The Imperial War Museum North

I fancied a trip out yesterday and the Imperial War Museum North sounded as good a plan as any. The name surprises me – not only because it is quite clunky but because they’ve never thought to get rid of the word "Imperial". With pressure growing to change OBE from "British Empire" to "British Excellence" or something equally "progressive" I would’ve thought the forces of self-proclaimed enlightenment would’ve banished the I-word along with anything else which refers to a period of British history not covered by the six years in which we fought the Nazis and therefore, for the first and only time, weren’t complete bastards.

The photos which follow are of variable quality. They were taken on my phone, often in very low light. I've improved them as much as time would allow.

The museum is part of the Salford Quays development in Manchester which also includes The Lowry and which will be home to the BBC’s huge Media City complex. It is very easy to get to – ten stops on the Metrolink from Piccadilly station – and has that futuristic feel which no amount of 1970s car parks passed off as twenty fifth century cities in Doctor Who can dispel. That said it is quirky building with a big thing sticking out of the top. The architect won awards you know. That’s usually a sign that it won’t look like a building.

The first thing you see when you go in through the big metal gates is a tank. It was captured from the Iraqis during one of the gulf wars (I forget which one – it might’ve been "A New Hope"). It reminded me of the Bessie which was in more or less the same place at the Llangollen Doctor Who exhibition. The door is a long way away from where you expect it to be. For something which is part of the Salford Quays complex they have gone out of their way to not be easily accessible. You have to walk three quarters of the way round the building until you find the tiny entrance. After a quick bag search (I passed – yay) they let me in. It was dark in there – even more so as the bright, low sun had turned my glasses almost completely black.

The museum is largely contained within one big room. You don’t get a sense of how big (or small) the room is because it has lots of surfaces upon which images are projected during the hourly presentations. These are very evocative because the voices are those of the real people reading their real experiences, the images are well chosen and powerful, and the sound is loud enough that the floor vibrates with every explosion. Of which there are lots. The only downside is that they are fifteen minutes long and the children who piled in when they heard there was a show starting got bored after ten minutes and started running round and hitting each other.

The last museum I went to – the Science and Industry Museum – didn’t seem to have a flow to it. You just wandered round and hoped you’d seen everything. The IWMN has a time line around the outermost wall starting at 1900 and going up to the present day. It does a splendid job of summing everything up and is well worth reading in its entirety. The surfaces onto which the presentations are beamed are the walls of so called silos. These are smaller exhibitions on particular themes and contain the usual cabinets filled with original objects. You have your traditional displays of uniforms and posters alongside more personal and unusual items.

One of the silos is made up of pretend filing cabinets, each one devoted to an individual whose correspondence or personal effects are part of the museum’s collection. One which struck a powerful note was that of a conscientious objector who pledged not to go to war and who was sentenced to two years hard labour as a result.

There was also a log book recording every detail of every flight undertaken. In neat, curiously old fashioned handwriting, we can see the names of the crew, the flight duration, how high they went and any notable things which happened while they were in the air.

Going somewhere like this, there will always be at least one moment when you feel like you’re going to cry. This was mine.

I’m not embarrassed to admit to welling up, I’m a little embarrassed admitting I chuckled inwardly when I saw this hat. It reminded me of a Mitchell and Webb sketch. "Are we the baddies?" asked SS officer Mitchell when he realised his cap had a skull on it.

Dotted about the exhibition are numerous full sized objects. This is a naval mine – it is massive. It also has a sign on it telling people not to climb on the plinth and muck about with it. I didn’t need that sign – I was quite happy to leave it alone when I read that it was a naval mine.

We also saw the gun turret of an RAF bomber. It looked like something out of a Patrick Troughton episode of Doctor Who. Like a lot of the exhibits it didn’t look real. There is a Harrier suspended from the ceiling just as you go into the main hall and it looks fake. I’ve no doubt it is real (because there wouldn’t be much point having one that wasn’t) but it looks like a full scale replica made out of household materials.

One of the most interesting items on display was a 1980s Trabant. Not exactly a weapon of war but it was (indirectly) a consequence of the war. Sadly, although in excellent condition, it had a number of stickers on it which suggested it had been owned by an enthusiast and wasn’t in its original post-liberation condition.

One of the silos was a weird pop-art inspired room with bizarre chairs and various cabinets filled with propaganda items. There were thick wooden bars on the glass of the display cases which I’m guessing was a stylistic touch (the rest of the exhibits didn’t have them) but it made it hard to see everything that was inside.

I did spot this on the wall next to a cabinet of toy soldiers. It was the one thing (apart from the noisy and boisterous children) which annoyed me about the museum.

Of course they feature "negative stereotypes" – we were at war with the NAZIS and their close, slave-driving chums the imperial Japanese. Should we be telling stories now about nice Nazis? Would whoever wrote that appalling sign prefer it if Boys Own stories sympathised with the genocidal ambitions of Hitler and were angst-ridden about saving civilisation from the Third Reich?

These are original newspapers from the Falklands war. Aside from reminding us that our tabloids are scum, they look as old and fragile as the wartime papers in other exhibits. We think of the 1940s as "old" and the 1980s as "new" but time is taking its told on the artefacts which make up all of our history.

On the back wall (at least it felt like the back wall) was this roll of casualties. It starts at the top with the number of Russian troops who died on the Eastern front. At the bottom are the Americans who died during a Japanese balloon offensive and were the only American casualties on American soil during the war.

This display about venereal disease is one of the few things which doesn’t seem out of place today. Of course, in those days they had ignorance about sex as an excuse for getting a dose. These days it is more likely to be a cretinous belief that wearing a hood and carrying a knife will be enough to scare off any nasty infections.

And that is the War Museum part of the War Museum North. It comfortably passes an hour and a half and contains plenty of things to look at. For children there are also a number of activities such as the First World War smells game which lets you sniff synthesised aromas such as "smell feet", "mustard gas" and "dead bodies". As you get towards the end there is an unintentionally hilarious 1970s "What to do if a nuclear bomb goes off" video which advises you to (amongst other things) keep buckets of water in a convenient place in case your lavatory stops working and if any members of your family should die, place a name tag on them and keep them in your house. If they haven’t been collected within seven days, bury them in your garden.

There is one final thing to do – the architect added a strange prong like structure to his plans and this has been made into an observation platform.

You go up it in a rather shaky lift (thank goodness Stephen Fry had told us only this past Friday just how safe lifts are or I might’ve been prone to panic) and when you get to the top you discover that you can’t really see anything. Most of the walls are made up of bars which block all but the most determined viewer. The tiny holes cut in the fence let you see something but it is hardly a sweeping vista. I did manage to take this picture – I think it’s the home of English sport, Old Trafford.

Post script. I was on the train going home with two people sat opposite me. There was a man who smelled of citrus and who was sporting My First Beard™ and a woman in a burgundy power suit. The woman almost immediately took a telephone call and confirmed our worst fears – since Loz came back to work the time it takes for items to move from the pending board to the job-on board has increased. The rumours were true. The ticket inspector came round and missed the citrus guy. He called after him "Excuse me, sir…" in an accent which made me think he was from the Clouseau region of France.

And that was very much that.