Blitz: Steve McQueen’s film gives voice to the often overlooked stories of wartime Britain

The story of the blitz is a familiar one: Londoners taking shelter in the city’s underground stations; cheerful cockneys singing to keep their spirits up while bombs rained down; the heroism of air raid wardens, firefighters and many others. But above all, the defiance and sense of unity that rose out of the ashes of city streets and houses to shape the “blitz spirit” so beloved of politicians and others since 1940.

The blitz, which also affected many other cities around the country from Glasgow to Southampton, sits at the heart of Britain’s second world war, the embodiment of the conflict as our “finest hour”. It was a time when people came together across social and political divisions with stoicism, ingenuity and good humour to fight and eventually defeat Nazi Germany.

This popularised notion of the blitz is a story the British like to tell themselves. It may come as a surprise then, that filmmaker Steve McQueen, best known for films like Twelve Years A Slave (2013) and Grenfell (2023) that challenge audiences with uncomfortable, often difficult, material, has chosen to make a feature film about it. What could there possibly be left to say about an event that is so embedded in British life that a number of retro tea rooms across the country are named after it?

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In fact, there is a lot to be said about this short but intense period in British history. While images of the blitz sit at the heart of the cultural memory of the second world war, they are selective, and much that is important about the period is marginalised and near-invisible. By showing the blitz through the eyes of a young black Londoner trying to find his way home through the city, McQueen finds a new way to tell this familiar story.

A complex story

McQueen brings both his artist’s eye and detailed historical research to the story. The opening scene, a sensory overload of noise, fire and chaos, evokes images from the documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings’ Fires Were Started (1943), about the work of the fire service during the blitz, while later scenes of anti-aircraft sites at night reference similar scenes in Jennings’ and Harry Watt’s London Can Take It (1940).

A montage of women at work in a munitions factory is inspired by 1930s documentary films like Coal Face (1935) and Night Mail (1936) which used techniques from Soviet realism to represent the dignity of manual labour. Women, McQueen reminds us, were a vital part of the war effort.

The film also reminds the audience of other, often forgotten, elements of the blitz. Frightened crowds clamour outside locked and guarded underground stations, a reminder that in the first weeks of the blitz the relative safety of the tube system was officially out of bounds. The government feared that people would simply refuse to come back to the surface.

The character of Micky Davies – a real east-ender who organised a large shelter in Spitalfields during the blitz – is shown providing medical care and campaigning for better conditions for people seeking shelter. Looters steal from bombed-out shops and the bodies of the dead after the bombing of the Café de Paris near Leicester Square. And many die when a bomb hits a water main and floods a tube station as happened in Balham, where nearly 70 people sheltering from a bombing raid drowned in October 1940.

But it’s the young boy at the heart of the film that tells us the most important and most overlooked truth about London in 1940. This was a cosmopolitan, diverse city that went to war in 1939 and Londoners were soon joined by many thousands of volunteers from across the Commonwealth and occupied Europe.

George, McQueen’s child protagonist, was inspired by a picture the filmmaker came across while researching his television series Small Axe, which showed a small black boy being evacuated from the city. On his journey back home to his mother after being evacuated, George discovers much about his city – and himself.

A key scene shows George wandering through the old Islington Empire Arcade, encountering dioramas and murals of black workers, ever under the control of their white colonial masters. There he meets Isey, a Nigerian air raid warden, who cares for him and finds him a space in a shelter.

The shelter shows the diversity of blitzed London that was captured by the photographer Bill Brandt: Jewish families, Sikh families and white families crammed together in the squalor of the makeshift shelters below the city in the first weeks of air raids. When a white couple try to segregate the shelter by race, Isey reprimands them, reminding them that they are all fighting Hitler and the Nazi belief in a race war.

Blitz deserves to find a large audience. Not just because it retells a familiar story in a new way and gives voice to those whose stories are often overlooked, but because of what it has to say about who those blitzed Londoners, so central to British memory of the war, actually were.

In imagining the story of that small boy in the photo, McQueen helps us to re-imagine not just the blitz, but wartime Britain more widely. His sprawling, dramatic film reminds us that this is a shared history, one with meaning for many more people today than we might usually remember.

Lucy Noakes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.