UNITED KINGDOM: Interactive map shows every bomb dropped in London during the Blitz

Record ID: 357580

  • Title: UNITED KINGDOM: Interactive map shows every bomb dropped in London during the Blitz
  • Date: 14th December 2012
  • Summary: SCREEN SHOT OF BOMBSIGHT.ORG
  • Embargoed: 29th December 2012 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: United Kingdom
  • Country: United Kingdom
  • Topics: Conflict
  • Reuters ID: LVABE40PQ6AX69313J6PSPAI4ASO
  • Story Text: The team behind a project which allows users to find out if a bomb dropped in their street during the Blitz in World War Two say they've been overwhelmed by public interest.
    The bombsight.org website uses bomb census data from the UK's National Archives and marks where each of the 31,000 German bombs fell.
    Since launching at the end of November the site has gone viral and been inundated by millions of visitors.
    "We've been surprised, overwhelmed, excited," said project leader Dr Catherine Jones. "It's incredible that a project of this size and nature has gone viral around the world. On Friday (December 7) we had over 195,000 unique visitors to the website according to Google Analytics."
    Those numbers have increased with more than 300,000 visiting the site on a single day.
    The project is a collaboration between Dr Jones of the University of Portsmouth and the National Archives and was funded by UK education charity JISC.
    Researchers went through bomb census maps, which are only available in the reading room of the National Archives, then integrated the information into the website.
    The online map covers all of greater London, with red dots marking the spot each bomb fell.
    Users can zoom in and click on each bomb revealing more information and pictures.
    The project took more than a year to complete.
    Dr Jones said combing through the archives was painstaking.
    "We had to go through a process of taking the paper map and taking a digital scan of the map," she said. "When you have a digital scan you have to match the map to an online map, so you have to give it present-day geographical coordinates. And once you've done that it's much like taking a piece of tracing paper and putting it over it over the paper map and literally identifying where all the bombs are. So as you imagine it's a very time consuming process."
    Dr Jones used the Bomb Sight website to take Reuters Television to a street in south-east London where the map indicated a bomb had fallen.
    "Here you see a typical London street, rows of terraced housing, probably dating from the 1800s," she said. "If you just look over here... we have a very different type of housing that's more representative of the 1960s, so represents post-war building. And we know, using our map and our mobile app that a bomb landed in this location."
    The project's mobile app is expected to be publically available before the end of the year.
    Mobile developer Dan Karran said it would feature 'augmented reality', which allows users to see extra information when viewing a street through their phone's handset.
    "I think it's really important to help people explore when they're actually in the area," he said. "So if you've walked down a street before and seen buildings which might be from a different period you will be able to look at the app to see why that might be."
    The Blitz, or 'lightning' in German, took place between 7 September 1940 and 21 May 1941.
    London was bombed on 57 consecutive nights by the German air force, the Luftwaffe.
    More than one million houses destroyed and 40,000 people were killed.
    97-year-old Doris Leci survived, but was badly injured when the factory she worked in was bombed in 1940.
    She had been collecting wages for her colleagues when a bomb hit, leaving many of them dead.
    Mrs Leci was shown the Bomb Sight website by Reuters Television, and said she was "surprised" at the level of interest in the Blitz by young people.
    "Well that surprises me really because there's so much going on in the world that's not very good, there's bombs dropping all over the world aren't there? Why bring up what happened in the past? That's my opinion anyway," she said.
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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