The Tank Museum, Bovington, Dorset

A museum dedicated to the tank faces formidable challenges in engaging audiences. Like any transport museum, its core collection consists of large objects that require a lot of space to display, but can rarely move.

Tanks are purely functional military machines, built for domination. Unlike cars, boats, planes or, most of all, steam locomotives, tanks have no likeable qualities, serve no useful purpose in daily life and have no aesthetic pretensions.

They do not even have the sinister glamour associated with knives and guns. Who but a rivet-counting nerd or a military commander would actually enthuse about them?

The tank has been around for nearly a century. It was originally developed as a weapon by the British during the first world war in an attempt to break the stalemate of trench warfare on the Western Front. The new weapon did not win the war for the allies, but it played a significant role after first lumbering on to the battlefields of the Somme in 1916.

Bovington Camp in Dorset was the first headquarters of the Tank Corps and after the war a collection of early British tanks, including the famous prototype Little Willie and a Mark 1 'Mother', were preserved here. This was the beginnings of what became the Tank Museum. The current museum is on Ministry of Defence property close to the Royal Armoured Corps base.

This part of Dorset is still used by the army for training and on the drive into Bovington you may well encounter, as I did, a column of armoured vehicles with L-plates on the main road.

Machines for domination

Our images of so many conflicts, from the second world war to
the invasion of Iraq, have been dominated by tanks: German panzers rolling over Poland in 1939; Soviet tanks on the streets of Prague in 1968; Nato tanks in Basra in 2008.

Their role in the visual media has had as much impact as their actual presence, though it is rarely positive. The iconic pictures of a young man confronting a column of Chinese tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989 were truly extraordinary.

Today the Tank Museum in Bovington owns the best and broadest collection of tanks in the world, with more than 300 armoured vehicles acquired from nearly 30 countries. Its archive and reference library has grown into one of the world's major repositories of information on armoured warfare.

But however important or comprehensive a collection may be, the test of its effectiveness as a museum must be the quality and appeal of its presentation and display. For years the Tank Museum looked like a garage full of big boys' toys. It was impressive to a minority, but had little appeal to a wider audience and did not do justice to its subject.

The Tank Museum's £15.4m revamp, completed earlier this year, marks a major change of approach. A large building extension now incorporates a new entrance area, shop, cafe and, most significantly, a big permanent display hall called the Tank Story, featuring what the museum describes as "35 of the most important tanks in history in state of the art displays".

It is certainly a huge improvement, shaped no doubt by the demands of the Heritage Lottery Fund. In the extension gallery, tanks are no longer lined up in rows (though they still are in the old hall next door, now renamed the Discovery Centre). The key vehicles are given appropriate space and the contextual displays are well written, with good graphics and effective use of multimedia.

There are some fascinating and unique exhibits here, but the claim at the start of the gallery that "the tank story is the story of people" is not really borne out. This is a real shame because the museum has a lot of interesting oral history material, some of which is available on its website.

It has not been used creatively in the new exhibition, and the people content takes a very narrow and exclusive focus. We are told that we will "meet the soldiers, engineers and politicians whose lives have been affected by tanks", but what about everyone else?

The tanks still dominate the space, and there are still too many on display to tell a story. Although it is well presented, the new exhibition lacks pace and variety, and the visitor soon suffers from information overload.

Surprisingly, there are very few interactives, and the school party that was visiting when I was there looked thoroughly bored. Tracked vehicle rides in the outside arena are available on certain days, as well as special tank ride packages.

These must liven up a visit considerably, though they raise the inevitable question about what is appropriate to offer as a "fun" experience in a museum about the serious business of warfare. The idea that any military museum can really simulate the horror of combat conditions, either as education or entertainment, is pretty bizarre.

It reminded me of the lines in Siegfried Sassoon's famous poem Blighters, written in 1917 when the new wonder weapon was being celebrated on the London stage: "I'd like to see a Tank come down the stalls/ Lurching to rag-time tunes, or 'Home, sweet Home'/ And there'd be no more jokes in Music-halls/ To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume."

Oliver Green is the former head of collections at the London Transport Museum