It’s Only Mr. T! 30 Years Of Toys Confiscated From London Schools

It’s Only Mr. T! 30 Years Of Toys Confiscated From London Schools

Yeah, it’s easy to romanticize the past, but there’s something almost sweet about Confiscation Cabinets, an exhibition at the V&A’s Museum of Childhood showing 30 years’ worth of contraband swiped from kids at over 150 schools in London.

It’s Only Mr. T! 30 Years Of Toys Confiscated From London Schools

Teacher and artist Guy Tarrant collected a lot of the ephemera himself, with the rest donated for the project by fellow educators across the city.

It’s Only Mr. T! 30 Years Of Toys Confiscated From London Schools

It’s Only Mr. T! 30 Years Of Toys Confiscated From London Schools

The variety is impressive — folded, hand-written fortune-tellers, Dr. Who trading cards, plastic Stormtroopers, tennis balls, way-outdated electronics — with the majority of this stuff riding right on the razor thin line between total junk and absolute treasure.

It’s Only Mr. T! 30 Years Of Toys Confiscated From London Schools

It’s Only Mr. T! 30 Years Of Toys Confiscated From London Schools

It’s Only Mr. T! 30 Years Of Toys Confiscated From London Schools

Then some of it is, unsurprisingly, less playful and more worrisome: a bottle of bourbon, homemade axes and slingshots, found bullets, and a freakin’ lit fire bomb (!) were all sourced directly from students.

It’s Only Mr. T! 30 Years Of Toys Confiscated From London Schools

It’s Only Mr. T! 30 Years Of Toys Confiscated From London Schools

It’s Only Mr. T! 30 Years Of Toys Confiscated From London Schools

It’s Only Mr. T! 30 Years Of Toys Confiscated From London Schools

All of the specimens are labelled with a year (or decade), showing an evolution of cultural and adolescent interests as we’ve edged into a more modern age. Taken together, they exist as a testament to the innate skill that kids of any era have to turn pretty much anything into a distraction, nuisance, or major annoyance. Wouldn’t it be nice if creepy crawlies were the worst of what’s being brought into schools today? [Golem13]


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.