Liverpool Blitz - Keele University

Mobility, Regulation and Control in a Time of Terror: The Liverpool Blitz

Project team: Dr Peter Adey, Prof. Barry Godfrey and Dr David Cox

Leverhulme logo Funded by The Leverhulme Trust

The Blitz of the Second World War remains an exhaustively examined period of British history. The German aerial bombardment on British cities caused mass destruction of the urban infrastructure, human death and hardship alongside personal and collective terror. Studies have tended to concentrate upon historical narrative, military strategy or the experience of bombardment.

This project focuses instead upon the construction and imagination of the population as a problem to be managed and contained. It seeks to examine how a whole new layer of regulations attempted to manage and secure a potentially nervous and fearful populous in anticipation of and in the midst of an aerial war.

In the context of the Liverpool Blitz, this 16 month project will explore the relation between war-time security regulations and the experience of these regulations through 3 key interrelated sets of questions:

Mobility:

  • By what mechanisms were the population’s movements regulated and controlled?
  • How were other techniques of containment, curfew or evacuation experienced?

Morale:

  • How were the emotions of the population shaped, regulated and controlled?
  • By what array of technologies, procedures and regulations was this control enacted?
  • What imaginations or understandings of collective feeling did they draw on?

Morality:

  • How was the population’s emotional and physical movement constructed as a problem to be controlled?
  • By what techniques and practices was correct behaviour enforced?
  • How was the criminalisation of behaviour experienced by the population?