As a northerner, I was keen to find out what was distinctive about the north's experience of war, what the impact was on individual communities that were familiar to me and how this experience differed from the rest of the country. I left disappointed at this disjointed, half-hearted and unreflective exhibition.
Quite understandably, the exhibition progresses thematically rather than chronologically, but with the farcical result that it begins with the outbreak of peace and the 1945 VE celebrations.
As the introductory panel explains, 'people wore silly hats, sang silly songs and danced silly dances, but after long years of stress and hardship they felt they deserved a party'.
This kind of Janet-and-John language was typical, and there are many moments when the exhibition seems unwilling (or unable) to explore the themes that it claims for itself.
For example, it briefly looks at the creation of the Pals' battalions in the first world war, acknowledges their enormous losses on the Somme, but fails to explore the impact that this had on the individual communities.
What were the repercussions in Accrington, when several thousand of its citizens were killed or wounded in a single morning in 1916? The exhibition has nothing to say.
The story of the Pals is, predictably, set against a display of poppies, cascading gracefully from above. Such wartime cliches abound - sandbags, Vera Lynn, Glenn Miller, ration books - there were moments when the exhibition seemed designed for people who might never have heard of the two world wars. Certainly, it didn't inspire you to enquire too deeply.
Display cases include some potentially fascinating letters and reports, but only show a single page, with the other pages, tantalisingly hidden underneath. I was halfway through an enthralling account of the entrapment of a German spy in Salford when the (metaphorical) lights went out.
In the section on the victory celebrations sits one of the most confusing pieces of interpretation I've ever seen. A giant wireless complete with giant knobs and a dial, blaring out, yes, you've guessed it, Churchillian rhetoric.
It just begs to be fiddled with and in the course of a few minutes I observed any number of punters engaging in full-on fiddling, only to move on, confused and thwarted, as none of the knobs turn and the dial is completely static. Difficult to work out what ran out first - the ideas or the cash.
This is generally characteristic of much of the exhibition, which lacks clarity of purpose and shows little, if any, editorial direction. Even the basic premise seems flawed. The North at War is the first major exhibition to examine the impact of both world wars on the north of England.
One of the most fatuous elements of the exhibition is related to the second world war in the Atlantic and the endless series of convoys that crossed from America to the UK under constant threat of aerial and submarine attack.
Visitors are invited to 'take the lifeline buzzer challenge and see if you can make it across the stormy seas from Nova Scotia to Liverpool'. The challenge is to move a loop of metal along a curly piece of wire linking depictions of the various perils that might be encountered - mines, U-boats, air attack - but without touching the wire and setting off a buzzer.
Call me po-faced, but such a display is, at the very least, of doubtful taste, and reinforces a sense that the exhibition treats the wartime experience as something quaint, not real and horrific, more Warmington-on-Sea than Warrington.
There are attempts to introduce some personal stories into the narrative. A number of panels, so brightly back-lit as to suggest approaching with some degree of caution, give bald outlines of some wartime lives.
But there is something insubstantial and unconvincing about this. Nothing truly individual is present, no personal accounts, no telling testimony, just the facts. A chronology of a life, often tragic, but still just a chronology.
Facts and figures loom large in the exhibition, with a huge à la carte selection available on the display panels. But the facts go largely unexplained. In a section headed Changing Communities, we are told: 'Over 14,000 Canadian servicemen married British women'; '40,000 were evacuated from Leeds in less than seven hours', '29,000 people from Jersey and Guernsey were evacuated to Cheshire and Lancashire'.
But these are mere numbers and there is little to suggest how these events actually changed communities.
The display cases presented the kind of puzzle that you might want to spend a wet Sunday afternoon trying to solve. In one case, 27 individual objects are displayed, all unlabelled.
First find the object you want to identify. Then, at the foot of the case, to the left, locate the small panel with a silhouette of the 27 overlapping objects; each object in the silhouette is identified by a number.
Once you have identified the shape of your chosen object and established its number, move across to the right and match up the number to a numerical list of descriptions. Repeat twice to check that you have correctly identified the object. You have an attention span of six seconds in which to complete the task.
This may seem a harsh judgment, but the public has an insatiable appetite for coverage of the two conflicts and the output from other media is substantial and often highly distinguished.
If one considers the BBC's excellent recent TV programmes on Auschwitz and, perhaps more appositely, Charles Wheeler's recent radio series, Coming Home, a beautifully crafted examination of what the end of the second world war meant to people in Britain, then you realise what poor fare this is.
Michael Wright is the head of marketing at the Museums Association
Project data
Cost: £150, 000
Funding: The Big Lottery Fund
Exhibition designer: Hemisphere DMC
Exhibition ends: 8 Jan 2006
Quite understandably, the exhibition progresses thematically rather than chronologically, but with the farcical result that it begins with the outbreak of peace and the 1945 VE celebrations.
As the introductory panel explains, 'people wore silly hats, sang silly songs and danced silly dances, but after long years of stress and hardship they felt they deserved a party'.
This kind of Janet-and-John language was typical, and there are many moments when the exhibition seems unwilling (or unable) to explore the themes that it claims for itself.
For example, it briefly looks at the creation of the Pals' battalions in the first world war, acknowledges their enormous losses on the Somme, but fails to explore the impact that this had on the individual communities.
What were the repercussions in Accrington, when several thousand of its citizens were killed or wounded in a single morning in 1916? The exhibition has nothing to say.
The story of the Pals is, predictably, set against a display of poppies, cascading gracefully from above. Such wartime cliches abound - sandbags, Vera Lynn, Glenn Miller, ration books - there were moments when the exhibition seemed designed for people who might never have heard of the two world wars. Certainly, it didn't inspire you to enquire too deeply.
Display cases include some potentially fascinating letters and reports, but only show a single page, with the other pages, tantalisingly hidden underneath. I was halfway through an enthralling account of the entrapment of a German spy in Salford when the (metaphorical) lights went out.
In the section on the victory celebrations sits one of the most confusing pieces of interpretation I've ever seen. A giant wireless complete with giant knobs and a dial, blaring out, yes, you've guessed it, Churchillian rhetoric.
It just begs to be fiddled with and in the course of a few minutes I observed any number of punters engaging in full-on fiddling, only to move on, confused and thwarted, as none of the knobs turn and the dial is completely static. Difficult to work out what ran out first - the ideas or the cash.
This is generally characteristic of much of the exhibition, which lacks clarity of purpose and shows little, if any, editorial direction. Even the basic premise seems flawed. The North at War is the first major exhibition to examine the impact of both world wars on the north of England.
One of the most fatuous elements of the exhibition is related to the second world war in the Atlantic and the endless series of convoys that crossed from America to the UK under constant threat of aerial and submarine attack.
Visitors are invited to 'take the lifeline buzzer challenge and see if you can make it across the stormy seas from Nova Scotia to Liverpool'. The challenge is to move a loop of metal along a curly piece of wire linking depictions of the various perils that might be encountered - mines, U-boats, air attack - but without touching the wire and setting off a buzzer.
Call me po-faced, but such a display is, at the very least, of doubtful taste, and reinforces a sense that the exhibition treats the wartime experience as something quaint, not real and horrific, more Warmington-on-Sea than Warrington.
There are attempts to introduce some personal stories into the narrative. A number of panels, so brightly back-lit as to suggest approaching with some degree of caution, give bald outlines of some wartime lives.
But there is something insubstantial and unconvincing about this. Nothing truly individual is present, no personal accounts, no telling testimony, just the facts. A chronology of a life, often tragic, but still just a chronology.
Facts and figures loom large in the exhibition, with a huge à la carte selection available on the display panels. But the facts go largely unexplained. In a section headed Changing Communities, we are told: 'Over 14,000 Canadian servicemen married British women'; '40,000 were evacuated from Leeds in less than seven hours', '29,000 people from Jersey and Guernsey were evacuated to Cheshire and Lancashire'.
But these are mere numbers and there is little to suggest how these events actually changed communities.
The display cases presented the kind of puzzle that you might want to spend a wet Sunday afternoon trying to solve. In one case, 27 individual objects are displayed, all unlabelled.
First find the object you want to identify. Then, at the foot of the case, to the left, locate the small panel with a silhouette of the 27 overlapping objects; each object in the silhouette is identified by a number.
Once you have identified the shape of your chosen object and established its number, move across to the right and match up the number to a numerical list of descriptions. Repeat twice to check that you have correctly identified the object. You have an attention span of six seconds in which to complete the task.
This may seem a harsh judgment, but the public has an insatiable appetite for coverage of the two conflicts and the output from other media is substantial and often highly distinguished.
If one considers the BBC's excellent recent TV programmes on Auschwitz and, perhaps more appositely, Charles Wheeler's recent radio series, Coming Home, a beautifully crafted examination of what the end of the second world war meant to people in Britain, then you realise what poor fare this is.
Michael Wright is the head of marketing at the Museums Association
Project data
Cost: £150, 000
Funding: The Big Lottery Fund
Exhibition designer: Hemisphere DMC
Exhibition ends: 8 Jan 2006
