The Shadow of War
When Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, the residents of Highgate were under no illusion that their hilltop village would be spared the coming conflict. The memory of the Zeppelin raids of the First World War, which had brought aerial bombardment to London for the first time, was still vivid among the older generation. The rapid development of bomber aircraft during the 1930s, combined with the terrifying images from the Spanish Civil War — the destruction of Guernica, the bombing of Barcelona — had convinced both the government and the public that any future war would begin with massive air raids on British cities. Highgate, four miles from the heart of London, lay well within the target zone.
The preparations for war had begun long before the formal declaration. Air Raid Precautions wardens had been recruited and trained from 1937 onward, and by the summer of 1939 every street in Highgate had its designated warden, responsible for enforcing the blackout, directing residents to shelters during raids, and coordinating the response to bomb damage. Anderson shelters — the corrugated steel structures designed to be buried in back gardens — were distributed to householders throughout the N6 area, and those without gardens were directed to public shelters in school basements, church crypts, and the deep-level shelter at Highgate tube station.
The evacuation of children began immediately. In the first days of September 1939, hundreds of Highgate children were sent to reception areas in the countryside — Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, and Buckinghamshire — as part of the government's mass evacuation scheme. The scenes at Highgate station and at the local schools, where children assembled with their gas masks, identity labels, and small suitcases, were repeated across London. Some families evacuated themselves privately, moving to relatives in the country or renting houses outside the capital. By the end of September 1939, the population of Highgate had fallen significantly, and the village had taken on the strange, subdued atmosphere that characterised wartime London — the blacked-out windows, the sandbags around public buildings, and the eerie quiet of streets emptied of children.
The Blitz Reaches N6
The anticipated immediate air assault did not materialise. The period from September 1939 to September 1940 — the so-called Phoney War — passed without significant bombing of London, and many evacuated children returned to their homes, their parents having concluded that the danger had been exaggerated. But on 7 September 1940, the Blitz began in earnest. That Saturday afternoon, nearly four hundred German bombers, escorted by more than six hundred fighters, attacked the London docks, and the fires they started drew a second wave of bombers that night. The Blitz would continue, with varying intensity, until May 1941, and Highgate would not escape.
The bombing of Highgate during the Blitz was sporadic rather than concentrated. The village was not a primary target — the German bombers were aimed at the docks, the railways, the factories, and the government buildings of central London — but bombs that fell short of their targets, or were jettisoned by bombers turning for home, struck the residential areas of north London with depressing frequency. High-explosive bombs fell on streets in Dartmouth Park, on houses along Highgate West Hill, and in the open ground of Waterlow Park. Incendiary bombs, designed to start fires, fell in showers across the rooftops of the village, and the fire watchers who patrolled the streets each night were kept busy with sandbuckets and stirrup pumps.
The most significant Blitz-era incident in the immediate Highgate area occurred on the night of 13 October 1940, when a high-explosive bomb struck a row of houses on Dartmouth Park Hill, demolishing three properties and severely damaging several more. The blast killed five people and injured a dozen others, and the rescue teams worked through the night to extract survivors from the rubble. The scene was repeated, on a smaller scale, in dozens of incidents across the N6 area during the winter of 1940-41 — each bomb a small catastrophe for the families directly affected, each one leaving a gap in the streetscape that would remain for years.
Shelters and Civil Defence
The experience of bombing drove the residents of Highgate underground. The Anderson shelters in back gardens provided basic protection against blast and shrapnel, but they were cold, damp, and uncomfortable, and many families preferred to shelter in their cellars or under the stairs. The public shelters — reinforced basements in schools, churches, and commercial buildings — offered more space but less privacy, and their use raised tensions between residents who maintained different standards of behaviour and hygiene. The deep-level shelter at Highgate tube station, accessible via the Northern Line platforms, was among the most popular shelters in the area, and on heavy raid nights the platforms were packed with shelterers who brought blankets, thermos flasks, and books to see them through the long hours of darkness.
The civil defence organisation in Highgate was extensive and, by most accounts, effective. The ARP wardens, drawn from the local population, knew their streets intimately and could identify which houses were occupied and which had been evacuated — information that was critical when bombs fell and rescue teams needed to know whether to search the rubble for survivors. The heavy rescue squads, equipped with cranes, jacks, and cutting equipment, were based at depots in Hornsey and Islington but could reach Highgate within minutes of a call. The Women's Voluntary Service operated rest centres where bombed-out families could receive food, clothing, and temporary accommodation, and the local authority's housing department maintained lists of empty properties where displaced families could be rehoused.
The emotional toll of the Blitz on Highgate's residents was considerable, though it was borne with the stoicism that characterised the British civilian response to bombing. The nightly disruption of sleep, the anxiety of not knowing whether one's home would still be standing in the morning, the grief of losing neighbours and friends — all these took their toll on mental health and morale. The village's pubs and churches served as informal counselling centres, places where people could share their fears and draw comfort from the company of others who understood what they were going through. The rector of St Michael's Church, Highgate, was said to have spent more nights in the shelters than in his own bed during the worst of the Blitz, providing pastoral care to his frightened parishioners.
The V-1 Flying Bombs
The Blitz ended in May 1941, and for three years Highgate enjoyed a period of relative calm, broken only by occasional nuisance raids and the continuing restrictions of wartime life. But in June 1944, a week after the D-Day landings, a new and terrifying weapon arrived over London. The V-1 flying bomb — the Vergeltungswaffe 1, or vengeance weapon — was a pilotless aircraft powered by a pulse-jet engine, carrying a warhead of nearly a ton of high explosive. Launched from sites in northern France, the V-1s flew at around 400 miles per hour at altitudes of two to three thousand feet, their distinctive buzzing engine note earning them the nickname "doodlebug." When the engine cut out, the bomb glided silently to earth and exploded on impact.
Highgate, lying on the approach path for V-1s aimed at central London from the south-east, received more than its share of flying bomb strikes. The weapons were notoriously inaccurate, and those aimed at the West End or the City frequently fell short, striking the residential suburbs of north London instead. The first V-1 to hit the Highgate area landed in the early hours of 18 June 1944, striking open ground near Waterlow Park and causing blast damage to houses over a wide area but, mercifully, no fatalities. Subsequent strikes were not so fortunate.
The most devastating V-1 attack on Highgate occurred on a summer afternoon when a flying bomb struck a terrace of houses on Hornsey Lane, near the boundary between Highgate and Crouch End. The explosion demolished four houses completely and damaged dozens more, killing seven people including two children. The rescue operation continued for two days, as teams searched the rubble for survivors and recovered the bodies of those who had not escaped. The incident was one of the worst single-bomb attacks in the N6 area during the entire war, and it left a wound in the community that was felt for years afterward.
The V-2 Rockets
If the V-1 was terrifying, the V-2 was something worse — a weapon against which there was no defence and no warning. The V-2 was a ballistic missile, launched from mobile sites in the Netherlands, that rose to the edge of space before descending on its target at more than three times the speed of sound. Because it travelled faster than sound, the first indication of a V-2 attack was the explosion itself — a devastating blast followed, seconds later, by the sound of the rocket's supersonic descent. There was no air raid warning, no time to take shelter, no buzzing engine note to alert the population. The V-2 simply arrived, without announcement, and destroyed whatever it struck.
The V-2 campaign against London began in September 1944 and continued until March 1945, and during those six months more than five hundred rockets struck the capital and its suburbs. Highgate was hit by at least two V-2 rockets, both of which caused severe damage and loss of life. The first struck in the autumn of 1944, landing in a residential street and creating a crater thirty feet across. Houses on both sides of the street were demolished or severely damaged, and the blast wave broke windows and dislodged roof tiles for hundreds of yards in every direction. The second rocket, which fell in early 1945, struck closer to the village centre and caused even more extensive damage.
The psychological impact of the V-2 was out of all proportion to its actual destructive effect, which was comparable to a large conventional bomb. The impossibility of defence, the absence of warning, and the random nature of the strikes created a pervasive anxiety that was, in some ways, harder to bear than the nightly raids of the Blitz. During the Blitz, there had been rituals of preparation — going to the shelter, listening for the all-clear — that gave the population a sense of agency, however illusory. The V-2 denied even this comfort. The residents of Highgate, like those across London, simply had to go about their daily lives knowing that at any moment, without any warning, a ton of explosive might descend from the sky.
The Human Cost
The precise number of Highgate residents killed during the Second World War is difficult to establish, partly because the boundaries of the area do not correspond neatly to any single administrative unit and partly because wartime casualty records were kept by borough rather than by neighbourhood. The borough of Hornsey, which included Highgate, recorded several hundred civilian deaths from enemy action during the war, and a significant proportion of these occurred within the N6 postal district. To these must be added the military dead — the men and women from Highgate who served in the armed forces and did not return.
The war memorial at St Michael's Church, Highgate, records the names of those from the parish who died in both world wars, and the Second World War section of the memorial lists more than sixty names. These were the sons and daughters of Highgate — young men who had attended the local schools, played in Waterlow Park, and walked along the High Street — and their loss was felt deeply in a community where most families knew their neighbours and where the bonds of social life were strong. The civilian dead, killed by bombs and rockets in their own homes and streets, added another layer of grief to a community that was already mourning its absent soldiers.
Beyond the dead, there were the injured, the traumatised, and the displaced. Hundreds of Highgate residents were made homeless by bomb damage during the course of the war, and many never returned to their original homes. Some moved permanently to the reception areas where they had been evacuated; others were rehoused in other parts of London. The community that had existed before the war — the network of relationships built over decades of shared life in a particular place — was fractured by the war, and although it reconstituted itself in the years after 1945, it was never quite the same.
Bomb Sites and Rebuilding
When the war ended in May 1945, Highgate bore the visible scars of six years of conflict. Bomb sites — gaps in the terraces where houses had once stood, now fenced off and overgrown with rosebay willowherb, the plant that colonised London's ruins with such vigour that it became known as "fireweed" — dotted the streets of the village and its surroundings. Some sites were cleared and tidied relatively quickly, their rubble removed and their ground levelled for future redevelopment. Others remained as they were for years, even decades, serving as impromptu playgrounds for local children and as unofficial dumping grounds for household rubbish.
The rebuilding of bomb-damaged Highgate was a slow process, constrained by the shortages of materials and labour that afflicted post-war Britain. Building licences were required for all but the most minor works, and the government's priority was the construction of new council housing rather than the repair of privately owned properties. Many of the houses that had been damaged but not destroyed remained in their blasted condition for years, their windows boarded up, their roofs patched with tarpaulins, their gardens untended. The owners, many of whom had been evacuated or rehoused during the war, lacked the resources to undertake repairs, and the local authority lacked the funds to compel or assist them.
When rebuilding did come, it often took forms that were at odds with the Victorian and Edwardian character of the surrounding streets. The bomb sites that had been cleared were redeveloped in the architectural styles of the 1950s and 1960s — flat-roofed blocks of flats, concrete-framed houses, and municipal buildings that bore no relationship to the brick terraces and stucco villas that had previously occupied the sites. These insertions, jarring at first, have become part of the fabric of Highgate, their very incongruity serving as a reminder of the destruction that created the space for them. The attentive walker in Highgate can still identify the bomb sites by the architectural anomalies they created — a modern block between two Victorian terraces, a gap in a row of houses filled with a building of a different era, a garden that is slightly too large for its plot.
Memory and Commemoration
The bombing of Highgate is now passing from living memory into history. The generation that experienced the Blitz and the V-weapons is almost entirely gone, and with them has gone the first-hand testimony that could convey the full reality of life under bombardment. What remains are the written records — the ARP wardens' logs, the borough council minutes, the casualty lists, and the occasional diary or memoir — and the physical evidence in the landscape itself. The bomb sites, long since rebuilt, are invisible to the casual observer, but they can still be read by those who know what to look for.
The war memorials of Highgate — at St Michael's Church, at the Gatehouse pub, and in Waterlow Park — provide the formal framework of commemoration, and each November the village gathers at these sites to remember its dead. But the most eloquent memorials are perhaps the unconscious ones: the post-war buildings that fill the gaps left by German bombs, the slightly irregular street patterns where rebuilding followed a different plan from the original, and the deep cellars of Victorian houses that were strengthened during the war and still bear the marks of their wartime reinforcement.
The bombing of Highgate was, in the larger context of the Second World War, a minor episode. The village suffered far less than the docklands, far less than the East End, far less than Coventry or Plymouth or the cities of Germany and Japan. But for the people who lived through it — who heard the sirens, felt the blast, and emerged from their shelters to find their neighbours' houses reduced to rubble — it was the defining experience of their lives. Their courage, their resilience, and their determination to rebuild are part of Highgate's story, and they deserve to be remembered alongside the village's more celebrated chapters of literary fame and architectural distinction.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London's most remarkable neighbourhoods.*