Extract: Nation, Memory, Myth by Steve Vizard
Posted on 11 Jun 2025
How does myth generate meaning for a nation and its citizens? How does a national myth transform into symbolic performances of cultural memory and kinship?
Arthur Ward
A self-confessed 'Airfix boffin', Arthur Ward is acknowledged as the Airfix historian. As a youngster, he spent many happy hours drawing creating weird and wonderful machines - mostly tanks, aircraft and spaceships. In the 1960s, he discovered that his private world could be given three-dimensional form via plastic kits, and since then his love of models (especially Airfix) has been unabated. For the last 25 years, he has collected examples of early Airfix kits and, seeing nothing odd about this eccentric passion, 'saves them for posterity'. He is the author of The Model World of Airfix (1984) and Airfix: Celebrating 50 Years of the Greatest Plastic Kits in the World (1999), as well as Collecting TV Toys & Ephemera and Classic Toys. He has his own website, CollectingFriends.com, co-founded with Peter Donaldson of Radio 4, which attracts over 2,000 keen collectors worldwide.
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