What happened to the railings?

What is it about railings this week? I can't seem to stop taking photos of them. Although in this picture only the stumps of the railings that were once around Malet Street Gardens remain.
It's widely known that railings from most of the London parks and gardens were cut down during the 1940s to help with the war effort. But it seems that very of little of the metal collected was actually used in that way. Much of it was apparently just stockpiled and left to rust. Some claim it turned out to be the wrong sort of metal to use for munitions, others that simply too much was collected. There has even been a claim that when the bombs ran short toward the end of the war the bombers were simply loaded up with loads of cut-down railings to drop on their targets...
One thing I'm sure of - none of it was used to make this spoon.