ABSTRACT
Peter grows up, far and wide, considering his and his family's world beyond Ivy Cottage, its garden, the surrounding streets and immediate neighbourhood. We consider the infrastructure of suburbia: schools, borstals, libraries, public houses, working men's clubs, cemeteries, the railway, and so on. The chapter explores the social institutions of suburbia that Peter, his family, and his neighbours, engage with on a daily basis. It considers metals, minerals, stone, concrete, and so on, and how those substances were made reference to in the children's texts of the 1970s. Screened amongst the first series of ITV's Shadows, a children's TV show with a supernatural fixation, was the particularly memorable After School'. Broadcast on 17 September 1975, the story is set in an ordinary' comprehensive school, Bryn Haffes, that serves a small Welsh community.
