A Little Piece of History Beneath Our Feet: The Story of Young Benny Merrell and the Wooden Streets of London

In the bitter chill of a London winter in 1954, a small boy named Benny Merrell, just six years old, could often be found along Shirland Road in West London. While other children might have been playing or staying warm indoors, Benny was out hustling — selling firewood to earn a few coins. But what made his story remarkable wasn’t just his determination — it was where he found his firewood.

Benny didn’t gather logs from a forest or scrap yard. Instead, he scavenged wooden paving blocks — relics of an earlier age, pried loose from the very streets he walked. These small, tar-soaked blocks were once used to surface London’s roads in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the time, wood was chosen over cobblestones to quiet the clatter of horse-drawn carriages echoing through the city. The result was a smoother, softer, and strangely aromatic street surface that became a defining feature of London’s older districts.

By the mid-1950s, however, those wooden roads were disappearing fast. Modern asphalt and concrete were taking their place, erasing a piece of Victorian ingenuity that had literally supported the city for decades. But for Benny and others like him, those blocks were more than discarded relics — they were fuel, income, and survival.

Each block, saturated with tar, burned hot and bright — a perfect source of warmth for homes still relying on open coal or wood fires in post-war Britain. Coal shortages and rationing had made heating fuel expensive and hard to find, especially for working-class families. Benny’s scavenged firewood brought both comfort and nostalgia — a tangible link to an older London, still healing from the scars of war.

What few realized at the time was the dark legacy those same wooden streets carried. During World War II, cities like Hamburg, Dresden, and even parts of London suffered horrifying secondary fires when bombings ignited the tarred wood beneath the streets. Once lit, those wooden blocks turned roads into rivers of flame, spreading destruction faster than anyone could contain.

By 1954, only fragments of those wooden roads remained — soon to vanish entirely beneath the progress of the modern world. But for young Benny, they represented something else entirely: resilience. A child finding warmth and purpose in the remnants of a city rebuilding itself from ashes.

Today, a few of those old paving blocks still resurface during roadworks in London — blackened, tar-streaked, and fragrant reminders of a forgotten era. Most people walk past without noticing. But for those who know their story, they are more than just bits of wood. They are echoes of a time when even the streets carried history — and when a little boy named Benny turned that history into hope.