The analysis of generational conflicts in Britain is bedevilled by a peculiar kind of difficulty in that it is widely regarded as a problem without a history. Street crime and violence, ‘gangs’ and stabbings, are unhesitatingly seen as entirely new and unprecedented, involving some kind of radical discontinuity with the past, which is fondly ‘remembered’ as a time of peace and tranquillity. Against this, I will argue in this chapter that youth crime and disorder are better understood as persistent, if somewhat intermittent, features of the social landscape, and that in this respect we suffer from a profound historical amnesia.