The story of the blitz is a familiar one: Londoners taking shelter in the city’s underground stations; cheerful cockneys singing to keep their spirits up while bombs rained down; the heroism of air raid wardens, firefighters and many others. But above all, the defiance and sense of unity that rose out of the ashes of city streets and houses to shape the “blitz spirit” so beloved of politicians and others since 1940.
The blitz, which also affected many other cities around the country from Glasgow to Southampton, sits at the heart of Britain’s second world war, the embodiment of the conflict as our “finest hour”. It was a time when people came together across social and political divisions with stoicism, ingenuity and good humour to fight and eventually defeat Nazi Germany.
This popularised notion of the blitz is a story the British like to tell themselves. It may come as a surprise then, that filmmaker Steve McQueen, best known for films like Twelve Years A Slave (2013) and Grenfell (2023) that challenge audiences with uncomfortable, often difficult, material, has chosen to make a feature film about it. What could there possibly be left to say about an event that is so embedded in British life that a number of retro tea rooms across the country are named after it?
