BOMBING LONDON: 40 years on

Gustav Milne

April 24th 1993: Bomb blast damage in Billingsgate looking down London wall to the Museum of London

We know that the systematic scientific study of our City’s past began after the Blitz with Professor Grimes and his dedicated work on bombsite after cheerless bomb site. Although obviously not on the same scale, its worth remembering that from 1971 onwards there were more bombing campaigns in London, which lasted throughout the DUA period and beyond. In London, the targets ranged from the Post Office Tower, Old Bailey, Houses of Parliament, Ministry of Defence, Chelsea Barracks, the Tower, Harrods, Madame Tussauds, Earls Court Boat Show, various pubs, the British and the Imperial War Museums, Edward Heath’s home, Heathrow, Oxford Street, Canary Wharf and many train stations with the infamous litter bin campaign. The principal perpetrators were the Provisional IRA, but also included The Angry Brigade, the Scottish National Liberation Army, Neo-Nazis, the extortionist Edgar Pearce and (after the Good Friday Agreement) the Real IRA. Among the two most damaging of these incidents were the bombs at Baltic Exchange (1992) and Bishopsgate (1993). The Museum’s archaeologists kept calm and carried on, and often worked on the sites in the aftermath. For example, David Bentley actually recorded the massive crater in Bishopsgate left by the truck bomb: he chose the site code BOM93.

What follows is an archaeological perspective on that dark episode in the City’s history, forty years ago. In 1992, David Bentley suggested that an interesting project for UCL students would be to record the exposed south façade of the medieval St Vedast Church, which was then under scaffolding. After all, it was argued, standing buildings in the City were potentially as much under threat as below ground archaeology: the 1988 fire at the church in St Mary-at-Hill in was one example, the damage to St Helen’s Church in Bishopsgate by the Baltic Exchange bomb in April 1992 an even more recent one. The building recording at St Vedast was duly done over the winter of 1992-3, and a programme for similar work was drafted. Initially this included photographic surveys of the visible elevations of the City’s surviving medieval churches.

A photographer was then commissioned to record St Ethelburga’s Westen façade on Saturday 24th April 1993 (there was far less traffic in the City at weekends then): meanwhile, I attended a Day-School in the Museum of London on historic buildings. During the morning session, the lecture theatre was rocked by a sudden explosion: we all knew it was a bomb and it must have been close. The news filtered through quickly: it was massive, it was in Bishopsgate, the epi-centre was St Ethelburga’s Church, and the only casualty was a photographer.
(for the record, archaeological photographer’s train was delayed and he couldn’t make it)

St Ethelburga's Church Bishopsgate

SITE SUMMARY (London Archaeologist, 7 no8: p 200)
Apr 1993 St Ethelburga's Church Bishopsgate
MoLAS (Gordon Malcolm) evaluation SET93

A disturbed cemetery soil was revealed in a test-pit in the rear courtyard. In another test-pit, located against the W wall of the hall, a N-S aligned brick barrel vault had been built against the church wall. The church wall, exposed below a modern brick footing, was made of roughly finished greensand ashlar blocks. A deposit of chalk rubble lay above the vault, with modern demolition rubble above that.
Work was prematurely curtailed when the church was destroyed by a terrorist bomb.

24 April 1993:             BISHOPSGATE BOMB

The IRA detonated a huge truck bomb in the City of London at Bishopsgate. It killed press photographer Ed Henty, injured over 40 people, and causing £1bn worth of damage, including the near destruction of St Ethelburga's church and serious damage to Liverpool Street station. Police had received a coded warning, but were still evacuating the area at the time of the explosion. The area had already suffered damage from the Baltic Exchange bombing the year before.

May 1993 Bishopsgate, E side of hole in road, opposite St Ethelburga's.
MOLAS (David Bentley) watching brief BOM93

A sequence of stratified deposits was revealed in a 5m deep crater in Bishopsgate following a bomb explosion. Successive Roman metalled surfaces confirmed evidence for the line of Ermine Street within the walled city.
Fronting onto the Roman street was a substantial masonry building which had been destroyed by fire; it lay some 6m W of the medieval building line. The building and the road surfaces were sealed by a dark earth containing late Roman pottery. It was not possible to identify any evidence for the subsequent line of Bishopsgate due to recent disturbance.

Mar-July 94 St Ethelburga-the-Virgin, Bishopsgate
MoLAS (Damian Goodburn, David Lakin, Andrew Skelton) salvage operation SEH94
Clearance of the site following extensive damage to the church by a terrorist bomb was monitored and the debris sorted and salvaged. A wide range of material has been identified and retained including stonework, apparently earlier than the supposed date of the church, and late medieval structural carpentry timbers which are very rare in London.

April 1993: St Ethelburga’s Church: interior view and nothing left of the western facade
April 94 St Helen's Church, Bishopsgate
(Dave Fellows & Kathren Henry) ongoing building recording HAT94
Major refurbishment and repairs resulting from the IRA bomb of April 1993 have revealed much of the original church fabric. At least 3 phases of building activity before 1700 have been identified, and a fragment from a column within the 13th-century fabric implies the presence of an earlier structure on the site.

PS In February and March 1993, ie after the Baltic Exchange bomb which damaged St Helen’s, but just before the Bishopsgate bomb (which created further damage), Dave Lakin was conducting a watching brief SHC93 at St Helen’s.

See also
John Schofield 2019 ‘The Archaeology of Terrorism: Damage to Two Medieval Churches in the City of London in the IRA Attacks of 1992 and 1993’ London Journal 2019, 1-20

Photos from City Police and BBC

We would welcome any of your recollections and or photographs relating to these events