Wartime Britain

What was life like in Britain during the Second World War (1939–45)? Here we explore rationing, evacuation measures, the Blitz, crime, and the role of women

Winston Churchill leaves a cabinet meeting

Churchill’s days of destiny.

A British soldier uses a searchlight to spot German aircraft during the Second World War. Britain has lived with the fear of invasion for several centuries, a fact reflected in its architecture, its art and its people’s mental health. (Photo by David Savill/Getty Images)

The LibraryThe island fortress fallacy.

Blitz

Second World War

The cruel cost of the Blitz: how did everyday Britons rebuild their lives?

Second World War

The Coventry Blitz – Q&A with historian Frederick Taylor

Second World War

The wartime wireless and the lost voice of Cyril Lakin

Migrating to Britain.

Persuading the people: British propaganda in the Second World War.

Soviet science and feeding Britain at war.

Britain’s Second World War and the Country House.

Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists

The LibraryBritain’s tearoom fascists.

World War Two spies and an extraordinary naturalist.

The LibraryThe History Essay: How Europe rose from the dead.

A Black Market camera seller

Criminals of the Blitz: how the German bombings created a golden age of crime.

North Sea oil and the Blitz.

Women wearing unrationed shoe soles during the war

Dressed for war: fashions of the Second World War.

Huts in Lambeth built for bombed-out families, 1945. (Getty)

Britain in 1945: Life in the shadow of victory.

Soldiers guard England's south coast behind a bank of banned wire on 2 September 1940

Britain's fight for survival: Fortress Britain 1940.

10 tips for surviving on the home front during the Second World War.

Portrait of Juliet Gardiner for BBC History Magazine

History explorer: the Second World War home front.

Escaping the Blitz and recording the First World War.

Worshippers inside the Duke Street Baptist Church in Richmond, Surrey, listening to a service in 1954. (Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Getty Images)

The LibraryD-Day for God?.

The aftermath of the Second World War.

Industrial might: Blenheim bombers in production in England, late 1939. The Allies’ combined industrial strength proved too much for the Axis. (Getty Images)

Second World War

The LibraryThe world in flames

Hard labour: a woman tarring and flinting in Oxford Street, central London, 1919. (Getty Images)

The Library“Our Excess Girls": women after the First World War.

German scientists Dr Carl Eisenmann, Dr Mersch, Dr Trabat and Dr Stocklin. (Express/Getty Images)

The intelligence war for German scientists.

A woman at a floral tribute to Neville Chamberlain at a florist in Ludgate Circus, London, 1938. In the wake of the Munich agreement, the prime minister was understood to be a hero of women everywhere. (Photo by Harry Todd/Getty Images)

The LibraryGuilty women?.

English soldiers in the ruins of Palmyre in charge of taking over the Syrian Territory occupied by Vichy’s France. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

The untold Second World War.

Clean-up crews salvaging what they can from the ruins of buildings in Hornsey, a north London suburb, 1944. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

Hitler's secret weapon.

Schoolchildren helping workmen construct a new estate of pre-fabricated houses in Watford, Hertfordshire in 1946 following the devastation of the Second World War. (Photo by Keystone Features/Getty Images)

Postwar squatters: a very British uprising.

A colossus at war.