Hackney Marshes football pitches with the city of London on the horizon.
Alan Denney|Flickr
East London’s fabled football destination is the best example of how wartime rubble was repurposed to improve the city for its residents.
Patricia Huchot-Boissier/ABACAPRESS.COM
The failure of bombing campaigns during the second world war and Vietnam shows that to win a war you have to capture territory.
People wait in line — some for over two hours — at a PCR COVID-19 test site in Toronto.
(THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young)
Canadians need to rethink their relationship to the pandemic by learning to live in a state of continual disaster for the foreseeable future.
Men wearing masks outside a military hospital in New York during the 1918 influenza pandemic.
/Shutterstock
How the pandemic is reported by the media can influence people’s behaviour.
People going to work during the blitz.
Imperial War Museum/Wikimedia Commons
Wearing a face mask during the blitz was uncontentious.
Their finest hour: the Battle of Britain memorial at Victoria Embankment in London.
CarlsPix via Shutterstock
US correspondents in Britain played a big part in convincing the American public to support the British war effort.
Pilots and air crew passing the time with books and newspapers.
S.A. Devon, RAF official photographer/Imperial War Museum
Books were an important weapon on the home front in the second world war.
Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall had been performing royal duties until he tested positive for COVID-19.
Yui Mok/PA Wire/PA Images
The pandemic makes it hard for the royal family to act as national figureheads as they have in past crises.
Cuteness overload.
Shutterstock.
When World War II struck, the British government evacuated women to hospitals in the countryside to give birth – and the change still affects maternity care today.
Unleashing hell.
Everett Historical/Shutterstock
Scientists studying the atmosphere found help in an unlikely place – the aerial bombing campaigns of World War Two.
Gary Oldman plays Winston Churchill in the 2017 film Darkest Hour .
Jack English/Focus Features
Not just period pieces, the 2017 films “Dunkirk” and “Darkest Hour” shed light on the intense Brexit debate, and raise important questions about Britain’s fundamental identity.
A German bomber flying over Wapping, September 7, 1940.
Wikimedia Commons
Government learned much from the war. But today we find new throwbacks to that Blitz-era sclerosis.
London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral during the great fire raid of December 29, 1940, during World War Two.
Shutterstock
As the bombs fell, people flocked to the movies.
Wikimedia Commons
When buildings began to rise from the ruins and the rubble, the planners missed an opportunity to create a better society.
Reconciliation by Josefina de Vasconcellos at Coventry Cathedral, first conceived in the aftermath of the war.
Ben Sutherland
Despite big hopes for rebuilding Coventry’s manufacturing heart after the Blitz, the tale of Hillfields became one of sad decline.