Camouflaged Town Hall

Stoke Newington Town Hall, London, was built in 1937 to a pleasing Art Deco and neo-classical design. An important centre of civil defence in the last World War, it was camouflaged by paint to save it from German bombers in the Blitz of 1940. For only having just been built it would have been a particular shame to lose it so soon.

I initially marvelled at the prospect of enemy bombers looking down at a large building and, on account of some green and brown paint, mistaking it for a garden or stretch of parkland. Yet when our German cousins were peering down their bomb sights in blacked out London at an area next to a real park (the grounds of Clissold House), then such a plan might just work. And it did, apparently, because Stoke Newington’s town hall survived the Germanic bombing frenzy and lived to enjoy the post-war golden age of local government expansion and unchecked bureaucracy.

Unlikely-sounding plans, fanciful schemes and radical solutions sound ridiculous when we first learn them, but the proof is in the pudding. The gospel sounds farfetched and outlandish when we first hear of it, but it works: God became man and died Adam’s death that Adam’s children might be restored and ‘partake of the divine nature’. That Christ could wear our guilt while we dress in His purity is an outrageous concept. But it is still true. And it still works.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. Romans 1:16, NKJV