[30] Shopkeepers who were thought to be war profiteering by unduly raising their prices were liable to cause public outcry, or even to have their premises picketed by the Stepney Tenants' Defence League in the East End.

"[34] London County Council also opened "British Restaurants" in places such as Fishmongers' Hall, the Royal Veterinary College, and Gloucester House, which provided cheap, nourishing food in comfortable surroundings.

[40] One civil servant called Mary Davies was served a black-market haggis by a friend, and wrote that "My sort of level wouldn't have done any black marketing [...] We would have considered that not really the done thing.

[50] As over 1,000 firefighting crews arrived all through the night to fight the fire, telegraph poles and wooden roadblocks spontaneously burst into flame from the heat, and half a mile of shoreline was burned down, including 350,000 tons of timber stored in dock warehouses.

It killed 1,436 civilians, more than any other raid on Britain during the war, and hitting buildings from Hammersmith in the west to Romford in the east, including the House of Commons, Westminster Abbey, the Royal Mint and the Tower of London.

[62] For these Londoners, and for people away from their homes during an air raid, public shelters were opened in the crypts of churches such as St. Martin-in-the-Fields, in basements of housing blocks, office buildings and shops, or under railway arches.

[3] In November 1940, a London taxi driver told Vera Brittain that he continued to sleep on the top floor of his block of flats every night through the bombings, saying, "Unless it has me name on it, it won't git me.

The heaviest-hit areas of London often tended to be where working-class people lived, as they were next to militarily useful targets like docks and factories, and in the aftermath of the Buckingham Palace bombing, the Queen said, "Now I can look the East End in the face.

"[88] The complex contained a Cabinet Room where government figures could meet with the armed forces Chiefs of Staff; a Map Room where fronts and ship convoys across the whole war could be mapped out, 24 hours a day; equipment for broadcasting Churchill's speeches on the radio or for contacting American president Franklin D. Roosevelt; bedrooms for Churchill and other high-ranking figures; and offices and sleeping quarters for dozens of typists, stenographers, switchboard operators and secretaries.

[95] Upon the outbreak of war, the Security Service, commonly known as MI5, moved their headquarters to the Wormwood Scrubs prison in East Acton in order to gain more office space.

Here, captured members of the German secret service, the Abwehr, were turned to work for the British as double agents, either remaining in Britain or travelling back to Germany with false information.

The double agents, particularly codenames Tricycle, Bronx, Brutus, Garbo and Treasure, conducted Operation Fortitude, successfully convincing German high command that the Allies would target Calais rather than Normandy on D-Day.

[102] The mission of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) was to train and direct saboteur agents in enemy territory such as occupied France, Czechoslovakia, Norway, and Belgium- in the words of Winston Churchill, to "set Europe ablaze".

Their Camouflage Section was responsible for concealing film, radios and other equipment inside innocuous objects like coal, dead rats, or a tube of toothpaste, and started working from 56 Queen's Gate, before moving to the Victoria and Albert Museum and then the Thatched Barn near Elstree over the course of the war.

[109] The French section of the SOE used a flat in Orchard Court in Portman Square to brief new agents rather than the headquarters, to reduce the possibility of them seeing classified information or giving away the position of the main hub.

For example, Selfridges department store on Oxford Street continued to trade during the war, but the basement hosted American-made X-system encryption machines, code-named SIGSALY.

[111] Grosvenor Square became the station for a barrage balloon nicknamed "Romeo" flown by the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), who were housed nearby in Nissen huts.

[112] King George VI had part of the Buckingham Palace gardens converted into a firing range so that he and other members of the royal family could practise their marksmanship for use in a possible invasion.

In the newspaper Tribune, author and journalist George Orwell called the removal "a democratic gesture", saying, "more green spaces were now open to the public, and you could stay in the parks till all hours instead of being hounded out at closing times by grim-faced keepers.

[16] Many Germans and Austrians in London were arrested in September 1939 and sent to either Olympia in West Kensington or the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum on Wandsworth Common before being moved out of the city, with true Nazi sympathisers like Baron von Pillar kept together with German-Jewish refugees like Eugen Spier.

[121] After Japan joined the war, twenty Japanese diplomats were put up in flats in Kensington until they could be safely returned to Tokyo, with a guard of eight policemen to accompany them when they left the building.

[136] De Gaulle escaped from occupied France on 16 June 1940, and two days later, made a BBC radio broadcast calling on French citizens to resist German occupation.

[146] Writer Evelyn Waugh noted that American soldiers "passionately and publicly embraced" British women, who were "rewarded with chewing-gum, razor-blades and other rare trade goods.

"[150] One particular point of contention was how to deal with both black soldiers from the United States and the British Empire arriving in London, and white officers from the south of the US who expected racial segregation in public life.

[153] The Home Guard (initially Local Defence Volunteers or LDV) was an armed citizen militia supporting the British Army during the Second World War, which at first did not allow women to join.

Anti-Semitic rumours inconsistently claimed that both Jewish people fled to the country at the first sign of trouble, and that they monopolised space in shelters; that they profited from the black market and refused to volunteer as ARP wardens or AFS officers.

The Home Office kept watch on anti-Semitism in London by commissioning studies, one of which read that "though many Jewish people regularly congregate and sleep in the public shelters, so also do many of the Gentiles, nor is there any evidence to show that one or other predominates among those who have evacuated themselves voluntarily".

[174] Leonard Rosoman worked as a fireman during the war, and produced the painting A House Collapsing on Two Firemen, Shoe Lane, of two of his colleagues immediately before they were both killed by a falling building, which was later purchased by the WAAC.

[182] As well as traditional painters and sketchers, the Ministry of Information also commissioned photographers such as Bill Brandt, who recorded Londoners taking shelter in Tube stations, church crypts, and railway arches, and documented historic buildings that might be destroyed.

In July 1945, the activist John Prean moved a Mrs. Wareham and her seven children into a large house in Fernhead Road in Maida Vale, and vowed to continue his work until the council took it up.