Wartime Birmingham: the Blitz

On the night of 8–9 August 1940 the first German bombs fell on Birmingham. The city council dates the Birmingham Blitz from 8 August; other records give the 9th, which suggests the bombs fell either side of midnight. It was the first of 77 raids. By the last, on 23 April 1943, 2,241 people in Birmingham had been killed.

The Imperial War Museum calls Birmingham Britain’s third most-bombed city, after London and Liverpool. The reason was simple. The city made guns, aircraft parts, engines and ammunition. Every factory was surrounded by streets of houses.

The Market Hall burns

The first raid on the city centre came on the night of 25–26 August 1940. Incendiaries fell on the Bull Ring, and Charles Edge’s Market Hall of 1835 burned. Its famous clock and carved oak figures were destroyed. In the words of the Victoria County History, the hall was “reduced to a shell by enemy action in 1940”.

What happened next says a great deal about Birmingham. Covered stalls went up inside the roofless walls and the traders carried on. They would keep selling in the ruin for about twenty years.

November: the BSA

In November 1940 the Luftwaffe tried something new: raids on several nights running. German records, printed in Basil Collier’s official history of the air defence of Britain, list 357 aircraft over Birmingham on the night of 19 November, carrying 403 tons of high explosive. Two more big raids followed on the 20th and 22nd.

That first night, bombs brought down part of the New Building at the Birmingham Small Arms works in Small Heath, maker of rifles and motorcycles. The IWM records that 53 workers were killed.

The longest night

Collier’s figures make 11 December 1940 the second-heaviest raid on the city: 278 aircraft, 277 tons of explosive. It went on from dusk until dawn. That December the church of St Thomas in Bath Row, built by Rickman and Hutchinson in 1826–29, took a direct hit. The IWM’s memorial record notes that its clock stopped at 7.25pm. Only the west front, with its tower and portico, survived. It still stands in what is now the Peace Garden, opened in 1992, listed Grade II.

Spring brought more. On 9 April 1941 a direct hit destroyed the Prince of Wales Theatre in Broad Street. Collier records that the great night offensive of 1940–41 “closed with a raid on Birmingham” on 16 May 1941. Historic England notes that the last large raid came in July 1942.

“A West Midland City”

People elsewhere had little idea what Birmingham was going through. Censorship meant that newspapers rarely named the city. Historic England quotes the *Evening Despatch* of 23 November 1940 describing a fire in a restaurant in an unnamed “West Midland City”, put out when the heat burst the bottles of sauce on the tables. It was the kind of detail the censors allowed: human, cheerful and useless to the enemy.

Counting the cost

The bombs did not fall evenly. The VCH found that about 12,000 houses were “destroyed beyond repair, almost all of them in the central area and three-quarters of them slum or near-slum property”. The council’s 1995 history of the period counts 5,129 high-explosive bombs and 48 parachute mines, besides countless incendiaries.

Some landmarks survived damaged. An oil bomb and an incendiary hit Philip Hardwick’s 1838 station building at Curzon Street, by then a goods office; it still stands, listed Grade I. At St Martin’s in the Bull Ring, a bomb in 1941 damaged the west end and destroyed nearly all the glass. The Museum and Art Gallery was hit, though staff had emptied it first.

A figure often quoted, 1,852 tons of bombs on Birmingham, comes from Collier’s table. But it counts only high explosive aimed in eight major night raids between September 1940 and May 1941, not the whole Blitz.

What the bombs decided

The raids shaped Birmingham for decades. Herbert Manzoni, the City Engineer, already had plans for a ring road and for clearing the inner slums. The bomb sites, and the gutted houses, gave those plans room. The shell of the Market Hall was finally cleared in the early 1960s for the Bull Ring Centre. The BSA went back to work; motorcycles were made at Small Heath until Christmas Eve 1975.

Remembering

The Birmingham Air Raids Remembrance Association campaigned for a permanent memorial, and on 8 October 2005 Lorenzo Quinn’s bronze *Tree of Life* was unveiled near St Martin’s: a tree growing from a rock, with two hands holding up the world. On 28 July 2026 it was taken away for restoration, to return to a new memorial space beside St Martin’s.

It will stand a few yards from where the Market Hall burned on the first night the bombs reached the centre. The traders who kept working in that shell would understand the choice.