London Was Ours is an original, insightful and engagingly written study of first-hand accounts of the London Blitz. Amy Helen Bell fuses social and cultural history, attending both to experiences of the Blitz – uncovered from a very wide range of diaries and letters – and to the ways in which Londoners narrated these experiences, both at the time and in subsequent, autobiographical writings. In so doing, she makes an important addition to the historiography of the ‘The People's War’ and a compelling contribution to the history of twentieth-century London.

War-time diarists – acutely conscious of their roles as historical witnesses – deployed highly visual metaphors to capture the danger, contingency and ‘terrible beauty’ of the Blitz. More prosaically, in their accounts of the raids themselves, rationing, war work and civil defence, Londoners described the social inequalities that persisted beneath idealized notions of civilian unity. As Bell forcefully demonstrates, first-hand accounts tended to depict solidarity ‘within social classes, not between them’. War work in London centred on ‘the organization and maintenance of the city’, itself a powerful symbol of British fortitude. Yet Bell's sources reveal the complexity of individual motivations. Patriotic sentiment was always entwined with personal needs and desires: for money, distraction, company and excitement. Evacuation and public shelters made family life increasingly visible during war-time. Here, too, pre-war antagonisms persisted, not least in the moralistic scrutiny of the mothers of the urban poor by their better-heeled counterparts. Within families, existing tensions were exacerbated by the strains of war and, children's voyeuristic excitement notwithstanding, we see glimpses in Bell's work of the heightened vulnerability of both children and the elderly. In a carefully crafted chapter on ‘Love in the Blitz’ Bell frankly acknowledges the limitations of first-person narratives. Diaries and memoirs do not allow us access to ‘real’ sexual experiences, which remain largely beyond the grasp of even the most diligent historian. As Bell shows, those relatively few Londoners who chose to write about sexuality fall into two groups. The first, mainly male, and seeking non-procreative sex, described their ‘pleasure in danger’. In their accounts, the Blitz held the prospect of excitement and sexual abandon. As Bell notes, however, their liberated London was a cultural construction for which there is little supporting evidence in her sources. The second, mainly female, group saw danger in pleasure. Fearful of the strains of war upon on existing marriages, they clung to more conventional moralities.

Bell's final chapter, on ‘Remembering the Blitz’, unpicks layers of memory to reveal how popular conceptions of World War II have evolved from one generation to the next, leaving the last living survivors of the Blitz to write of their legacy of grief, loss and austerity. London Was Ours paints an absorbing picture of the ways in which Londoners coped with the myriad stresses and privations of the Blitz. This enlightening, and frequently moving, book is a truly popular history of ‘The People's War’.