Thurloe Square : Research #thurloesquare #ww2 #scrapforvictory

Getting things right wherever possible is a must for me, and today – while adding fresh words to the WIP – ie the next Bunch Courtney Investigation – I realised that having given Thurloe Square as the location for her family’s town house I knew relatively little about it.

So down the research rabbit hole I went!

I have reached a passage where Bunch is walking around the Square to visit a neighbour and notices something out of the ordinary in the gardens. In order to show it through her eyes I needed as rough idea of how it would have been.

The houses themselves are easy to research  as they have changed little since the square was built in the 1820s, and the gardens laid out at around the same time.

But how did it fair during the blitz years? Surprisingly little damage as it turns out and the weighty tome ‘Bomb Damage Maps 1939-1945’ shows only minor damage to house around the square. South Kensington Tube station in the next street (to the south) took a hit, as did the  V&A Museum, which face the north end of the square.

The Scrap For Victory campaign did more to change the look of the square when the iron railings around the square’s private gardens at the centre of the square where cut down and carted away.

Many railings were cut down in parks and gardens across the UK in the propaganda drives to recycle them for vehicles and munitions. Some say that the drive was so successful that there was simply too much to melt down, others that many (possibly most) of these railings  proved to be made of cast iron and unsuitable for arms manufacture. Whatever the reason they were, anecdotally, shipped down the Thames on barges and sunk in the estuary.

I did find one reference on the current ‘Friends of Thurloe Gardens’ page that because the gardens – similar to the garden in the film Notting Hill  (Rosmead Gardens in North Kensington – somewhat larger than Thurloe)- were private and not under the council’s care, and because many residents had moved out to the country in the war years, and thus there were few there with the time to develop a Victory Garden,  Thurloe Square rapidly becoming overgrown.

So the answer to my original query what did those gardens look like I think I can cover it in one word.  Scruffy!

I also came across reference to an anti-fascist demo in the Square in 1936 that was mentioned in the Commons – but that was before the book is set and I have let this research quest take up enough time already –  maybe research for another time?

The Bunch Courtney Investigations are available from all good book shops!