Southwark-based Bubble Theatre Company is launching an oral history and performance project to discover how the dropping of the first atomic bomb, on 6 August 1945, was reported in London and how residents reacted as more details of the scale of the destruction of the Japanese city became available.

Researchers will also research the reactions and experiences of Japanese-born Londoners and look at how the event led to the creation of the peace movement and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Bubble Theatre aims to weave these many different voices and experiences together and to present them through an intergenerational performance. In building a unique and striking portrait of the ‘post Hiroshima’ story, Bubble Theatre aims to connect Londoners with an important piece of living history.

The project will run in tandem with another in Japan. This follows a visit by members of Japanese theatre companies to an earlier Bubble Theatre project that charted reactions to the London Blitz. Memories and stories gathered during the atomic bomb project will be shared with a new project in Hiroshima.

More than 180 volunteers will be recruited from the local community to work with experts and artists to research the period from 1945 through to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963. After the full effects of the bombing, including radiation sickness, became more widely known in the UK, politicians, philosophers, scientists and church leaders came together to campaign against nuclear weapons with peaceful protests, marches, music and artwork among the responses.

Project volunteers will look into the way the bombing and the aftermath were reported, how the families of soldiers, sailors and airmen who had been serving in the Pacific, or had been held in Japanese prisoner of war camps, reacted and what stories the earliest peace protestors have to tell.

The resulting archive of memories and documents will be publicly accessible through a new website and made available to the Hiroshima Peace Museum.

Sue Bowers, Head of Heritage Lottery Fund London, said: “The reaction of Londoners to one of the defining moments in 20th-century world history is an important subject for study and dissemination to a wider audience as we approach the 70th anniversary of this event.”

Jonathan Petherbridge, Creative Director of London Bubble, said: “We are very proud that our work on the Grandchildren of the Blitz project, supported by HLF, has now led to an exploration to the responses to the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and the production of what we hope will be linked events in London and Hiroshima. The support of the HLF over the last four years has allowed us to develop our skills and thinking as researchers and creative explorers of heritage. In turn this has led to shared knowledge, increased community engagements plus two significant theatre pieces, and now the opportunity to test our ideas on a event of international significance. We are excited and trepidatious in equal measure!”

Further information

HLF press office: Vicky Wilford on 020 7591 6046 / 07973 401 937, email vickyw@hlf.org.uk or Phil Cooper on: 07889 949 173.

London Bubble Theatre: Shipra Ogra, email: Shipra@londonbubble.org.uk, tel: 020 7237 4434.