Bombs Plotted —
Locations —

Devon & Cornwall — all locations

Bombing and UXO locations

59 bombing raids from July 1940 to April 1944
602 air raid alerts heard across the city
1,174 civilians killed during the Plymouth Blitz period
205k incendiaries dropped during seven of the heaviest nights

Local context

From first bomb to bomb book closed

Eighty-odd years of the same city, told in eleven moments — from the first raid in 1940 to devices still surfacing today.

  1. This is the opening entry in the Town Clerk's wartime "bomb book", now held at The Box, Plymouth.

  2. The heaviest nights of the Blitz followed almost immediately — a grim coincidence of timing that local accounts still note today.

  3. Rather than rebuild it, the city preserved the shell as a permanent memorial — it still stands roofless on its traffic island at Charles Cross today.

  4. The University of Plymouth later named a building on the site after the incident and commissioned a memorial artwork; the victims are listed on the Imperial War Museum's War Memorials register.

  5. By the end, 1,174 civilians had been killed, 3,209 injured, and over 4,000 properties destroyed outright across the whole Blitz period.

  6. A digitised copy of the bomb book is on display at The Box, Plymouth — page by page, it's the closest thing to a master record this map has to work from.

  7. The door is still known as the Resurgam door, marked today by a carved granite plaque.

  8. A second device turned up at the same site the following February — more than one wartime bomb can lie beneath a single redevelopment site.

  9. The device was moved by military convoy to the Torpoint Ferry slipway, then disposed of at sea.

  10. Investigators returned in May and again in July 2026 to check for further buried ordnance before construction could resume.

  11. The evacuation centre at Southway Youth and Community Centre supported more than 50 residents, with 25 households in temporary accommodation.

Transparency

Sources and next steps

Headline figures come from Plymouth City Council's public record. Archive context comes from The Box, Plymouth (which now holds the former Plymouth & West Devon Record Office collections). Recent incident details are drawn from council updates and contemporary news coverage. Historic area points remain approximate and should be replaced with archive-backed coordinates before publication.

On accuracy: positions here are indicative rather than survey-grade. Most confirmed records name a street, not an address, so the point is placed along that street and can sit some way from the specific building involved. Each pin is drawn inside a translucent circle showing that margin — from about 30m for a named building up to 500m for a record that only describes an area — and the same figure is repeated as “Position accuracy” in every record's detail panel. The potential-sites layer is digitised from printed bomb census mapping, where a single dot covers roughly 35–45m of ground. Treat every point as “somewhere in this area”. Nothing on this site should be used to assess unexploded-ordnance risk at a specific address — if you have a genuine concern, contact your local council or the police.