An exhausted Camden still had just enough energy left for a VE Day knees-up 60 years ago on Saturday. Professor Pat Thane reveals how the task of rebuilding began

CAMDEN, like the rest of Britain, was exhausted and run-down by the last months of war. Of course, there was pleasure that it was almost over and obviously a victory. But, pock-marked by bombing, cold, dark, bleak, crumbling, unpainted, the very fabric of the city expressed the privation and tiredness of the people, aware though they were that almost everywhere else in Europe it was much, much worse.
The three main railway stations in the south of what is now Camden – then the boroughs of St Pancras, Holborn and Hampstead – made the area a target for bombing. But throughout London bombs fell randomly, their sites now marked by blocks of flats built in the late 1940s and 1950s, sometimes, as in my own Twisden Road in Dartmouth Park, interruptions of intact Victorian terraces.
In June 1944, Hitler’s final blow, the pilotless V1s, nicknamed doodlebugs, arrived just as people were relaxing, looking forward to the end of the war. They killed 152 people in St Pancras and injured 438 seriously and 658 slightly. In Hampstead, 21 people died and 80 were seriously injured. By September 13, 744 houses in St Pancras had been damaged by enemy action, 437 beyond repair.
Early in 1945, people in Yorkshire and Humberside, who had suffered less, sent lorry loads of furniture, bedding and household items to Hampstead to help victims of the bombing. The town of Halifax adopted St Pancras and more lorry loads of spare household goods trundled down the A1. They were distributed by the Women’s Voluntary Service.
In turn, Holborn had a good-neighbour scheme to help bombed-out people in still-worse-hit Bethnal Green.
Many house were empty, especially in the smarter areas, as those who could had fled from London early in the war. The population of Hampstead fell from 90,000 in 1939 to 58,000 in 1942, then slowly drifted upwards.
By the end of 1944 councils began to requisition empty houses, turning them into flats for the homeless, when they could find the labour. In April 1945, St Pancras Council sought permission to convert 200 houses that had been empty for up to four years. It was estimated 3-400 houses and 750 other properties were vacant and suitable for conversion. In February, Hampstead Council estimated that 1,500 people were living in requisitioned property, but at least 200 more needed homes.
The boroughs began to plan post-war rebuilding early in 1944, but the doodlebug attacks created a new urgency. St Pancras, in particular, began to look for sites for temporary, prefabricated homes that could be erected quickly without getting in the way of more permanent building. In a densely populated area of London this was difficult.
In desperation, in November 1944 the housing committee proposed building 300 temporary houses on 25 acres in the south of Parliament Hill Fields and on smaller sites in Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill. This, predictably, aroused the wrath of the Heath and Old Hampstead Society and of residents concerned that, once lost, the open spaces would never be reclaimed. In fact, there were no practicable prefabricated units available in England until the end of the war.
The borough councils’ plans for permanent housing development also faced opposition, especially a proposal by Hampstead to build “working class flats” on a bomb site at New End and Well Walk.
Plans were held up by the slowness of the government to sanction them, which caused increasing anger and frustration. In fact, the wartime government had no coherent post-war housing policy. This was an important reason why Churchill lost the 1945 election. It perpetuated homelessness, leading to the post-war squatting movement in London and elsewhere.
Sometimes the slowness of redevelopment might have been a blessing for the fabric of Camden. In November, 1944 the vice-chairman of St Pancras Borough Labour Party wrote to the Holborn Guardian proposing “an exciting opportunity for town planning, rebuilding of the outer Green Circle of Regent’s Park… It is the ideal site for the careful planning of a great sweep of working-class flats.” No more was heard of this vision.
People were cold as well as poorly housed. Coal was the main form of domestic heating; many houses did not have electrical connections. Throughout Camden in the winter of 1944-5 people had to collect their own coal from the dump, in carts, or most often in prams.
Crime figures shot up during the war. Sometimes people were driven to crime by desperation, such as the Kilburn postman given probation for stealing three-and-a-half pence worth of coal from the Post Office, because his family was cold.
The vicar of St Barnabas in Kentish Town was fined 10 shillings for “throwing a milk bottle into water stored on behalf of His Majesty for the purpose of fighting fires”. He was lucky. The maximum penalty for this offence was two years’ imprisonment.
When victory came, one of the first demands was the removal of wartime regulations but the post-war Labour government actually increased controls and rationing, which did not end until 1954. For all that, people managed to enjoy themselves. Cinema attendance was high. Film ads and reviews took up much of the front page of the Holborn Guardian.
Dancing was the other favourite pastime, encouraged by the government to boost morale, with some surprising places, including Covent Garden Opera House, converted to dance halls.
The end of the war was a time of sadness as well as triumph. People had lost relatives and friends in the bombing and the fighting (my father included) and, all too many Camden residents gradually realised, in the death camps in Europe. The war wasn’t even over in May 1945. It continued in Asia until the surrender of Japan in September 1945. Many men were still in Japanese camps, if they survived at all. But it was almost over, and and Camden began to rebuild.

Professor Pat Thane is Leverhulme Professor of Contemporary British History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.