The Imperial War Museum (IWM) has always set itself high standards of interpretation and display. As long ago as the 1970s it developed a surprisingly forward-looking and inclusive approach to exhibitions, which even then seemed at odds with its backward, Edwardian sounding name. Despite that portentous title, now shortened to initials, it has never really been about the British empire or restricted itself to traditional military history.
It was interdisciplinary and wide ranging and remains so. IWM pioneered the collection and use of film, conducted oral history interviews and commissioned war art as well as acquiring and preserving more conventional museum objects and documents. It even worked closely with television companies, notably on the groundbreaking 1970s documentary series The World at War. The rest of the museum world is only just catching up.
Originally founded in 1917, IWM has chronicled the impact of war over the past 100 years. It both records and presents the experiences of men and women in the forces as well as civilians who have been caught up in conflict. Even remote wars affect all of us in our increasingly connected world, and the remit of the IWM has grown accordingly.
This has involved physical expansion on four sites beyond its main base in Lambeth, London. By far the largest of these is IWM Duxford, located on a historic RAF fighter station near Cambridge. Coincidentally, this first became a military training airfield in 1917, just as the creation of the original IWM was being proposed. In 1940, RAF Spitfires from Duxford played a significant role in the Battle of Britain, and from 1942-45 the airfield was home to 1,500 American servicemen whose Thunderbolts and Mustangs escorted US 8th Air Force bombers on daylight raids over Germany and much of occupied Europe.
Acquired by IWM in 1976, initially for collections storage, Duxford has grown to become the premier aviation museum in Europe. Exhibits now span the development of military and civil aviation in Britain, featuring iconic aircraft on static display, and occasionally in the air.
Smooth operator
Restoring the operational status of the airfield has enabled the museum to organise major airshows and flypasts. With more than 30 listed buildings still on the airfield, including the pre-war control tower and historic hangars, IWM has been able to recreate a convincing 1940s feel at much of Duxford, while incorporating practical facilities for museum displays, storage and restoration.
For me, the jewel in the crown is the newly transformed American Air Museum, reopened this year after a major refurbishment.
This is the latest in a series of development projects that have seen Duxford gradually morph from a rather raggedy collection of historic aircraft into a coherent and expertly presented museum and heritage site.
The American Air Museum’s progress has been spectacular. It has grown from a modest plan in the 1980s to get Duxford’s growing collection of US military aircraft under cover to the opening of a new museum in 1997. It is also a memorial dedicated to the 30,000 American airmen and women who lost their lives while serving from bases in the UK during the second world war.
The building’s design, which won the Riba Stirling Prize for architecture in 1998, is classic Norman Foster: stylish and practical high-tech engineering, entirely appropriate for the site.
The museum’s elliptical fingertip shape and size were designed to showcase the largest aircraft in the collection, a huge cold war-era B52 straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s classic film Dr Strangelove. The giant bomber squats menacingly in the centre, its wingtips almost touching the curved perimeter wall. Visitors enter the building at cockpit level with the nose of the bomber only inches away from them.
The museum’s single-span roof was designed in a similar way to the stressed skin structure of an aircraft fuselage, making it strong enough to suspend other planes around the B52 as if in flight.
The American Air Museum as built 20 years ago is impressive, but the original emphasis was very much on the military hardware, with a memorial on the side. It felt like a rather clinical tribute to American air power, but as a museum display it offered little interpretation beyond a brief label for each plane. The captions were drily technical and lacked any explanation or emotional punch. To be told as a simple matter of fact that Duxford’s B52 took part in 200 missions during the Vietnam war is a pretty terrifying statistic, but says nothing more about that conflict, the impact of “carpet bombing” tactics or the unknown victims of this lethal killing machine.
Fostering change
The reshaped museum retains Foster’s visual drama while adding the welcome option of extensive interpretation in new displays below the silent bulk of the aircraft. The exhibition has been cleverly devised to offer a wide range of views that encourage debate rather than lay down a single official line.
The hope, as Diane Lees, the director-general of IWM, puts it, is that this will “tell the story of the relationship between Britain and America in human terms. Personal stories come to the fore, vividly demonstrating the consequences of war in the 20th and 21st centuries.
“From the pilot, to the female riveter who built the aircraft, the African-American engineer who built the airfields to the courageous female journalist who reported on the action, visitors come face-to-face with people whose moving stories are inextricably linked with the formidable aircraft on display,” Lees says. “The impact of global warfare is told from contrasting perspectives, giving visitors a rounded view of the lasting effects of contemporary warfare.”
On the whole, this ambitious mission has been successfully achieved. Using the narratives of more than 80 individuals, mostly in their own words and set against the wider context of global conflict, is highly effective here. We are taken beyond the facts with the introduction of a range of opinions and emotion, roads that traditional military museums rarely go down.
There is a wide choice of engaging stories, presented in various ways. I found it particularly encouraging that even the controversial issues in the long Anglo-American partnership are not glossed over or ignored. Our relationship with these “friendly invaders” has not always been smooth.
The racial segregation of US forces in the second world war, which caused tension in the UK, and the long women’s peace camp protests against US cruise missiles at Greenham Common airbase in the 1980s, are just two examples. Both are highlighted here through personal accounts in the words of those who were there and what they experienced. These are of course subjective and partial, but far more effective and affecting than a dry and remote official description of what might have happened.
IWM has used new technology to create an evolving “roll of honour”, a tribute to Americans who lost their lives but also a growing visual record of all who served and their experience while based in the UK. With crowd-sourced content gathered from the museum’s website, this is a participatory digital resource to which visitors and remote users can contribute names, comments, information and images.
IWM may not be the first museum to use its website in this way, and many others are becoming more focused on the potential for digital income generation through marketing and retail sales. All the same, this is an impressive example of what is achievable and at a comparatively low cost. The possibilities for digital interpretive and interactive displays beyond simple visual access to a museum’s collections have barely emerged. And it is great to see that IWM is at the cutting edge of interpretation and using new ways to engage more visitors and users.
Oliver Green is a research fellow at the London Transport Museum
Main funders The Board of Trustees of the American Air Museum in Britain; Heritage Lottery Fund; Butterwick Trust; DCMS/Wolfson Museums & Galleries Improvement Fund; Federal Express Corporation; and a range of other funders
Exhibition design Redman Partnership LLP
Interpretation In house
Fit-out Marcon Fit-Out
Showcases Reier
Installation Richard Rogers Conservation
Aircraft suspension IWM Duxford conservation team; Borley Brothers Engineering
AV consultants Heritage Interactive; Squint Opera; Spiral; Magnetic North
Admission £18 Adult, £9 Child. Free for MA members
It was interdisciplinary and wide ranging and remains so. IWM pioneered the collection and use of film, conducted oral history interviews and commissioned war art as well as acquiring and preserving more conventional museum objects and documents. It even worked closely with television companies, notably on the groundbreaking 1970s documentary series The World at War. The rest of the museum world is only just catching up.
Originally founded in 1917, IWM has chronicled the impact of war over the past 100 years. It both records and presents the experiences of men and women in the forces as well as civilians who have been caught up in conflict. Even remote wars affect all of us in our increasingly connected world, and the remit of the IWM has grown accordingly.
This has involved physical expansion on four sites beyond its main base in Lambeth, London. By far the largest of these is IWM Duxford, located on a historic RAF fighter station near Cambridge. Coincidentally, this first became a military training airfield in 1917, just as the creation of the original IWM was being proposed. In 1940, RAF Spitfires from Duxford played a significant role in the Battle of Britain, and from 1942-45 the airfield was home to 1,500 American servicemen whose Thunderbolts and Mustangs escorted US 8th Air Force bombers on daylight raids over Germany and much of occupied Europe.
Acquired by IWM in 1976, initially for collections storage, Duxford has grown to become the premier aviation museum in Europe. Exhibits now span the development of military and civil aviation in Britain, featuring iconic aircraft on static display, and occasionally in the air.
Smooth operator
Restoring the operational status of the airfield has enabled the museum to organise major airshows and flypasts. With more than 30 listed buildings still on the airfield, including the pre-war control tower and historic hangars, IWM has been able to recreate a convincing 1940s feel at much of Duxford, while incorporating practical facilities for museum displays, storage and restoration.
For me, the jewel in the crown is the newly transformed American Air Museum, reopened this year after a major refurbishment.
This is the latest in a series of development projects that have seen Duxford gradually morph from a rather raggedy collection of historic aircraft into a coherent and expertly presented museum and heritage site.
The American Air Museum’s progress has been spectacular. It has grown from a modest plan in the 1980s to get Duxford’s growing collection of US military aircraft under cover to the opening of a new museum in 1997. It is also a memorial dedicated to the 30,000 American airmen and women who lost their lives while serving from bases in the UK during the second world war.
The building’s design, which won the Riba Stirling Prize for architecture in 1998, is classic Norman Foster: stylish and practical high-tech engineering, entirely appropriate for the site.
The museum’s elliptical fingertip shape and size were designed to showcase the largest aircraft in the collection, a huge cold war-era B52 straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s classic film Dr Strangelove. The giant bomber squats menacingly in the centre, its wingtips almost touching the curved perimeter wall. Visitors enter the building at cockpit level with the nose of the bomber only inches away from them.
The museum’s single-span roof was designed in a similar way to the stressed skin structure of an aircraft fuselage, making it strong enough to suspend other planes around the B52 as if in flight.
The American Air Museum as built 20 years ago is impressive, but the original emphasis was very much on the military hardware, with a memorial on the side. It felt like a rather clinical tribute to American air power, but as a museum display it offered little interpretation beyond a brief label for each plane. The captions were drily technical and lacked any explanation or emotional punch. To be told as a simple matter of fact that Duxford’s B52 took part in 200 missions during the Vietnam war is a pretty terrifying statistic, but says nothing more about that conflict, the impact of “carpet bombing” tactics or the unknown victims of this lethal killing machine.
Fostering change
The reshaped museum retains Foster’s visual drama while adding the welcome option of extensive interpretation in new displays below the silent bulk of the aircraft. The exhibition has been cleverly devised to offer a wide range of views that encourage debate rather than lay down a single official line.
The hope, as Diane Lees, the director-general of IWM, puts it, is that this will “tell the story of the relationship between Britain and America in human terms. Personal stories come to the fore, vividly demonstrating the consequences of war in the 20th and 21st centuries.
“From the pilot, to the female riveter who built the aircraft, the African-American engineer who built the airfields to the courageous female journalist who reported on the action, visitors come face-to-face with people whose moving stories are inextricably linked with the formidable aircraft on display,” Lees says. “The impact of global warfare is told from contrasting perspectives, giving visitors a rounded view of the lasting effects of contemporary warfare.”
On the whole, this ambitious mission has been successfully achieved. Using the narratives of more than 80 individuals, mostly in their own words and set against the wider context of global conflict, is highly effective here. We are taken beyond the facts with the introduction of a range of opinions and emotion, roads that traditional military museums rarely go down.
There is a wide choice of engaging stories, presented in various ways. I found it particularly encouraging that even the controversial issues in the long Anglo-American partnership are not glossed over or ignored. Our relationship with these “friendly invaders” has not always been smooth.
The racial segregation of US forces in the second world war, which caused tension in the UK, and the long women’s peace camp protests against US cruise missiles at Greenham Common airbase in the 1980s, are just two examples. Both are highlighted here through personal accounts in the words of those who were there and what they experienced. These are of course subjective and partial, but far more effective and affecting than a dry and remote official description of what might have happened.
IWM has used new technology to create an evolving “roll of honour”, a tribute to Americans who lost their lives but also a growing visual record of all who served and their experience while based in the UK. With crowd-sourced content gathered from the museum’s website, this is a participatory digital resource to which visitors and remote users can contribute names, comments, information and images.
IWM may not be the first museum to use its website in this way, and many others are becoming more focused on the potential for digital income generation through marketing and retail sales. All the same, this is an impressive example of what is achievable and at a comparatively low cost. The possibilities for digital interpretive and interactive displays beyond simple visual access to a museum’s collections have barely emerged. And it is great to see that IWM is at the cutting edge of interpretation and using new ways to engage more visitors and users.
Oliver Green is a research fellow at the London Transport Museum
Project data
Cost £3mMain funders The Board of Trustees of the American Air Museum in Britain; Heritage Lottery Fund; Butterwick Trust; DCMS/Wolfson Museums & Galleries Improvement Fund; Federal Express Corporation; and a range of other funders
Exhibition design Redman Partnership LLP
Interpretation In house
Fit-out Marcon Fit-Out
Showcases Reier
Installation Richard Rogers Conservation
Aircraft suspension IWM Duxford conservation team; Borley Brothers Engineering
AV consultants Heritage Interactive; Squint Opera; Spiral; Magnetic North
Admission £18 Adult, £9 Child. Free for MA members
