Read on Twitter
Today and for the next few weeks, we're going to have a look at some selected incidents from one of my favourite contemporary books on wartime London, which is "Hitler Passed This Way" published in 1945 by the Evening News, which was one of no fewer than three evening newspapers
then available in the capital (the others being the Star and the Evening Standard.) I *may* have touched on this particular incident previously during Lockdown #1 but to be honest, I am losing track of time now, so please forgive me if I am repeating myself. Today, we are going
to start in the area of Sutherland Terrace in Pimlico and more specifically, at a pub called The Monster. We can see Sutherland Terrace on the attached extract from the 1939 A-Z and for those of you that know your London, it was squeezed in between Sutherland Street + Warwick Way
in what is still a busy residential area between the Thames and Victoria Station. The Monster is probably a corruption of the word "Monastery", as in the 14th Century, the land here belonged to the Abbot and Monastery of Westminster. More recently, in the early days of the 20th
was the starting point of a route of horse-drawn buses that became known as "Monster" buses. Don't go looking for The Monster today though, or Sutherland Terrace, as it was wiped out on the night of 16/17 April 1941, the penultimate night of the Blitz and the second-heaviest raid
of the entire London Blitz. This is one of the examples in London where the geography was changed as a result of the wartime bombing - look for Sutherland Terrace today and it isn't there. Compare the bomb damage map on the left, with the Google street view of today. The bomb map
shows large swathes of buildings coloured black, meaning total destruction. The photos below give an idea of the scale of the destruction that the map cannot provide. These were peoples' homes and businesses - all gone. It was a bad night in Westminster, with 148 killed and a
further 564 injured. Around the corner in Sutherland Street, things weren't much better. A large furniture depository was torched by the incendiaries and the following morning, barely a trace remained. A parachute mine further down the road, a parachute mine wrought the customary
devastation. This was the sight that greeted those residents which had survived when dawn broke the following morning. The whole area suffered, on this night as well as later in the war. Next, we'll take a look at neighbouring Lupus Street with some attempted "then and now" shots
using Google streetview, as I cannot travel up to London to take my own photos right now. So in this first one, we see why 46 Lupus Street has been replaced by more modern structures. This is a result of damage on the 10/11 May 1941 - the final and heaviest raid of the Blitz.
Lupus Street today takes a sharp left to meet Grosvenor Road, which runs alongside the Thames but in the 1940s, stopped at the junction with Westmoreland Terrace, as we can see here from the 1939 A to Z and the comparable street view today. In our next "then and now" shots, we
can see Lupus Street at the-then junction with Westmoreland Terrace, which runs from left to right across the photograph, with the Thames somewhere down to our left. In the right hand photo, we see the comparable view today, with Lupus Street taking a sharp left to follow the
old course of Westmoreland Terrace down to the river. The damage in the wartime photo is the aftermath of a V-1 Buzz Bomb that caused considerable damage and killed 10 people, with another 62 seriously injured. Eyewitnesses described the bomb as hitting the ground without the
engine having cut out, which if correct meant that it would have hit the ground at a speed in excess of 400 mph. I must apologise for the slightly disjointed nature of today's thread but I am having internet connection problems and so will call it a day now. We'll cover another
incident next week and will hopefully have connections restored to normal!/END
