Published February 17, 2025 | Version v3
Dataset Open

V1 and V2 impact sites in London

Authors/Creators

Description

The V1 ('flying bomb' or 'doodlebug') and V2 (a ballistic missile) were two new weapons developed by Nazi Germany. In 1944 and 1945 thousands were fired at London. They killed thousands of people and injured many more.

This dataset includes all impact sites for V1s and V2s within the London County Council boundary. These were manually compiled from bomb maps published in 'The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps 1939-1945' by Laurence Ward (Thames and Hudson, 2015). The original LCC Bomb Damage maps are held at the London Archives. 

**Please note that this is not a comprehensive dataset of all V1s and V2s. Only those within the London County Council boundary are included.**

File Explanation
bomb_map.kml Map layer downloaded from Google Maps in 
Keyhole Markup Language (KML) format
data-conversion.R Script used to convert the KML file to tables of impacts. 
V1-impacts.csv Locations of V1 impact sites with page number (in Ward 2015), longitude, latitude, easting, northing. 
V2-impacts.csv Locations of V2 impact sites with page number (in Ward 2015), longitude, latitude, easting, northing. 
flying-bomb-supplementary-analysis.html Supplementary analysis code, archived from https://lukefshaw.netlify.app/the-flying-bomb-and-the-actuary-supplementary-analysis/

 

The impact sites can also be viewed as a layer on Google Maps. Data is separated into two layers: V1 sites and V2 sites. Each point represents an impact site, with the closest street name (to help with possible cross-reference) and page number in the LCC Bomb Damage Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1VwyxV_e_LAwzbyJPCAF-C7aCRVNA5W7N&ll=51.509018493447314%2C-0.05324588962980492&z=14 

We previously analysed this dataset in 'The flying bomb and the actuary', Significance (2019). doi: 10.1111/j.1740-9713.2019.01315.x

Our analysis, all coded using R, is available at https://lukefshaw.netlify.app/the-flying-bomb-and-the-actuary-supplementary-analysis/
 
The rectangular bounding box used to recreate the famous analysis of Clarke (1946) is, using British National Grid (BNG) easting/northing coordinates:
xmin = 525000
xmax = 543000
ymin = 172000
ymax = 180000
 

Files

V1-impacts.csv

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Additional details

Related works

Is described by
Journal article: 10.1111/j.1740-9713.2019.01315.x (DOI)