Donald James grew up poor when the Luftwaffe was targetting nearby Lots Road Power Station. Scars of bombing stand out in the landscape.

Developers call this rising area Lot’s Village and Chelsea Waterfront, but as World’s End it was ignored — a place of factories, tenements, bomb sites, coal-boats, workshops and dog races, into the later 20th century.

Donald James Wheal grew up when World’s End was poor, called by some the Wrong End of Chelsea. His Memoir of a Blitz Childhood paints a vivid picture of a close-knit neighbourhood of working-class families and friends getting by in scarce times and enduring regular bombing raids.

The Imperial Gas Light and Coke Company at Sand’s End was a pioneer of the gas industry in Europe, while the Power Station at Lots Road supplied energy for most London underground railways and tramways for nearly a hundred years. Cremorne Pleasure Gardens was a major Victorian entertainment-site famous for fireworks, balloon ascents and women selling sex.

Both JMW Turner and James McNeill Whistler painted the light on the water of this pre-Embankment end of the riverside. A houseboat community at Chelsea Reach survives despite developers’ dreams, commemorated in Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1960 novel Offshore.

James and his family worked and played in all these streets before WWII and when bombers were obliterating housing while aiming for the power station.

Laura Agustín is an historian and anthropologist interested in illuminating the lives of unnamed people in history – the ‘ordinary folk’.

The Naked Anthropologist is Laura’s longtime blog, now dedicated to historical walks that highlight issues of Gender, Sex and Class.