, gender, and ethnicity. In this paper, I will draw on official, press and personal sources, to assess what we can say about who used the air raid shelters in 1917-1918, why they used them and what their experience was like. I will also ask what lessons were learned, or not learned, in the interwar period by governments, organisations and individuals looking to prepare for the next war.
Since I’m just finishing the 1917 chapter of Home Fires Burning and about to start on the 1918 one, this was originally going to be a classic ‘talk about the thing I will have been writing about’ kind of paper. However, since I now think I actually need to next spend some time on fixing up the first few chapters, having decided some time ago to merge three of them into two to free up space but not actually doing that work at the time, the paper may turn into the equally-classic ‘talk about the thing I will be writing about next’. Come to the AHA to see which one it will be!
Image: Walter Bayes, The Underworld: Taking Cover in a Tube Station During a London Air Raid (detail), 1918 (Art.IWM ART 935).
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