Are you sure it is British?
A good question, it belongs to a friend who believes it is. I will see if he can supply a picture of the back to see if it has a British postcard backing, although that in itself might not be 100% definitive on the point.
This is the back. A fairly standard British postcard backing. This makes it more likely it is a British image than not. It’s not impossible it could be a wartime snap brought home and printed here, but more often than not such images were printed abroad and have the French “carte postal” on the reverse.
The clothes look far too early for World War II and there were relatively few air raids in WWI, so I doubt it was anything to do with air raids.
The dolphin figures (known I believe as grampus in the context of sculpture) are distinctive but not unusual.
Could be a canal? And could damage be accidental? A derailment if rail - or an explosion?
Intriguing.
Although nothing like the scale of WW2, quite a lot of damage was caused by air raids across the country in WW1. Most sources cite around 100 raids in total by either Zeppelins or aircraft causing approx 4,900 casualties by the end of the war.
A further point I’d make is that the damage is comparatively insignificant and hardly worthy of a photo or a crowd of onlookers unless there was some novelty as to the cause, which perhaps makes a WW1 air raid more likely. Amid the destruction of France or Belgium, or the devastation of the WW2 blitz, is it likely someone would be whipping out a camera to photograph a chipped parapet? Whereas Zeppelin raids, especially the early ones, were big news as the idea of an enemy attack from the air on home soil was novel to the British public.