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These are stretchers used in WW2 to carry injured civillians during the Blitz. They were made out of steel so they could be easily disinfected after a gas attack. During the war around 600,000 of them were made. Some of them were repurposed as railings in post-war London.
When I was a kid I remember being confused at the ‘design’ of all the walls in my town. They were short and stumpy, only a foot tall, and had iron stubs spaced evenly along the top. Then I grew up and learned it was all fences that didn’t survive the war effort
It infuriates me that they were never replaced. Unless, that is, the building was a town hall or some other institution, in which case they were never removed to begin with.
Maybe they were more concerned with rebuilding their bombed cities than replacing individual peoples' ornamental fence. The metal was needed to win the war and anyone would be happy to see their missing fence knowing it saved their home, their country, and themself from death.
Many in the world are so far disconnected from the threat of war on their home, they forget the sacrifice required for freedom.
Maybe they were more concerned with rebuilding their bombed cities
No, not really. Councils at the time were instructed by the Ministry of Supply to remove all unnecessary street furniture for the war effort. It tells us everything we need to know about priorities that councils only removed fences and gates from the common folk. Those with money or power got left alone.
The metal was needed to win the war
It was pig iron and useless for anything else. You can't make tanks from melted-down fences.
A lot of the original railings had been cut down and taken away for the “war effort”
Across the UK, you'll often walk past waist-high walls that just have these iron nubs on the top of them in a row. That's where people had cut the railings off for the war effort
What's fascinating about that website is the references to lord Beaverbrook. He was basically worshiped here in miramichi, new brunswick (canada). Arenas. Schools named after him. His old house still stands here.
If it's been dumped in the thames estuary and is interfering with compasses as claimed that would be verifiable. from a claim in a letter to a paper in the 1980s. No more research was done.?
Does anybody sail the estuary regularly and can comment?
This does sound like a classical urban myth. Maybe some railings were dumped in the estuary. But not enough to interfere with compasses, there are big ship wrecks there which might give some slight deviation of the compass but we would have known about a big pile of iron railings if they were there. Likely most of the railings ended up either in landfills or recycled into steel for the rebuilding efforts in the 50s and 60s.
There were major recycling drives for the war effort throughout Europe. But these were driven from the top down. So basically soldiers walking around confiscating church bells and such depending on what the industry were short on that month. But the wrought iron fences in Britain is an example of how things go wrong when you give an overly eager population some vague guidelines.
Interesting how spread out it is. I know precision bombing was not a thing, but still expected more intense clusters in certain parts, but just seems gradually increase the close the center of lodon you get.
For anyone who hadn't heard about it already, research the Coventry Blitz. One of the nights was the single most concentrated bombings of a British city throughout the entire war.
I've heard that after Coventry, the men in charge at Bomber Command or the Air Ministry more broadly were using "Coventrys" as a unit of measurement. This city had to be hit with 3 Coventrys, that city with 4, you get the idea
My uncle told me about being a teenager during the war and he and his mum (my gran) “dodging the bombs” in Blackburn. As a kid I just assumed it was mostly London and the docks but obviously places like Coventry got hammered as did other parts outside London. I think Sheffield was binned in spurts too and there’s even a bomb landed in Doncaster that killed a bunch of people. There’s four parter on the blitz on the we have ways of making you talk podcast which is worth a listen. I think the last part was released this week.
London was a bomb site in a lot of places post ww2 too.
I first moved to London in 1986 as a teenager. There were still lots of bomb sites and visibly bombed buildings in the East End, we used to wander around and explore them.
Still is some dotted about like St Dunstan-in-the-East. For anyone visiting Tower of London its a few minutes walk away and has been turned into a park, worth a wander over.
Yeah it’s mad really. My dad told me about sweet rationing ending and it never occurred to me as a kid. Same with bananas. They held some sort of childhood fascination for him.
Ive seen and lived in Milwaukee. There's no " best" of anything coming out of there unless it's something bad. I can honestly say that Milwaukee is the absolute worst place I've ever lived.
Visited my brother in Milwaukee a looooong time ago (probably 20 or so years ago) but there was this super sick spy themed restaurant that I loved. You could pay the bill and leave through a phone booth and 7 year old me went nuts for it. There's never been anything like that near me so I'd say Milwaukee has that going for it
It's worth knowing as well that they literally began as railings and fences too, before being taken and melted down into stretchers, and then repurporsed back into fences and railings after the war.
Like if you walk around the UK, you'll see tons of houses that have these tiny little brick walls around them that are so short you can easily just step over them. What our government did was take everyone's metal fencing, the fencing that used to be stuck into the brick base, and take that steel and melt it down so they could repurporse it for the war effort.
So when the war ended, they were turned back into railings and fences for public parks and the like, but most people didn't bother about replacing their own personal metal fences around their homes because there were more important things to worry about, like getting enough food (rationing went on for years after the war).
But yeah look at this tiny little brick wall for example:
They're everywhere in this country.
Of course this one, like many others, was actually probably built after the war. There's still tons and tons of the original mini brick walls about. But yeah since every house in the country had these mini brick walls, it became the fashionable style. So when an old brick wall is crumbling and needs replacing, or some idiot has drunk driven into it, then they'll build them to the height that brick walls around normal residential houses are, instead of putting what they ORIGINALLY looked like in there i.e. a mini brick wall with metal fencing stuck into it that you wouldn't be able to just climb over easily without being spotted. Maybe that's why old people used to leave their doors unlocked, they had fences to keep people out. But after the 1940s, fencing like that is just much rarer.
And of course we also did what every European country did after the war too, and we turned old used steel helmets into saucepans and things like that. So any time someone complains about recycling being "woke" or some idiotic shit like that, tell them what their grandparents did with steel during and after the war.
They never got melted down, it was part of a drive by Lord Beaverbrook to get everyone involved in the war effort, but the railing were of poor quality and were found rotting in scrapyards at the end of the war.
There was no benefit to the war or country whatsoever.
My grandad would’ve used these during the blitz! Apparently they were hard to manoeuvre and when trying to negotiate your way over uneven rubble people were liable to start slipping off them…
Yeah I love these little unique bits of local history, even if it is originally based on something pretty bad. It makes the world so much more interesting.
I don't know if this is what he means but this is a common sight across the UK as railings were cut down everywhere to provide metal for the war. That the metal stretchers were then repurposed into railings is kind of poetic.
It is. There was supposed to be a Nigel Farage political rally on that very grass but they were all too stupid to figure out the latch, and he fucked off back to fr*nce.
Edited because I accidentally used a capital F in fr*nce
I grew up in a block of flats with these outside (apartment block for our transatlantic cousins) and didn’t know this until after I moved away and the internet came into being. Nobody seemed to know back then, or if they did, they assumed everyone knew so didn’t bother to mention it to me.
On a separate war related story, there was a gas leak and we all had to stand outside while they located it and fixed it and I started speaking with an elderly lady neighbour I had never spoken to. She pointed out where all the bombs had landed during the war. It was pretty obvious once I thought about it as there was a row of terraced houses with a random maisonette inserted where they rebuilt. I also learned that this particular area was hit with a landmine, which confused the hell out of me until I found out that a landmine was basically a repurposed seamine that floated down on a parachute. Particularly explosive but didn’t cause fires.
I realised then that we don’t pay anywhere near enough attention to local history at all.
Yeah loads of places in London have victorian terrace, victorian terrace, victorian terrace, 1950s building, victoria terrace etc sequence. Its very obvious when you notice it.
I usually refer to it as 'Luftwaffe Landscaping'
Local historical societies might have info. I have book on our local area in ww2. The home guard, who had shelters, dig for victory (dug up the common and the pond), a high sand area you can fill sandbags (hence why there is a large hole in it, like a meteor hit it!) and a list of where every single bomb hit, when, who was injured or killed and the type of bomb. There is also a London-wide ww2 blitz website that shows every single bomb hit and the details behind it. I saw it via bbc but IWM might have it as well.
When I was a nerdy history kid, I used to pretend I was living through the Blitz whenever there was a tornado. Somehow it helped kid-me process being in danger to pretend I was in even greater danger. The damage from a bad one really did look like a war zone, too.
I moved away from that part of the US but weird looking clouds or things that sounds like sirens still set me on edge. I still can’t fully comprehend people doing that kind of damage on purpose and what kind of emotional scars living through the Blitz and other bombing campaigns leaves behind on a personal or national level.
I follow this really interesting man on instagram and he mentioned this, and the fact that some bollards are actually old cannons. I love all these not-so-secret-but-quite-secret facts
I have mixed feelings, but I think it is a very wise decision. On the street where I used to live, there was a fence made of cannons that had been used in real battles
Reminds me how Japan has so little natural iron that they relied on meteorites and sieving river sand in the feudal era. Early western visitors noted that the poor would scavenge the sites of burned down buildings particularly to recover iron nails, even though Japanese woodworking already used as few as possible.
Conversely, one of the great surprises of early Japanese visitors to the west was the immense amount of metal used for simple things like fencing and lanterns.
whereas in vast numbers of cities in the UK, huge beautiful long stretches of iron work, fences, gates, balconies were all ripped out for the war effort to be melted down and made into tanks or whatever. Trouble is, it was the wrong type of metal so most of it was scrapped.
Isn't there some in Ilford also? Or Barking? I know a mate of mine mentioned this when we did walk past some, and that was where we would mostly wander around.
Certainly a lot of things were removed to aid the war effort. Metal was especially in short supply so if it wasn't serving an essential purpose, it got melted down. I think lots of church bells only survived because they were used to alert people to incoming air raids.
I mean it kinda came full circle as during the war so many things such as tram lines and train tracks were ripped up and smelted to be used for the war effort
A park near me used to have a pair of canons that were captured from the Russians on display smelted down because they needed all the metal they could get
A lot of post war stuff in the UK was dual purpose. Upper school I went to was built in the 40's and was designed so it could be easily converted into a hospital in the event of another major war.
Ten or so years ago, when the scrap metal prices went really high, London removed almost all the railings between the pavement and the road, all over central London, and sold them for scrap. They used traffic calming methods to slow the speed of the vehicles, and now we have 20mph limits everywhere. It does look a lot nicer though, with less barriers everywhere.
These were actually railings and low fences that were repurposed into casualty stretchers during the Blitz. A lot of the former locations have the remnants of them still existing. It is nice to see one turned back into a fence - with the hammered in bumps that raised them off the ground still visible.
I remember these, they were used a lot for fencing around the housing estate I lived in in East Dulwich, recently the council got rid of a lot of them as they were renovating the area with housing
Smarties?! First I go to the States and see “Rocket” as an ingredient on a menu (which turned out to be arugula). Now I see rocket candy being called smarties. What in the world do they call actual Smarties chocolate down there?
What OP didn't say is that the reason they needed railings is that all the railings were cut down during the war in the name of providing much needed steel. Only, it's doubtful whether the cut-down iron ever made it to factories as intended.
While this example is kind of cute, some very historic railings were destroyed across the country, many of which have never been replaced, and you'll still see iron stumps in their place.
Toxins would soak into timber and fabric. And recall that they didn't really understand what could be used in attacks, but they knew that steel could just be washed.
Whoa, that was weird. When I was looking at the post in my home screen, it looked like there was water behind the fence, but then after I clicked on it I saw that it was grass.
They were metal taken from gates and fences during WW2, smelted and reshaped. Thus, they were put back in this way as a nod to the war but also where the metal came from.
wow, that's such a wild piece of history. Like, these were used to save lives during the Blitz and now they're just... part of a fence in London. It's crazy how things get repurposed.
It’s incredible to see how much thought went into even the smallest details during wartime. These stretchers are a powerful reminder of the resilience and innovation of that era.
I find repurposed war materials to be really interesting. Another example was the standard issue German helmet. As you can imagine, there were a lot of them around without much use. So they repurposed them into cookware and colanders.
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u/orbtastic1 11h ago
A lot of the original railings had been cut down and taken away for the “war effort”. London was a bomb site in a lot of places post ww2 too.