Piper was already an artist of some standing by the start of World War II, made through his association with the group of avant-garde artists experimenting with abstraction in the 1930s. However, his lifelong interest in architecture found new direction through the commissions he undertook on behalf of the War Artists Advisory Committee and established his reputation as the painter of Britain's architectural heritage. At the end of 1940, Piper was commissioned to record bombed churches, initially in Coventry, where the Cathedral had been destroyed in the air raids, and later in Bristol, Bath and London. Of these works, the poet John Betjeman wrote, "When the bombs fell, when the city churches crashed, when the classic and perpendicular glory of England was burnt and stark, he produced a series of oil paintings, using his theory of colour to keep the drama of a newly fallen bomb alive.