What did Walklings Bakery do at Greet Street?

Bakery: A Corner of Tragedy The corner of The Cut and Greet Street was where Walklings Bakery had stood for generations, its ovens warming the neighbourhood with the smell of fresh bread through peacetime and into war. On the night of 17th April 1941, as German bombs fell across Southwark, fifty-four people—employees, customers, and local residents—sought refuge in what they believed was the safest place: the bakery's deep cellars beneath the shop.

A direct hit from a Luftwaffe bomb transformed those stone vaults into a tomb, ending fifty-four lives in an instant and erasing not just a building but a vital part of the community's daily life. Standing on this spot today, reading the bronze plaque, you're not just looking at an address—you're standing where ordinary Londoners made an ordinary decision that turned tragic, where a workplace of sustenance became a place of sudden, catastrophic loss, and where the Blitz claimed some of its most ordinary, most irreplaceable victims.

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