We recently attended the moving exhibit Childhood and War at the Imperial War Museum and can definitely recommend it. This expansive and well thought out exhibit is by no means just for kids, but the presence of them was unexpectedly delightful.

Childhood and War covers how children were affected by war from WW1up to the conflict in Ukraine. The WW1 room features a doll that we quite frankly found terrifying, and features a hastily abandoned children’s unmade bed. If you’re expecting the unmade bed of Tracey Emin, its over at the Tate and would be wildly inappropriate for this setting. The exhibit is in places immersive, and puts you into a wartime living room and a cold war kitchen. An example of its nod to adulthood, there is an interactive rotary phone that anyone under 45 wouldn’t have a clue how do use and we witnessed a nine year old punching the digits, dismayed that it didn’t light up.

One reason that this exhibit is interesting to local history buffs is that long before the era of £15,000,000 flats, in WW2 Greater Kennington was very much a working class set of neighbourhoods and replete with children. Given its location many of these kids would have been evacuated to rural and more middle class areas, and films document this well. A reimagined evacuation rail carriage is especially powerful.

As you scroll through the exhibit you get a sense of what children lose during war but also their resilience. War is a confusing experience for them, but also draws out innate toughness and beauty. Expect to see wartime artwork by children, letters, and even art created by optimistic German children in a detention camp. The last section deals with the impact of war on children very recently, including Syria and Ukraine.

And as we’ve been banging on about for almost a decade, the IWM is by no means a celebration of warfare but if anything serves as a reminder of the determination of those affected by war including Jews, women, infrastructures, and in this exhibit children. And over the years IWM has been incrementally evolving into a memorial of the horrors of war as opposed to a celebration of military might.  As it’s the lazy days of summer what’s better than seeing a scary doll or a smelly unmade bed?

Childhood and War is on now until 27 February 2027 and like everything in life, including this website, is totally free.