Rubble

When the cities we call home – and the memories that stitch them together – are reduced to dust and ash, what comes next?

Rubble is the story of the art of aftermath. In this radical new portrait of the Blitz, we follow nine individual bombsites, and a work of art or architecture created amidst each site, to trace how artists forged new ways of representing the world in the shadow of war.

The works explored in Rubble were uniquely shaped by the Luftwaffe's destruction. From Francis Bacon's visceral paintings to the defiant glamour of Cecil Beaton's bombsite photographs, Rubble illuminates how the Blitz changed British art – and therefore its people – forever. Altair Brandon-Salmon vividly explores how art was uniquely placed to demonstrate the anxieties and fears of ordinary people, and the competing hopes and utopias that emerged for a better future.

In showing how life, art, and architecture emerged from the wreckage of war and transformed London as we know it today, Rubble offers an urgent perspective on how cities should work in the aftermath of conflict, and crucially for whom.