Race against devastation: How wartime photographers dodged Nazi bombing to record historic buildings New exhibition chronicles the wartime work of the National Buildings Record – set up to capture a disappearing landscape

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Plagued by ill health and distraught at the devastation being inflicted by wartime bombing raids on Britain’s towns and cities, Margaret Tomlinson was nothing if not dogged in pursuit of her task.

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As the Luftwaffe unleashed the Blitz to try to disable Britain’s war machine, the trained architect and recently divorced mother was in desperate need of work. When offered a position in 1941 as the first female photographer for the newly-formed National Buildings Record (NBR) she accepted with enthusiasm.

Austin Seven

In the depths of that winter and while suffering the lingering effects of flu and a septic ear, the shutter mechanism on her camera one day stopped working because of the cold. Where others might have simply gone home, Tomlinson started up her Austin Seven car and placed her malfunctioning kit under the bonnet until it had warmed sufficiently for her return to her work.

The NBR, staffed by some 30 people, had been set up as an urgent reaction to the grim reality of the Second World War as Nazi air raids destroyed not just Britain’s industrial infrastructure but also the historic city centres adjacent to factories and ports. By the end of the war, some 70,000 buildings in London alone had been destroyed and demolished in bombings that also cost 30,000 lives.

‘Dangers of war’

Walter Godfrey, a prominent architect who was the NBR’s first director, warned there was a need “to meet the dangers of war then threatening many buildings of national importance”.

In this race against architectural devastation, it fell to Tomlinson and her NBR colleagues to photograph, draw and document as many of the ancient and important buildings in England and Wales before they were destroyed in the bombing. Similar bodies took on the work in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

It was work suffused with an iron-willed awareness of the existential threat to the built environment – from medieval streets to Georgian terraces – that fell under the gaze of the Luftwaffe’s strategists.

‘The only thing to do is to plod along’

When at one stage Tomlinson confessed that her confidence had been knocked by the difficulties of recording ancient monuments amid the destruction, a colleague replied: “It is important in our job never to be in the slightest degree ruffled by the destruction of unrecorded buildings. The only thing to do is to plod along regardless of what happens.”

The work of Tomlinson, who went on to produce 3,500 photographs and immortalise dozens of buildings subsequently lost forever, and her colleagues is at the heart of “What Remains”, a new exhibition at London’s Imperial War Museum examining why cultural heritage is attacked in conflicts and the efforts to protect and restore what is targeted.

The NBR’s task became even more urgent when in April 1942, Hitler unleashed the so-called “Baedeker raids”. Named after the German pre-war tourist guides of the same title, the strategy was an attempt to destroy British morale by deliberately targeting cities for their cultural and historical importance, such as Bath and York, rather than locations of strategic value.

Extensive ruins

Among the cities targeted was Exeter, where Tomlinson found herself having to return to a Georgian townscape she had recorded weeks earlier to catalogue the now extensive ruins caused by the Nazi bombing.

Shortly after the first of the Baedeker attacks, she wrote: “I have had an absolutely miserable spring with illness and am still rather shaky. It is all most unfortunate and the Exeter blitz being the last straw.”

The NBR, which was formally established in 1940 with the help of intervention from BBC pioneer Lord Reith and a sizable grant from America’s Rockfeller Foundation, was part of a wider effort to preserve Britain’s cultural riches that also saw works of art and antiquities moved out of London en masse to the safety of locations including Welsh slate quarries.

‘Safeguarding the memory of the nation’

Tamsin Silvey, who co-curated the exhibition on behalf of heritage watchdog Historic England, told iweekend: “Of course, you cannot put buildings in storage. The NBR employees were pioneers and they were given a lot of autonomy in how they worked. As a result, many of their pictures are beautiful – it wasn’t just a dry process of recording architecture. Tamsin Silvey, who co-curated the exhibition on behalf of heritage watchdog Historic England, told iweekend: “Of course, you cannot put buildings in storage. The NBR employees were pioneers and they were given a lot of autonomy in how they worked. As a result, many of their pictures are beautiful – it wasn’t just a dry process of recording architecture.