Staveley Road

1944 V-2 explosion

At 6.43pm on Friday 8 September 1944, a V-2 missile (Aggregat 4 in German) launched from Wassenaar in Holland landed in Staveley Road, near the junction with Burlington Lane, killing three people (including a three-year-old girl), and injuring nineteen people.^[1] The crater was thirty feet deep. The missile had taken seven minutes to reach Chiswick from Holland, travelling at around 3,000mph. This is regarded as the world's first recognised ballistic rocket attack, although another V-2 had previously landed in the outskirts of Paris earlier in the morning. Sixteen seconds after the V-2 attack occurred in Chiswick, another V-2 landed in Epping Forest harmlessly; another V-2 landed in London that day.

Eleven houses were completely destroyed, and another fifteen had to be extensively rebuilt. The area at the time had been partly evacuated. The explosion could be heard six miles away in central London. Within an hour of the explosion, government officials were arriving at the scene. The general public was not notified about the existence of V-2 rockets until 10 November 1944.

Each V-2 rocket was forty-six feet long and carried a one tonne warhead. 4,300 V-2 rockets would be launched. The final V-2 to hit England would be on 27 March 1945 in Kent, killing a 34-year-old woman. 517 V-2 rockets would hit London. The most devastating V-2 attack in London would be on 25 November 1944, killing 160 people.

Blossom in April 2005