Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines some of the principal material manifestations of the Second World War as experienced by young people in Britain. It considers the ways in which young people sought to master this material culture, individually and collectively, through various forms of creative, social and destructive play. The book outlines the project’s long and strange genealogy. It aims to collect accounts of shrapnel collecting and pieced together a historical anthropology of the practice drawing on material culture theory and a variety of theories of childhood collecting. The book provides a peripheral part in the televised excavation of a crashed Hawker Hurricane fighter aircraft from beneath a road close to London’s Victoria Station. It describes a framework for studying the material cultures of wartime childhood beyond Britain and the Second World War. Second World War as experienced by young people in Britain.