ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the bombsite through the eyes of war children as a physical space, a social place, an ecological and entropic process, and as a marginal ‘disordered space’. It aims to piece together the nature and broader significances of this interaction of people and place, with its necessary reimagining of concepts of play, transgression, ecology, risk and the unhomely. The transformation of a building into a bombsite was in some respects a very rapid process. The effects of a bomb on buildings varied considerably, based on the size of the bomb, the construction of the building and its distance from the point of detonation. Tales of childhood adventures amidst the bombed ruins abound in memory narratives of life in the Second World War. From Barcelona to Berlin to Beirut, the urban bombsite has become one of the iconic traces of twentieth century warfare.
