The trees came down in the Munich week
Primrose Hill's war began almost a year before the declaration. During the Munich Crisis of September 1938 the grove of trees on the summit was felled to clear the ground for anti-aircraft guns, and slit trenches were dug at the foot of the hill as improvised cover. Some 350,000 gas masks were issued to residents of Hampstead and St Pancras — the two authorities that then covered the area.
When war did come, in September 1939, around 600,000 London children were evacuated; roughly half came back when the expected bombing failed to materialise in the first months. Anderson shelters went into back gardens. Chalk Farm and Swiss Cottage Underground stations became shelters in their own right during the Blitz, and Swiss Cottage's shelterers produced their own newsletter, the Swiss Cottager, under the motto De profundis — out of the depths.
Four guns on the summit
The high ground that makes Primrose Hill a viewpoint made it a gun site. An anti-aircraft battery was established on the top early in the war, armed with four 4.5-inch single-barrelled guns; in 1943 these were replaced by four double-barrelled 5.25-inch guns. The battery site was fenced off and came with the full apparatus of a permanent installation: huts, barracks, air-raid shelters, instrument pits, a command post, an ammunition store and a searchlight.
The batteries were not, by the arithmetic of the time, efficient. It has been calculated that in September 1940 roughly 11,000 anti-aircraft rounds were fired for every German aircraft brought down. Their real function was to be heard: the noise of the guns was a considerable comfort to people below who could otherwise do nothing at all. In October 1940 a Junkers 88 did come down on the hill, possibly hit by Primrose Hill's own guns, crashing among the allotments that by then covered the hilltop. For most of the war the summit was a working site — part gun position, part vegetable patch — rather than a park.
What the bombs took from the streets below
The residential streets around the hill and across the Eton Estate were hit repeatedly. At least 65 people were killed by bombs or flying bombs in the area over the course of the war.
- 13 September 1940 — 175 Adelaide Road, on the Eton Estate, was hit; eleven people were killed.
- Late September 1940 — St Mark's Church was struck twice and reduced to a shell. Cecil Sharp House, at the foot of Regent's Park Road, was badly damaged.
- Pickford's stables, on the site now occupied by Waterside Place, were destroyed and the horses got loose.
- A bomb at 23 Princess Road killed one woman; four people were killed at Egbert Place between Chalcot Road and Auden Place; a married couple died at 14 Gloucester Avenue.
- At London Zoo a bomb allowed a Grevy's zebra to escape into the surrounding streets.
- 17 April 1941 — a parachute mine destroyed villas on Fellows Road, killing 27 people, the worst single incident in the district.
Flying bombs and the last rocket
The second phase of bombardment, from mid-1944, was in some ways harder on the area than the Blitz. Thirteen V1 flying bombs fell on Regent's Park, destroying St Katharine's Lodge and Holford House among the Nash buildings; another fell near the zoo with little damage.
The worst local incident came at five o'clock in the morning on 25 November 1944, when a V1 struck 63 King Henry's Road. Eleven people were killed, among them Dr Norman Joynt. The blast damage extended far enough that houses along King Henry's Road and Oppidans Road had to be demolished. The London County Council bought the cleared site, and the flats at Primrose Hill Court opened there in 1951.
The area's final strike was also its most spectacular and its least lethal. At 11.40 in the morning of 21 March 1945, the only V2 rocket to fall in the district hit the tea rooms on Primrose Hill, near the reservoir. It left an impressive crater. Nobody was killed.
What the war left, and what it didn't
The guns came off the summit, the allotments were dug back into grass, and the hill returned to being a hill. St Mark's Church, gutted in 1940, was rebuilt. Elsewhere in Regent's Park the restoration of the bomb-damaged Nash terraces ran on from the 1950s into the 1970s.
It is worth being precise about what the bombing actually changed in the fabric of Primrose Hill, because the assumption is usually wrong. Most of the post-war building around the hill is not the result of bomb damage at all: the redevelopment of the Eton Estate in the 1960s demolished considerably more of the Victorian neighbourhood than the Luftwaffe managed. The war killed people and broke individual houses; the peace rebuilt whole streets. Both are visible from the top of the hill, if you know which rooflines to look for.