In the booklet’s foreword, the Very Reverend W. R. Matthews, then the Dean of St. Paul’s, claimed that “the devastation of war has given us an opportunity which will never come again.” This optimism echoed sentiments expressed during the war itself. The country would turn bombsites into social housing and hospitals, with a few churches left as memorials to the carnage of the home front. (As Brian Foss has pointed out, it wasn’t until September 1941 that frontline casualties outnumbered civilian deaths in Britain.) The short booklet is full of halftone illustrations, architectural plans, and garden plans, showing how to transform destroyed buildings into “ruins.” In one article, Hugh Casson argued that “every stone—whether fallen or in place—is a fragment of the past, part of the pattern of history.” Churches such as St. Dunstan and Christ Church, Newgate Street, scarred by the Great Fire of London and the Blitz, are now living monuments not just to the bombs and fires, but to London’s long history of transformation. Casson worried about a time when “all traces of war damage will have gone, and its strange beauty vanished from our streets...and with their going the ordeal through which we passed will seem remote, unreal, perhaps forgotten.” These precious City survivals are meant to be a guard against forgetting. They embody the trauma and mass destruction that are all too easy to forget in placid twenty-first century Britain. Apart from these ruined churches, you will find only small brass plaques marking the spots where historic buildings once stood before being annihilated by “Enemy Action.”

Christ Church, Newgate Street, near the London Stock Exchange, is perhaps the most visible of the ruined churches in the City. It was one of the churches identified by the Architectural Press as worthy of being preserved in its desolation. The landscape architect Brenda Colvin proposed that the plants and flowers at Christ Church should mirror those seen blooming spontaneously amid bombed houses, and all three writers in the booklet—Casson, Colvin, and the Czech architect Jacques Groag—were in agreement that the garden should be wild and disheveled. Casson emphasized “how much pleasanter would these garden ruins be...than the usual little municipal park with its geometrical patterns of unfriendly asphalt and forbidden turf.” Well, the City of London Corporation was never going to allow messy patches of grass and weeds. The new garden, opened in 1989, is tidy and tasteful, not at all what the contributors to Bombed Churches as War Memorials had in mind. Christopher Woodward, in his 2001 book In Ruins, regrets what he dubs the “corporation aesthetic” of the Christ Church ruins, wishing that they were instead “a little wilder.” Today Christ Church is a pleasant and tranquil corner of the City of London—but it is not really a bombsite, nor a hidden urban wilderness.

The mournful quality of London’s ruins is instead best caught in another book by the Architectural Press, The Bombed Buildings of Britain, first published in 1942 and then followed by an expanded edition in 1947. It is an obituary for England’s cities, containing hundreds of photographs of broken Gothic churches, demolished Georgian terrace houses, shattered palaces and museums. Compiled by J. M. Richards and John Summerson, both major architectural historians and theorists, it records “buildings whose loss is more profound than any transient beauty in their swan-song can compensate for.” The book is an elegy of an urban landscape disintegrating before the authors’ eyes, as the Luftwaffe and later the V-1 and V-2 flying bombs relentlessly pulverized it. The book’s images of smashed stone and wood are a powerful metaphor for the tens of thousands of civilians who perished from the night raids and the random death visited upon the English metropolis.

Richards writes that “storm and lightning, the death-watch beetle, Cromwell’s troopers, the speculative builder, mere obsolescence—and now German bombs,” have all contributed to the destruction and renewal of the country, an almost natural process, as certain as the changing of the seasons. It cannot be prevented, only accommodated and recorded. Buildings become like trees, with their centuries-long lifetimes. St. Dunstan-in-the-East is now a battered, three-century-old tree stump, surrounded by the charmless saplings of the new City.