Penny Lecture | Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War

For most of us the very thought of ‘London at war’ means just one thing – the Blitz. That extraordinary drama so dominates the idea of wartime London that it is hard to imagine the city and its people affected in any special way by the war of 1914-18. The truth is much more interesting. From the moment war was declared at 11pm on Tuesday 4 August 1914 London became the hub of an ever-enlarging leviathan of total war. The Londoners almost without exception were caught up body and soul in its maw. In this Penny Lecture, Professor White explores how the war utterly dominated the city’s life, changing everything – not just for those four-and-a-quarter years of the most destructive war that human history had ever witnessed but for generations after. Even in the twenty-first century Londoners still live with many of the consequences of the First World War.

Professor Jerry White teaches History at Birkbeck, University of London. His latest book, Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War, is the first to explore this momentous period in London’s recent history.

This talk forms part of the Morley College Penny Lecture series. Penny Lectures began in 1882 at the Old Vic Theatre in Waterloo. Topics were chosen to encourage new thinking and ideas and provided illustrated lectures at affordable prices…a penny! The lectures were a huge success and quickly led to the establishment of ‘Morley Memorial College’ for Working Men and Women. Now celebrating our 125 year anniversary, we have revived the Penny Lecture series for a new generation of adults to learn from and be inspired by.