Children Asleep in the Underground: The Tube Shelters of Bill Brandt and Henry Moore

This article re-examines what historian Angus Calder has called the Myth of the Blitz, focussing upon the figure central to this Myth - the child asleep in the Underground. Images by Bill Brandt and Henry Moore are considered, as well as material by Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen, in order to understand a seminal moment in the history of modern British culture: the formation of a new, modernist aesthetic that was to play an integral part in die post-war transformation of the UK.