War. What is it good for? (Imperial War Museum (London))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Imperial War Museum (London)
Date:	19/08/02 (209 review reads)
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As a child I always wanted to go to the Imperial War Museum, but whenever my family visited London there would always be more important things to do. When I moved to London it cost too much to get into, so I only finally went this year. As with all big museums, there's far too much there to see properly in one visit. I've now been twice, and I still need to go again.

I think that technically the Imperial War Museum is spread across a number of sites, including the Cabinet War Rooms and HMS Belfast. The only bit I've been to is the main building in Lambeth. It's very easy to get to by Tube: Lambeth North (Bakerloo, zone 1) is just a few minutes walk away, and the museum is amply sign-posted once you get out of the station. I daresay there are plenty of buses that would take you there, too. It's open 10 till 6 every day (except Christmas I guess).

You don't have to pay to get in (which is very good indeed). You simply collect a floorplan from what used to be the ticket office, and in you go. A more detailed and 'lavishly illustrated' guidebook can be purchased for about a fiver. There's a café, which charges too much for smallish helpings of food, and a rather good book and gift shop.

The museum is full of information about wars last century, mostly ones that the UK was involved in, with heavy emphasis on the two world wars. On first entering you'll find a huge room full of large exhibits. There are tanks, and planes hanging from the ceiling (a Spitfire, a Sopwith Camel, a V-1 flying bomb etc). All manner of war-related vehicles and large guns, including a V-2 rocket, one-man submarines and the smallest boat that took part in the Dunkirk evacuations (very small it is, too). I think everything here's genuine, with the exception of a replica of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. This is great stuff - anyone who has even a passing interest in the history of the two world wars will recognise most of
the things on display.

There's an exhibit about what it would have been like in a WWII submarine. This exhibit is aimed mainly at children, and has lots of buttons to press, things to smell etc. Because it's a realistic replica of a submarine, it is rather cramped, especially when full of children. There's also a reconstruction of a World War 1 trench, built to tie in to a recent BBC series. Again, this is great stuff for kids (and adults too, let's be honest), as you get to crawl around in dugouts and press buttons and so on. My only (rather unreasonable) complaint is that it all smells far too clean. This exhibit isn't permanent, which is a shame. It should be.

The main part of the museum is in the basement. This is where the detailed permanent exhibitions are held. There are large exhibitions on both world wars, a smaller one about the Korean War and a small section detailing other wars since 1945. There's a huge variety of artefacts on display, along with information about each important area of each war. Most of them are uniforms, or guns, with the odd grenade or gas mask thrown in. And lots and lots of posters. Throughout there are telephones you can pick up to hear people who fought in the wars telling you what it was like. There are sound effects playing at various points, and music, and film footage.

My favourite bit was the section about the Home Front during the Second World War. I love the posters from that era - warnings not to discuss important state secrets in front of women (because they might be spies), advice on making clothes out of old sacks, digging for victory etc. Marvellous. (Probably not so great if you actually lived through it, I suppose.)

These sections are vast, and there's far too much to do in one visit. There are other things in the basement. There's a smaller (permanent) trench exhibit, which is OK, but nowhere near as good as the one upstairs. There's somethin
g called 'The Blitz Experience' that I didn't see because the queues were too long. And there's the 1940s House, a complete-in-every-way replica of a house from the 1940s. I think it was used in a TV series of the same name. This was interesting, although going around with my parents was a little unwise. 'Oh, we used to have a radio/table/lamp just like that one' and so on. I fear I was in imminent danger of being told about how they all had to go round their neighbours' houses to watch the Coronation 'because not many people had television in those days, you know'. Fortunately a huge influx of schoolchildren at this point meant we had to leave.


There are various other exhibits on the upper floors, including a history of spies, and an exhibition about the Victoria Cross. There are galleries of war art, and various temporary exhibitions are housed up there.

The second floor contains the Holocaust exhibition. As you might imagine, this is a pretty powerful and sombre experience, and it really warrants a whole trip to itself (which is how I saw it). You probably won't want to see anything else afterwards. It takes about 90 minutes to go around properly. Young children aren't allowed in there, which is understandable as a lot of it is very distressing, especially some of the film footage. It's the perfect example of how a subject like this should be shown. There's a huge amount of material about the Holocaust that could be presented, but the exhibition selects carefully what it shows, and never overloads you with too much detail.

It takes it slowly, building up a reasonably complete step-by-step history of the Holocaust from the rise to power of the Nazis, through the early persecution of the Jews, atrocities in occupied Poland and elsewhere, before moving on to the death camps themselves. Finally there are sections about the liberation of the camps and the punishment of the leading Na
zis. Throughout there are plenty of artefacts (from propaganda posters to prisoners' uniforms) and many video and audio survivor and witness testimonies. There are details about individual victims at every stage to remind us that, however overwhelming the numbers may be, this happened to real people. The centrepiece of the exhibition is a large model of the area at Auschwitz-Birkenau where prisoners disembarked from their trains to be sent either to work or to the gas chamber. This is accompanied by witnesses describing their experiences, and there are piles of victims' shoes and other artefacts on display nearby (including a child's doll with its face partly crushed - that particularly sticks in my mind).

It was interesting watching the reactions of other people in this section. Everyone adopted a studied look of complete impassivity - we were wandering around galleries depicting appalling horrors, and no one was allowing themselves to display any emotion whatsoever (myself included). It was hard to know how else to behave. (There were some slightly unsettling exceptions. The foreign tourists who were giggling at one of the film clips, for instance, or the two scary-looking men who were discussing how much certain items of Nazi memorabilia would be worth on the black market.)

As I said, I really would recommend going to this exhibit separately to the rest of the museum, it's completely different in tone. It's very difficult to try and look at anything else afterwards, as you'll probably find some of the images staying with you for quite a while. But do go and see it.

So that's the Imperial War Museum. It's a museum of two halves (the Holocaust exhibition and the rest). Both are excellent. Well worth a visit next time you're in London.

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