Imperial War Museum, London
The opening of the redeveloped IWM London is one of the major events marking this year's first world war centenary. Julian Humphrys assesses the First World War Galleries while Yasmin Khan looks at the new atrium and the second world war displays
Writing during the first world war, Edwin Montagu, Britain’s minister of munitions, commented that “this was not a soldier’s or civilian’s war, but the whole nation’s war”. The Imperial War Museum’s (IWM) new First World War Galleries amply illustrate this point.
Previous first world war displays, at the IWM and elsewhere, have usually included sections on, among others, the Home Front and the role played by women and non-British troops. But here, perhaps for the first time, these are fully integrated into one coherent narrative.
Turn from the displays on the use of artillery on the Western Front, for example, and you’ll see a picture of women working in shell factories, or a poster making the point that such work at home was as equally important as fighting at the front.
A strong narrative thread runs throughout the displays. The stated aims of the exhibition are to explain why the war began, why it continued for so long, how it was won (and lost) and what happened afterwards.
Where possible, the participants are allowed to speak for themselves, notably through extracts from the museum’s extensive collections of letters and diaries. Yet, this is much more than simple narrative history; the displays also focus on people’s reactions to the war and help to bring their individual experiences to life.
Stories to tell
The objects on display do not disappoint, which is hardly surprising given that the museum has more than 140,000 three-dimensional artefacts from which to choose. Fewer items are now on display than before but much more is made of those that are.
A great deal of thought has clearly gone into the selection of these artefacts. Some are star items: a greatcoat worn by the Kaiser, complete with shortened left sleeve to mask his withered arm; bullet-riddled signs from Ypres; and an extraordinarily complicated doodle made by British prime minister David Lloyd George at Versailles in 1918 – perhaps evidence of the complexity of the negotiations that took place there.
Other items are more prosaic but all have stories to tell. The handle of an army spade has been polished by the many hands that used it to dig trenches and shelters.
Small, round “on war service” badges attest to the need to shield those whose employment prevented them from joining up from public indignation. A fragment of wallpaper taken from a captured German bunker illustrates not only the mania for souvenir hunting but also the way in which the Germans set out to make life at the front as comfortable as possible.
Indeed, like the wallpaper, many items tell more than one story and these have been cleverly teased out by the exhibition team. A charred map of London recovered from a Zeppelin raider shot down in flames over Potter’s Bar in October 1916 is a case in point.
It illustrates the German bomber offensive and British countermeasures, but also enables the exhibition to explore public attitudes to “the Hun” in general and these raiders in particular: the caption accompanying the artefact explains that, as the Zeppelin crew jumped to their deaths from the burning aircraft, they were watched by an exultant crowd, roaring out the national anthem.
No punches pulled
The great strength of this exhibition lies in the way it displays and interprets its smaller exhibits. It is a pity that the collection of large artefacts that gave the museum’s old atrium the affectionate nickname of “the biggest boy’s bedroom in London” had to be dispersed.
While this means that more of them can be seen in their historical context some, such as the Sopwith Camel plane and Mark V tank, now lack the space they need to be fully appreciated.
The old trench experience with its static dummies clearly needed changing but, despite a clever piece of film showing silhouettes of soldiers, its stripped-back replacement seems incomplete.
Although I would have liked the point that soldiers actually spent a relatively short amount of time in the frontline trenches to have been made more strongly, the exhibition dispels a number of other myths: Field Marshal Douglas Haig is no longer Blackadder’s callous buffoon, and while casualty rates were shocking there was no “lost generation”.
Quite rightly, it is an exhibition that pulls no punches and the point that many continued to suffer from the war years after it ended is graphically made.
It will be hard to forget the display showing attempts to help those with faces destroyed by shellfire, while I saw more than one visitor reduced to tears by the footage showing the mental and physical anguish of shell-shock sufferers.
Julian Humphrys is the development officer at the Battlefields Trust
The refurbished atrium at IWM London looks predictably grand, laden with a constellation of artillery, protruding vehicles and suspended aircraft.
There is a Spitfire fighter plane used during the battle of Britain and one of the thousands of V2 rockets that Hitler’s Germany dropped on London. Further along are more recent war relics: a Harrier jet deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Among other “witnesses of war” are Jeremy Deller’s art installation of the scorched wreckage from a suicide car bombing in Baghdad, a crumpled piece of rusted steelwork from the World Trade Centre and a damaged Land Rover belonging to Reuters news agency that was hit by an Israeli rocket in the Gaza strip in 2006.
Visitors are imbued with a sense of the enduring impacts of war, both past and present.
Running parallel across the first-floor balconies are a series of areas focusing on specific aspects surrounding the second world war, presented as “Turning Points” between 1934 and 1945.
There aren’t any conventional object labels – instead, text can be found on remote pillars, which makes it difficult to digest the information quickly and creates bottlenecks. Many visitors brush past the information, rendering huge swathes of exhibits inaccessible.
I squat in front of a pillar to study a knee-height gallery map but this attempt to make sense of that graphic proves even more disorientating. Elsewhere, pillars are peppered with a range of voices representing perspectives from the curator, a historian and the designer.
These superfluous notepad additions mostly come across as distracting disclaimers. More intrusively, in some places they sound like didactic ego-trips.
Ironically, the emphasis on articulating the designer’s vision merely draws attention to the limitations of an approach that obscures the overarching narrative of historic events.
Most importantly, it displaces a more inclusive model of co-curatorship that could better accommodate the lay community; why not ringfence space for the authentic bystander’s voice instead? Some museum professionals might be interested in analysing the effects of this experiment in plural interpretation.
But don’t the majority of visitors want to know, at least as a starting point, exactly what the object presented in front of them is, its provenance, its purpose and relevance?
Pales in comparison
The official museum guidebook available from the bookshop provides a useful synopsis but it doesn’t really help visitors get to grips with the detail of specific second world war exhibits on display.
I listen enviously to visitors accompanied by enthused war veterans who deliver incisive interpretations of objects in tandem with their route through the exhibits.
If there is determined resistance to incorporate object labels, perhaps the lack of interpretation could be swiftly remedied through an audioguide or by a bespoke gallery leaflet.
I find the dispersed arrangement of disjointed snippets exhausting, although there is a spot for reflection by one of the stone window ledges. Despite the huge breadth of historical content, I was left yearning for something less fragmented and more compelling.
I had hoped the second world war galleries would help unravel the main complexities, underpinnings and interconnecting dynamics of the conflict. But IWM’s stated goal is to use groups of objects to tell the stories of people and events connected to them rather than elucidate the story of the war itself.
It should be said that these are temporary displays: the museum is planning a full refurbishment that should be completed ahead of the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war in 2025.
Meanwhile, the prodigious first world war exhibition on the ground floor overshadows the rest of the museum, luring newcomers into a cavernous space bursting with immersive content that is gripping, exhilarating and discerning. These galleries are certainly world-class and a benchmark for the upper galleries to live up to.
Yasmin Khan is an independent cultural adviser who has worked at the British Library and the Science Museum
Previous first world war displays, at the IWM and elsewhere, have usually included sections on, among others, the Home Front and the role played by women and non-British troops. But here, perhaps for the first time, these are fully integrated into one coherent narrative.
Turn from the displays on the use of artillery on the Western Front, for example, and you’ll see a picture of women working in shell factories, or a poster making the point that such work at home was as equally important as fighting at the front.
A strong narrative thread runs throughout the displays. The stated aims of the exhibition are to explain why the war began, why it continued for so long, how it was won (and lost) and what happened afterwards.
Where possible, the participants are allowed to speak for themselves, notably through extracts from the museum’s extensive collections of letters and diaries. Yet, this is much more than simple narrative history; the displays also focus on people’s reactions to the war and help to bring their individual experiences to life.
Stories to tell
The objects on display do not disappoint, which is hardly surprising given that the museum has more than 140,000 three-dimensional artefacts from which to choose. Fewer items are now on display than before but much more is made of those that are.
A great deal of thought has clearly gone into the selection of these artefacts. Some are star items: a greatcoat worn by the Kaiser, complete with shortened left sleeve to mask his withered arm; bullet-riddled signs from Ypres; and an extraordinarily complicated doodle made by British prime minister David Lloyd George at Versailles in 1918 – perhaps evidence of the complexity of the negotiations that took place there.
Other items are more prosaic but all have stories to tell. The handle of an army spade has been polished by the many hands that used it to dig trenches and shelters.
Small, round “on war service” badges attest to the need to shield those whose employment prevented them from joining up from public indignation. A fragment of wallpaper taken from a captured German bunker illustrates not only the mania for souvenir hunting but also the way in which the Germans set out to make life at the front as comfortable as possible.
Indeed, like the wallpaper, many items tell more than one story and these have been cleverly teased out by the exhibition team. A charred map of London recovered from a Zeppelin raider shot down in flames over Potter’s Bar in October 1916 is a case in point.
It illustrates the German bomber offensive and British countermeasures, but also enables the exhibition to explore public attitudes to “the Hun” in general and these raiders in particular: the caption accompanying the artefact explains that, as the Zeppelin crew jumped to their deaths from the burning aircraft, they were watched by an exultant crowd, roaring out the national anthem.
No punches pulled
The great strength of this exhibition lies in the way it displays and interprets its smaller exhibits. It is a pity that the collection of large artefacts that gave the museum’s old atrium the affectionate nickname of “the biggest boy’s bedroom in London” had to be dispersed.
While this means that more of them can be seen in their historical context some, such as the Sopwith Camel plane and Mark V tank, now lack the space they need to be fully appreciated.
The old trench experience with its static dummies clearly needed changing but, despite a clever piece of film showing silhouettes of soldiers, its stripped-back replacement seems incomplete.
Although I would have liked the point that soldiers actually spent a relatively short amount of time in the frontline trenches to have been made more strongly, the exhibition dispels a number of other myths: Field Marshal Douglas Haig is no longer Blackadder’s callous buffoon, and while casualty rates were shocking there was no “lost generation”.
Quite rightly, it is an exhibition that pulls no punches and the point that many continued to suffer from the war years after it ended is graphically made.
It will be hard to forget the display showing attempts to help those with faces destroyed by shellfire, while I saw more than one visitor reduced to tears by the footage showing the mental and physical anguish of shell-shock sufferers.
Julian Humphrys is the development officer at the Battlefields Trust
The refurbished atrium at IWM London looks predictably grand, laden with a constellation of artillery, protruding vehicles and suspended aircraft.
There is a Spitfire fighter plane used during the battle of Britain and one of the thousands of V2 rockets that Hitler’s Germany dropped on London. Further along are more recent war relics: a Harrier jet deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Among other “witnesses of war” are Jeremy Deller’s art installation of the scorched wreckage from a suicide car bombing in Baghdad, a crumpled piece of rusted steelwork from the World Trade Centre and a damaged Land Rover belonging to Reuters news agency that was hit by an Israeli rocket in the Gaza strip in 2006.
Visitors are imbued with a sense of the enduring impacts of war, both past and present.
Running parallel across the first-floor balconies are a series of areas focusing on specific aspects surrounding the second world war, presented as “Turning Points” between 1934 and 1945.
There aren’t any conventional object labels – instead, text can be found on remote pillars, which makes it difficult to digest the information quickly and creates bottlenecks. Many visitors brush past the information, rendering huge swathes of exhibits inaccessible.
I squat in front of a pillar to study a knee-height gallery map but this attempt to make sense of that graphic proves even more disorientating. Elsewhere, pillars are peppered with a range of voices representing perspectives from the curator, a historian and the designer.
These superfluous notepad additions mostly come across as distracting disclaimers. More intrusively, in some places they sound like didactic ego-trips.
Ironically, the emphasis on articulating the designer’s vision merely draws attention to the limitations of an approach that obscures the overarching narrative of historic events.
Most importantly, it displaces a more inclusive model of co-curatorship that could better accommodate the lay community; why not ringfence space for the authentic bystander’s voice instead? Some museum professionals might be interested in analysing the effects of this experiment in plural interpretation.
But don’t the majority of visitors want to know, at least as a starting point, exactly what the object presented in front of them is, its provenance, its purpose and relevance?
Pales in comparison
The official museum guidebook available from the bookshop provides a useful synopsis but it doesn’t really help visitors get to grips with the detail of specific second world war exhibits on display.
I listen enviously to visitors accompanied by enthused war veterans who deliver incisive interpretations of objects in tandem with their route through the exhibits.
If there is determined resistance to incorporate object labels, perhaps the lack of interpretation could be swiftly remedied through an audioguide or by a bespoke gallery leaflet.
I find the dispersed arrangement of disjointed snippets exhausting, although there is a spot for reflection by one of the stone window ledges. Despite the huge breadth of historical content, I was left yearning for something less fragmented and more compelling.
I had hoped the second world war galleries would help unravel the main complexities, underpinnings and interconnecting dynamics of the conflict. But IWM’s stated goal is to use groups of objects to tell the stories of people and events connected to them rather than elucidate the story of the war itself.
It should be said that these are temporary displays: the museum is planning a full refurbishment that should be completed ahead of the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war in 2025.
Meanwhile, the prodigious first world war exhibition on the ground floor overshadows the rest of the museum, luring newcomers into a cavernous space bursting with immersive content that is gripping, exhilarating and discerning. These galleries are certainly world-class and a benchmark for the upper galleries to live up to.
Yasmin Khan is an independent cultural adviser who has worked at the British Library and the Science Museum
Project data
- Cost £40m
- Main funders Heritage Lottery Fund; Department for Culture, Media and Sport; Pears Foundation; Waste Recycling Environmental; DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund
- Architect Foster + Partners
- Research and content IWM
- Exhibition design Casson Mann
- Exhibition graphic design Nick Bell Design
- Construction manager Fraser Randall
- Graphic production Displayways
- Construction Scena; Gray Concrete; Eastwood Cook
- AV design and production ISO; Squint/Opera; Guy Holbrow
- Soundscape design and production Idee und Klang
- Mannequins Proportion
- Models and interactives Paragon Creative
- Object mounts and installation Richard Rogers
- Display cases ClickNetherfield; Meyvaert
- Lighting design DHA Design Services
- AV Sysco
- Mechanical and electrical fit-out Reed Engineering
- Textile conservation and dressing support Kitty Morris Textile Conservation
- Captions IWM Youth Panel
- Access consultants Centre for Accessible Environments; Access and Museum Design; VocalEyes; Cutting Edge Design; Age UK; Southwark Disability Forum