'What is London like after months of Hitlei's savage efforts to reduce it to heaps of ruins? 'You picture it perhaps with street after street blotted out, the traffic driven into devious: routes, the inhabitants certainly carrying on' undauntedly, yet against inconveniences and obstacles which would once have been deem~ ed insufferable to business.
Many people abroad, we know, think of London like that. Then-they come-here and. fare amazed at what they find, I met an American naval officer, here on some official business, who had been making the rounds of our ruins. "It astonished me," he said. "Even the worst parts were not as bad as Thad imagined. Houses had gone but thort. were plenty left. The streets were clear and one could pass through them without cliff culty. I had imagined them as just a series of heaps of wreckage filled about bomb craters, Nothing like that. And of course tone can go through miles of streets and hardly see.a broken window."
Tt can indeed fairly be said that when one considers the persistent, and indiscriminate. savagery of the raids, und the extreme difti~ nity of countering them at night, the wonder is not that so much, but that so little damage. has been done. The worst parts are the East End, the maze of little residential streets yound the docks, and the northern side of the Elly, between Cheapside and the Old Bailey.
But, as my American acquaintance particularly emphasized the work in the docks goes on with unabated efficiency, and so does the business of the City. When the Court of Common Council had its first meeting in the New Year, Guildhall was for the first] time in history unusable, a sadly blackened shell of its' former beauty. The City Fathers, therefore, met in the Egyptian Halt of the Mansion House, conducted business os] usual.and finished with the usual sherry and sandwiches.
When one moves westward, the damage: done is, T will not say negligible, but remarkably intermittent. 'There isan ugly "breach in Piccadilly at St. James's Church; a building at the corner of Sackville Street is gone, and two or three further west opposite' Green Park I think that is all. Regent Street is barely touched. The Strand has so far escaped. Carlton House Terrace suffered, but structurally the buildings are sound. Victoria Street at the Abbey end had some damage which diverted the traMe for a few days. The lower end of Portland Place had all its windows blown out and]
-"one house will have to be rebuilt. Here the BBC, building was rather, badly damaged and some of the staff were killed. But the broadcasting went on without the slightest interruption—a marked contrast with the German stations, which promptly go off the air when the R.A, are attacking.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.