To get a glimpse of the world I grew up in, I have to give microscopic attention to the backgrounds of English movies made between 1945 and 1955 in the hope of seeing the ruined South Bank in Hue and Cry or the remains of Wapping in Night and the City. If I’m willing to sit through hours of Cockney stereotypes, I might occasionally catch a few meters of library footage shot through the windows of a tram with Sid James’s head in the way.1 My London is fleeting, mysterious, torn down or buried. London was different up to 1940. From the illustrated books, it often seems tranquil and quaint, full of lost churchyards and hidden courts. There were always places where the traffic noise dropped away and you could enjoy a bit of peace. That was before the firestorms blasted the East End into blazing fragments of people and buildings, when so much of that quaint tranquillity became heaps of rubble, tottering walls, fire-blasted windows, cutaways of people’s private lives: their bathrooms and bedrooms, everything they’d valued, exposed to the hasty curiosity of the survivors.
