On the third of September 1939 people all over Britain tuned into their radios to hear Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain broadcast the fateful words 'as from eleven o'clock this morning Britain is at war with Germany'.
It was not unexpected. For months Germany had been threatening the peace in Europe by its aggressive postures toward other sovereign nations. With the invasion of Poland, which Britain had agreed to protect, war was inevitable. It was a war which from the start drew in much of Europe and which was, over the next six years, to become a conflict of global proportions. The Second World War would touch the lives of every one of the people listening to Chamberlain's broadcast in a way that was unprecedented in Britain. As in many previous wars those at home would have the anxieties and griefs over what would happen to their loved ones at the front, but this time they would also be more directly and physically involved themselves. The nation's island geography helped protect it from invasion but also made it difficult to import the supplies on which a sophistciated economy like Britain's depended. Those on the 'home front' would have to fight a battle with shortages, using creativity and ingenuity to 'make do and mend'. But the greatest challenge to the home front was to be coping with the devastation, destruction and fear caused by the terrifying new tactic of war - aerial bombardment. Many of the most memorable images of the war come from the assault on Britain by Luftwaffe bombers. Collected together here are some of those images, photographs restored to their original quality, to provide an impressionistic collage of life at that time, showing the devastation and destruction wreaked by aerial bombardment but also celebrating the ability of the human spirit to cope and survive in times of extreme stress...