12 June 2015

Friday

This very sobering May 1941 photograph is taken from Southampton Row looking east across Boswell Street, New Street and Harpur Street towards the destroyed end of Lambs Conduit Street. The trees at the top are presumably in Coram’s Fields and Mecklenburgh  Square. The white block of flats at the top just to the right of the middle of the photograph might be the Modernist Trinity Court in Grays Inn Road, built six years before. Nb. by the time of this raid Virginia Woolf was dead; the day she and Leonard went up to their bombed flat in Mecklenburgh Square and rescued her diaries – ‘I began to hunt out diaries’ p. 331 Diary Volume 5 – had been Sunday October 20th  1940 and even then ‘damage in Bloomsbury considerable.’