Description

It is the 30th of November 1940. Bombs fall on Southampton and the archaeologist O.G.S. Crawford watches the destruction unfold from his house in Nursling.

“The sky was lit up with white starlike flares slowly sinking and then breaking out afresh, up at then ran streams of red lights and all round the stars of shells bursting. All of this was against a background of lurid red revealing dense masses of smoke.

The town was burning, it was just plain HELL. Southampton was just a ruin, it is indescribable”

The Ordnance Survey offices on London Road, where Crawford worked, were completely destroyed in the raid. In the aftermath he began again, this time with the National Buildings Record, photographing what remained of the town.

Over the following years he took nearly 6,000 photographs, recording streets, walls and buildings that had been damaged or erased by the blitz. Changing Landscapes includes 123 of Crawford’s photographs of the medieval walled town, charting the impact of wartime destruction on the historic centre.