The Departure
The evacuation of children from London at the outbreak of the Second World War was one of the largest organised movements of people in British history — a logistical operation of extraordinary complexity that removed more than a million children from the cities considered most vulnerable to aerial bombing and relocated them to the relative safety of the countryside. Belsize Park, as a densely populated inner London neighbourhood within range of German bombers, was among the areas from which children were evacuated in the first days of September 1939, as the German invasion of Poland made war seem imminent and then inevitable.
The scenes at the schools and railway stations as the evacuations began have been described many times — the children with their gas mask boxes and their labels, the mothers trying to maintain composure as they said goodbye, the teachers who accompanied their classes into an uncertain future, the volunteers who organised the logistics of a movement that had to be accomplished in days rather than weeks. For the children of Belsize Park, the evacuation was the defining experience of their childhoods — the moment when the security of family and neighbourhood was suddenly and dramatically disrupted, when the familiar became strange and the future became genuinely unknown.
The destinations of the evacuated children from Belsize Park varied widely, reflecting the logistics of the evacuation programme rather than any consideration of the suitability of the receiving communities. Some children went to rural areas of southern England — Kent, Sussex, Wiltshire — where the contrast between the urban sophistication of their NW3 lives and the rural simplicity of their new environments was profound. Others went further afield — to the north of England, to Wales, to Scotland. A few went overseas, to Canada or the United States, protected from the European conflict by the width of the Atlantic.
Life in Evacuation
The experience of evacuation was enormously varied, ranging from the genuinely happy — children who were billeted with sympathetic families in beautiful countryside and who looked back on the evacuation period with nostalgia — to the genuinely traumatic — children who were billeted with hostile or abusive families, who were treated as servant labour, who were subjected to forms of deprivation and cruelty that the evacuation programme was entirely unable to prevent or monitor. The absence of parental oversight, the disruption of family bonds, and the powerlessness of children to determine their own circumstances made evacuation a genuinely dangerous experience for some of its participants, whatever its protective intentions.
The children of Belsize Park who were evacuated carried with them the cultural formation of their neighbourhood — its intellectual seriousness, its middle-class domestic culture, its association with the artistic and literary world that characterised NW3. This formation could be a source of both advantage and difficulty in the receiving communities: the evacuated middle-class child from NW3 might be better equipped academically than her rural peers, but might also be less practically skilled, less comfortable with outdoor physical work, and less well adapted to the social norms of a rural working-class community.
The Neighbourhood Without Children
The Belsize Park that remained after the evacuations were an uncanny place — a residential neighbourhood from which a significant portion of its youngest population had been removed. The streets that had been animated by children's play were quieter; the schools that had bustled with activity were repurposed for other uses; the domestic life of the neighbourhood was organised around the absence of children in ways that those who remained found deeply disorienting. The combination of the children's absence, the husbands and fathers who had gone to the services, and the general anxiety of the early war period created an atmosphere of suspended life — a neighbourhood waiting for the return of its normal inhabitants.
Not all children stayed away. The early months of the war — the period known as the 'phoney war', when the expected aerial bombardment did not immediately materialise — saw many families bring their children back to London, deciding that the disruption of evacuation was not worth the uncertain benefits. The subsequent Blitz, which began in September 1940, confirmed the wisdom of the original evacuation decision and sent many families back to the countryside. The pattern of departure and return, departure and return, that characterised the evacuation experience for many Belsize Park families was one of the more exhausting dimensions of the wartime domestic experience.
Return and Recovery
The return of the evacuated children to Belsize Park after the war — a process that began in 1944 and continued through 1945 and into 1946 — was not the straightforwardly joyful reunion that the accounts of liberation and victory might suggest. Many children had been away for five or six years — a significant proportion of their young lives — and had developed attachments, habits, and identities shaped by their time in evacuation. The neighbourhood to which they returned was in some cases physically damaged by bombing, in all cases socially and economically disrupted by the war, and populated by adults who had changed as much as the children themselves.
The psychological effects of wartime separation — on the children who were evacuated, on the parents who remained, on the families who were reunited after years apart — were not fully understood or addressed at the time, but have been the subject of extensive subsequent research and documentation. The Tavistock Clinic and the Hampstead War Nurseries, both associated with the NW3 neighbourhood, were among the institutions that engaged most directly with the psychological consequences of evacuation and wartime disruption. John Bowlby's work on attachment theory, developed partly in response to his observations of evacuated children, remains one of the most significant contributions of the NW3 psychoanalytic community to the understanding of human development.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London’s most remarkable neighbourhoods.*