dug up earlier today in Bermonsey, not far from Tower Bridge.
the Fire Brigade tweeted the news as the Cop's were shutting down roads in the area. the press are calling it a 1000lb device..

I work round the area and it was chaos as they were sorting out the traffic. on the way home, we passed an army convoy going into London under police escort..

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/11490058/Giant-WWII-bomb-dug-up-by-builders-in-London.html
http://www.lbc.co.uk/unexploded-world-war-ii-bomb-found-near-tower-bridge-106921
http://www.london-se1.co.uk/news/view/8154

I know in Germany people are still finding unexploded bombs from WWII on occasion.

Yep these pop up in the news pretty frequently. Crazy the amount of ordnance dropped

There are still live ordnance all over Europe and Eastern Europe and Russia leftover from both World Wars.

It still boggles my mind after World War 2 how did they go about cleaning up all the military wreckages of vehicles and tanks and down aircrafts and other war materials from all over Europe and Eastern Europe and Russia and the main countries in the Pacific (plus the millions of bodies) or did they just leave them there and let mother nature cover them up over time?

with the Bermondsy area, being close to the London Docks, it got a huge battering during the Blitz.. looks like this one was missed during the clean up.

Dad, (who I work with), just told me, we'd been in the building that used to be over the bomb.. yay.

In Germany it's good advice to consult old reconnaissance photos of bombing runs to look for unexploded ammunition before doing the excavation on your new construction site.

Re cleaning up after all the wreckages: The Baltic Sea is a whole junkyard for chemicals like poison gas from WW1. With all the new pipelines and internet cables built this is a real problem surfacing just now.

It's standard procedure here in Germany to check potential construction sites for possible unexploded ordnance using special maps based on WW2 aerial photos.

Couple of years ago I had to evacuate my apartment in Mannheim for a couple of hours due to a bomb removal a couple of streets away.

Happens all the time but usually only makes the news when it's right in the center of a larger city.

Some time ago I read a report about the Kampfmittelr�umdienst, our national bomb squad, where it was stated that they disarmed more than 5.000 pieces of unexploded ordnance every year. From hand grenandes to 2-ton air mines.

What's the German equivalent term for "balls of steel"? I ask because that's what you would need to be in that organization!

Can we do a swap? Seems fair

You two already did a swap, that's why you're all still finding bombs

London has a rather unique problem when digging it up. not just WW2 Ordinance. but Victorian, Tudor, Plague pits, Roman... heck the place is basically built on it's own history... referring to maps is done all the time, but frankly, what they show is not even a fraction of whats under it...

I should clarify my last post I think..

the main problem with London is, nothing was recorded until recently. I work as a contractor on behalf of a london borough, for water testing and maintence. problem is, said borough (and many others) have no complete record of their properties and what they contain. I wish I was joking on that. after 17 years of surveying the place, we still turn up water tanks no one knew were there.. and thats just at borough level...

Could be worse. While in the Army we had a brigade exercise in the Verdun region in France. One day I was taking a dump in a small forest, surrounded by what looked like small red flags. When I asked my Feldwebel what those were he told me they were all possible locations of old duds from WW1. And that there were simply too many to clear them all out, so the French just marked the spots.

Made the whole 'heading the call of nature' thing quite exciting, especially at night.

Evacuation was done quickly, wasn't it P_B.

The USAAF dropped 8,459,525 bombs vs Germany, The RAF would have dropped a similar number.

Yes, but with more panache

*waxes moustache*

You all might find this interesting!

Over here we still find UXOs typically at construction sites. The EOD guys get called pretty often. Most of the time it's judged safe to remove and dispose elsewhere, but once in a while they dispose of it in situ.

Less than two years ago I moved to the outskirts of Munich. Since then they dug out two bombs at a new construction site in the neighbourhood, with the evacuation zone reaching to the other side of my street...
And a colleague lives next to the place where they (intentionally!) exploded a bomb in Schwabing/Munich a few years ago.

SS Richard Montgomery.

And they get twitchier as time goes on.
From a National Geographic website article:

"Bombs have even been known to explode
spontaneously: In Oranienburg, a town
north of Berlin, five bombs have
"self-detonated" since the late 1970s,
and across Germany one or two bombs set
themselves off each year."

I suppose eventually the ones that don't get
found will reveal themselves...