During the blitz, people just did whatever they could. Friends, relatives and neighbours took them in. My mother moved out of London to the village her grandparents came from and we lived with a distant cousin.
After the war, when the troops started to return, there were Prefabs.
There were upwards of a million built in five years and although they only had a planned life of ten years, many people were still happily living in them fifty years later.
My mother was born in London and grew up during the war. Initially they hid in the Underground (London’s subway system) to escape the bombs but eventually the children were all split up and moved in with different relatives outside of London. My mother ended up in Bedford.
Nobody lived in the Underground. Underground stations were used as public bomb-shelters during air raids, but when the all-clear sounded you left. A few underground stations were repurposed for military purposes, but not as barracks.
Well, depends on your definition of “lived”. The trains still ran during the day, but my mom and her family slept in the Underground at night and hid there during bomb raids.
I don’t know if there were barracks anywhere or not. If there were any, they weren’t widespread. In any event, my mom’s family certainly didn’t sleep in any sort of barracks.
These are the conditions my mom and her family slept in (hmm… picture won’t link, so scroll about a third of the way down the page). It’s basically a bunch of people sleeping on blankets.
If they were allowed into the underground to sleep when there wasn’t an air raid, that would have been… unusual isn’t the word, really. They’d have had to sleep somewhere on the nights there weren’t air raids.
My mother passed away a few years ago, so we’re not going to get clarification on that point. All I remember is her saying that they slept in the Underground stations until the family was split up and sent out away from London.
They were also used during the war in smaller numbers. But given that so many of the men were away, it usually meant that it was a woman and her children who’d been made homeless by a bomb (if they all survived), so that made it easier for them to stay with families, either their own families or with neighbours.
A lot of children were also taken into care, to Barnardos and other charities, even if they weren’t orphans. (Evacuation was actually only mandatory - for both the children and their families and their hosts - for a brief period in 1939. Although a lot of children did leave, not all did. There were still a lot of children in London for most of the war, thus a lot of orphans and kids who couldn’t be looked after.)
Bear in mind that a lot of pre-WWII working class Londoners, especially in the east end around the docks, were living in slums even before the bombs dropped. They were used to sharing rooms and beds.
A lot of people seem to have chosen to leave London, if they could. I’m trying to find a cite I Iooked at once that showed which homes were occupied in 1941. When I looked at it, I was stunned to find that my street - in the East end, but it only had one bomb strike towards the end of the war - was half-empty despite the homes then being tied to work at a local brewery which continued production throughout the war.
Those people were skilled working class, and presumably found a way to move out to jobs in the home counties, perhaps helped by the brewery.
After the war people lived in prefabs and/or moved to the outer boroughs or into the counties - Essex, Kent, Herts, etc - partly due to the lack of housing in London and partly because the burbs were better anyway, back then.
The first great firebombing of Tokyo burned 16 square miles (41 sq km), killed 100,000 people and left over 1 million homeless in one night. The raid was in the working class neighborhood, where my ex-wife’s mother’s family lived.
Some families in the nicer parts of Tokyo (which were also bombed later, including where my ex-FIL’s family) took in some of the homeless who were shocked about how much better the middleclass lived.
All told from all the raids, about 8.5 million people were homeless and millions more were displaced from their home for making firebreaks. Children were sent out of the cities. My ex-MIL was sent to live with relatives in the countryside.
Yes, but I wouldn’t say they lived there and nor, I think, would they. They sheltered there, not because they had no homes or because their homes had been destroyed but because it was unsafe to remain at home during an air-raid. They went back to their houses during the day, they ate their, they kept their stuff there, etc, etc.
Worth noting that even if your home had been destroyed, you didn’t get to live in the Underground. Like everyone else, you had to leave when the all-clear sounded.
During the war, there was a legal power for local authorities to requisition empty properties, but I’m not sure if much use was ever made of it.
After the war, the housing shortage was a hot issue for years. There was a major push to build new towns out of London and other cities, and a massive expansion in council (i.e., public) housing. (But every new policy has its disadvantages, and we’ve never got it quite right since - which is another story).
I wasn’t saying they “lived” there (although to a small child sleeping there essentially every night would certainly seem like “living there”). I was replying to a comment that they would not be allowed to sleep there on nights without air raids by pointing out that there were 57 straight nights of air raids in London at one point.
My sister’s late husband was a schoolboy during the blitz and he was never evacuated. His school was bombed so he and his mates were free to roam around all day.
He said that apart from playing cowboys and indians or tommys and jerries in the ruins, they also spent a lot of time hunting for bits of bombs and anything that could be sold.
Yes, but they did not know in advance that there were going to be 57 nights in a row. They would have had a home to stay in, and, like UDS1 said, keep their clothes there, etc. Most air raids started long after people had gone to bed, too.
The original claim was that the family lived in the underground shelters, but that’s not how they worked.
People weren’t officially allowed to sleep in the Underground at the start of the London bombing during the Blitz, but they did so anyway. Later it became official government policy to organise the tube stations as air raid shelters including putting in water stations, chemical toilets and bunk beds. This wasn’t people going into the tube stations after the air raid sirens sounded. They were going down beforehand and at times, people were going down in the evening or earlier. They were then spending the entire night in the Underground, and doing so night after night.
Here’s a pretty good article on the use of underground stations as shelters.
If that reply was to me, I was responding to this statement of yours:
People went into the Underground shelters at the beginning of the night, stayed there the entire night, and did so for very many nights. They didn’t just do so when there was a bombing raid siren going off.