Southampton was bombed consistently from June 1940, when its importance as a port and as the base of the Supermarine factory producing Spitfire aircraft made it an obvious target. The raids escalated through the summer and autumn. The heaviest attacks came on two consecutive nights in November and then a further major raid in December 1940. These three nights of intensive bombing destroyed approximately 45,000 properties and killed around 630 people. The figure for those killed is almost certainly an undercount; the records from the period are incomplete and the distinction between those killed by bombing and those who died of injuries in subsequent days was not consistently maintained.
The medieval street pattern of central Southampton was substantially erased. Above Bar Street, the main commercial thoroughfare, was devastated. The Bargate, the medieval gateway that had stood at the north end of the old walled town since the twelfth century, survived because it is solid stone. Much of what surrounded it did not. The old town around the waterfront, which contained the best-preserved medieval domestic architecture in southern England at the start of the war, was hit repeatedly. Holy Rood Church was gutted and left as a ruin; it now serves as a memorial to the merchant navy.
What Was Lost
The assessment of what Southampton lost to the bombing is complicated by the fact that the medieval town was already compromised before the war. Victorian development had removed many of the guild halls and merchants’ houses. But the bombing took the Georgian commercial buildings of Above Bar and the late Victorian terraces of the town centre that had given the city its character as a working port town, replacing them with nothing immediately. The gaps remained through the late 1940s as rubble or temporary structures.
The reconstruction plans were drawn up by Herbert Collins, Southampton’s city architect, in the immediate aftermath of the bombing. Collins’s plan was modernist and ambitious: wide boulevards, cleared street blocks, civic buildings in the contemporary style. The plan was approved and substantially implemented through the 1950s and 1960s. The resulting city centre is functional, legible and largely without affection. The wide streets are windswept. The Civic Centre, completed before the war, stands as evidence of what the ambition looked like at its best; the shopping precinct that replaced Above Bar does not.
Memory and Reconstruction
Southampton’s war memorial culture is substantial. The Cenotaph, the merchant navy memorial, Holy Rood Church, the plaques on surviving buildings – the city has invested in marking what happened in a way that reflects both the scale of the loss and the specific identity of a port community whose losses were concentrated in the dockland parishes. The October and November anniversaries are marked each year. The oral history project at the Southampton Archives has gathered testimony from survivors and their children that preserves detail the official records do not contain.
The post-war city is what you see now, and the pre-war city is largely absent from it. Some of the medieval walls survive. The Tudor Merchant’s Hall was rebuilt stone by stone in Bugle Street. The old town retains a fragment of its earlier character. Above Bar is shops. The argument about what to do with the bombed city was decided in favour of the rebuilt city, and that decision cannot be reversed. Southampton is a post-war city living with that choice.
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