Imperial War Museum London

On 27 February 1917 Sir Alfred Mond, a Liberal MP and First Commissioner of Works, wrote to the Prime Minister David Lloyd George to propose the establishment of a National War Museum. The War Cabinet accepted the proposal on 5 March 1917, the decision was announced in The Times on 26 March, and a committee chaired by Mond was set up to oversee the collection of material to be exhibited. The National War Museum Committee divided into subcommittees examining such subjects as the Army, the Navy, the production of munitions and women's war work. There was an early appreciation of the need for exhibits to reflect personal experience so that the collections did not become dead relics, and Sir Martin Conway, the museum's first director-general, said that exhibits must "be vitalised by contributions expressive of the action, the experiences, the valour and the endurance of individuals". The first curator and secretary was Charles ffoulkes, previously curator of the Royal Armouries at the Tower of London. In July 1917 Mond visited the Western Front to study how best to organise the growing collection, meeting French government ministers and Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force. In December 1917 the name was changed to the Imperial War Museum, after a resolution from the museum's India and Dominions Committee.

King George V opened the museum at the Crystal Palace on Sydenham Hill on 9 June 1920. Addressing the King on behalf of the committee, Mond said that it was hoped "to make the museum so complete that every one who took part in the war, however obscurely, would find therein an example or illustration of the sacrifice he or she made", and that the museum "was not a monument of military glory, but a record of toil and sacrifice". The Imperial War Museum Act 1920 followed shortly afterwards and established a board of trustees to oversee the museum's governance; to reflect the imperial remit, the board included appointees of the governments of India, South Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. While the act was being debated, some parliamentarians felt the museum would perpetuate an undesirable war spirit, and Lieutenant-Commander Joseph Kenworthy MP said that he would "refuse to vote a penny of public money to commemorate such suicidal madness of civilisation as that which was shown in the late War". On the August Bank Holiday of 1920, the first public holiday since the opening, the museum received 94,179 visitors, and by November 1921 it had recorded 2,290,719 visits.

The art collection was building at the same time, from works the museum had itself commissioned and works commissioned by the Ministry of Information's British War Memorials Committee, among them John Singer Sargent's Gassed, painted for a Hall of Remembrance that was never built. As early as 1920 the collection held over 3,000 works.

In 1924 the museum moved into the Imperial Institute building in South Kensington, later demolished in the 1950s and 1960s to make way for Imperial College. The location was more central and sat in a prestigious quarter for museums, but the accommodation itself proved cramped and inadequate, and in 1936 a permanent home was found south of the River Thames in Southwark. The building was the former Bethlem Royal Hospital, vacated after the hospital moved to Beckenham in Kent. The site belonged to Lord Rothermere, who had originally intended to demolish the building to provide a public park in what was a severely overcrowded area of London.

In the event the central portion of the hospital was retained. The two extensive wings were removed and the resulting space was named Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park, after Lord Rothermere's mother. Conway described the building as one that "can be made to contain our collection admirably, and we shall preserve from destruction quite a fine building which otherwise will disappear". The hospital had been designed by its surveyor, James Lewis, from plans submitted by John Gandy and other architects, and completed in October 1814; Sydney Smirke substantially altered it in 1835, and between 1844 and 1846 replaced the central cupola with a copper-clad dome to expand the chapel beneath. The building stood substantially unchanged until the hospital left it in 1930, and the Duke of York, later King George VI, reopened the museum in its new accommodation on 7 July 1936.

The exhibits were divided by service and by civil or military activity, the Naval gallery in the east wing, the Army gallery in the west and the Air Force gallery in the hospital's former theatre, an arrangement that persisted until a wide-ranging redisplay from the 1960s onwards. Leslie Bradley had served in the First World War with the Middlesex Regiment until he was invalided out in 1917, and joined the museum at the invitation of Charles ffoulkes, initially to assemble its poster collection. He succeeded Conway, who had held the directorship since the founding, on Conway's death in 1937.

With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 the museum began to collect material documenting the new conflict. In November 1939, during the Phoney War, it appeared in the opening sequence of the GPO Film Unit production The First Days, in which children are seen playing on German artillery pieces from the museum's collection, captured during the First World War. The Dunkirk evacuation of May and June 1940 found the British Army short of equipment, and eighteen of the museum's artillery pieces returned to military service; the trench clubs were used by the Home Guard, while sights and optical instruments went back to the Ministry of Supply. The museum refused to return some historic items, among them a naval gun from HMS Lance, which had fired Britain's first shot of the First World War, and a gun served by the Victoria Cross winning boy seaman Jack Cornwell. It closed for the duration of the war in September 1940 with the onset of the Blitz, and on 31 January 1941 a Luftwaffe bomb fell on the naval gallery, damaging a number of ship models and destroying a Short Type 184 seaplane that had flown at the Battle of Jutland. While shut to the public the building served as a repair garage for government motor vehicles, a centre for Air Raid Precautions civil defence lectures and a fire fighting training school.

In October 1945 the museum mounted a temporary exhibition, its first since the end of the war in August, showing technologies developed by the Petroleum Warfare Department: the submarine fuel pipeline PLUTO, the fog dispersal method FIDO, and flame weapons such as the Churchill Crocodile and the Wasp Universal Carrier. Bomb damage to the building and to the exhibits obliged the museum to reopen its galleries piecemeal, a portion opening in November 1946, a third of them in 1948 and a further wing in 1949. In 1953, with Commonwealth forces engaged in Korea and Malaya, it began its present policy of collecting material from all modern conflicts in which British or Commonwealth forces have been involved. The wider remit did not arrest the decline of the early postwar years: Noble Frankland, the museum's director from 1960 to 1982, described the galleries in 1955 as appearing "dingy and neglected [and in a] dismal state of decay", the museum's "numerous stunning exhibits" notwithstanding.

The museum's present departmental organisation came into being during the 1960s as part of Frankland's reorganisation. Oral history gained increasing prominence in the 1970s, and in 1972 the museum created the Department of Sound Records, now the Sound Archive, to record interviews with individuals who had experienced the First World War. The same year it established the Artistic Records Committee, since renamed the Art Commissions Committee, to commission artists to cover contemporary conflicts. The Film and Video Archive, one of the oldest film archives in the world, holds the official British film record of the First World War, including The Battle of the Somme, a pioneering documentary of 1916 inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World register in 2005. The sound collection opened to the public in July 1977.

In 1966 the Southwark building was extended to provide collections storage and other facilities, the first major expansion since the museum had moved to the site. The following year the museum acquired a pair of 15-inch naval guns, one mounted on the Royal Navy's HMS Ramillies and the other on both HMS Resolution and HMS Roberts, both having been fired in action during the Second World War, and they went on permanent display outside the museum in May 1968. The guns led the museum to seek a 6-inch triple turret that would be representative of a number of classes of British cruisers, and that search eventually brought about the preservation of the light cruiser HMS Belfast. A Town class cruiser launched in 1938, Belfast served throughout the Second World War, took part in the Battle of North Cape in December 1943 and fired some of the first shots of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy, in June 1944, before seeing further combat in the Korean War. Decommissioned in 1963 and expected to be disposed of as scrap, she became the object of preservation efforts from 1967, and a joint committee of the museum, the National Maritime Museum and the Ministry of Defence reported in June 1968 that preservation was practical. The government decided against it in 1971, which prompted the formation of the private HMS Belfast Trust to campaign for her, and in July 1971 the ship was transferred to the Trust. Moored on the Thames near Tower Bridge in the Pool of London, she opened to the public in October 1971 and became a branch of the museum on 1 March 1978, acknowledged by the then Secretary of State for Education and Science, Shirley Williams, as "a unique demonstration of an important phase of our history and technology". In 2017 the exhibit was renamed HMS Belfast 1938, one of the Royal Navy's new Type 26 frigates having been given the name HMS Belfast.

RAF Duxford, a Royal Air Force fighter airfield in Cambridgeshire, was declared surplus to requirements by the Ministry of Defence in 1969, and the museum, needing further space, asked permission to use part of the site as temporary storage. The entire site was transferred to the museum in February 1976 and became its first branch, opening to the public on a regular basis in June 1976. The airfield had been operated by the Royal Air Force during the First World War, played a prominent part in the Battle of Britain and was later used by United States Army Air Forces fighter units in support of the daylight bombing of Germany, and it remained an active RAF airfield until 1961. Sir John Grandy, a trustee from 1971 to 1978 and chairman of the trustees from 1978 to 1989, had commanded RAF Duxford during the Second World War and was chairman during the planning of the site's American Air Museum, designed by Sir Norman Foster, which opened in 1997 and won the Stirling Prize. Duxford remains an active airfield, hosts regular air shows and is operated in partnership with Cambridgeshire County Council and the Duxford Aviation Society, a charity formed in 1975 to preserve civil aircraft and promote appreciation of British civil aviation history.

The Cabinet War Rooms, an underground complex beneath the Treasury building in Whitehall, became operational in 1939 and served as a British government command centre in constant use until their abandonment in August 1945 after the surrender of Japan. The public were able to visit by appointment, but because the site lay beneath a working government office only 4,500 of the 30,000 to 40,000 people applying each year could be admitted. The government raised the possibility of a museum takeover during the 1970s; the museum, reluctant because of its new commitments at Duxford and on HMS Belfast, agreed in 1982, a development keenly supported by the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, an admirer of Britain's wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Thatcher opened the War Rooms to the public in April 1984. A further suite of rooms, used as accommodation by Churchill, his wife and close associates and stripped out for storage after the war, was restored at a cost of £7.5 million and added in 2003; in 2005 the site was rebranded the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms, with part of it redeveloped as a biographical museum of Churchill's life at a further £6 million, and it was renamed the Churchill War Rooms in 2010. The search for a branch in the north of England ran through the 1990s, with 71 sites offered for consideration by 36 local councils, and in January 1999 the then Culture Secretary Chris Smith formally launched the project to build Imperial War Museum North in Trafford, Greater Manchester. It opened in July 2002 as the museum's fifth branch, the first outside southeast England and the first purpose-built as a museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind in his first building in Britain. Originally budgeted at £40 million, it was completed for £28.5 million after anticipated funding was not forthcoming.

On 13 October 1968 the museum was attacked by an arsonist, Timothy John Daly, who claimed he was acting in protest against the exhibition of militarism to children. He caused damage valued at approximately £200,000, not counting the loss of irreplaceable books and documents, and on his conviction in 1969 was sentenced to four years in prison. By 1983 the museum was again looking to redevelop the Southwark site, and approached the engineering firm Arup to plan a phased programme that would expand the exhibition space, provide environmental controls to protect the collections and improve facilities for visitors; Alan Borg, previously at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, had succeeded Frankland as director in 1982. The first phase ran from 1986 to 1989 with the museum closed to the public, and turned what had been the hospital's courtyard into a Large Exhibits Gallery of tanks, artillery pieces, vehicles, ordnance and aircraft from the First World War to the Falklands War. That phase cost £16.7 million, of which £12 million came from the government; the Queen reopened the museum on 29 June 1989, and in 1990 it was awarded National Heritage Museum of the Year. In September 1992 the museum was a target of a Provisional Irish Republican Army campaign against London tourist attractions, and two incendiary devices found in a basement gallery were extinguished by staff before the fire brigade arrived, causing only minor damage.

In 1989 the museum acquired the All Saints Annexe in Austral Street, an 1867 building opened as an orphanage by the local philanthropist Charlotte Sharman and later used as a hospital, which housed the photographic, film and sound archives. The second stage of the Southwark redevelopment, during which the museum remained open, was completed in 1994, and the final phase, the Southwest Infill, was completed in 2000, part funded by a £12.6 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. It included the museum's Holocaust Exhibition, opened by the Queen on 6 June 2000, the first permanent exhibition dedicated to the Holocaust in a UK museum; it had taken five years to develop, at a cost of £5 million. The permanent Crimes against Humanity exhibition occupied the second floor before the redevelopment of 2013 and 2014. In August 2019 the museum announced plans to spend over £30 million on a new set of galleries over two floors covering the Holocaust and its importance in the Second World War, and these opened in October 2021 in place of the existing permanent exhibition. Among the film archive's Second World War holdings is unedited footage shot by British military cameramen of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945. The Lord Ashcroft Gallery, opened in November 2010, showed the museum's Victoria Cross and George Cross collection alongside the private Victoria Cross collection amassed by Michael Ashcroft, 241 medals in total; that collection was on loan for ten years and the loan was extended by five more because of COVID, its termination first confirmed in July 2024 and the gallery closing on 1 June 2025.

The Imperial War Museum Foundation was announced in August 2009, chaired by Jonathan Harmsworth to raise funds for the redevelopment of IWM London's permanent galleries, and plans to rebuild the First World War gallery in time for the conflict's centenary followed in December 2010, when Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, became the foundation's patron. In a speech at the museum on 11 October 2012 the Prime Minister David Cameron announced an additional £5 million of government funding towards the national centenary commemorations. The £40 million redevelopment, designed by Foster and Partners, provided new gallery spaces for the history of the First World War and a new central hall: galleries closed during September 2012, the building closed to the public on 2 January 2013 and partially reopened on 29 July 2013, and Prince William formally reopened IWM London on 17 July 2014. The museum had rebranded itself as Imperial War Museums in October 2011, and all of its sites were shut because of the COVID-19 pandemic from 17 March to 31 July 2020 and again from 16 December 2020 to 18 May 2021. Borg had moved to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1995 and was succeeded by Sir Robert Crawford, whom Frankland had recruited as a research assistant in 1968; Diane Lees took the post on Crawford's retirement in 2008, noted in the media as the first woman appointed to lead a British national museum, and Caro Howell became director-general in May 2023. The Southwark building received Grade II listed building status in September 1972, and the museum is an executive non-departmental public body under the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, governed by a board of trustees originally established by the Imperial War Museum Act 1920 and amended by the Imperial War Museum Act 1955 and the Museums and Galleries Act 1992. The board's president, appointed by the sovereign, is Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, and as of December 2023 the chairman of the trustees was Sir Guy Weston. General admission to IWM London is free, although specific exhibitions are ticketed.