Imperial War Museums

Imperial War Museums: A Century of Preserving Britain's Collective Memory

In the dark winter of 1917, while shells still rained on the Western Front and the outcome of the Great War remained desperately uncertain, a quiet act of foresight took place in Westminster. Sir Alfred Mond, the Liberal MP and First Commissioner of Works, wrote to Prime Minister David Lloyd George proposing the establishment of a National War Museum. His argument was simple and urgent: the experiences of millions — soldiers, nurses, factory workers, families — were already slipping away, and if no one gathered them now, they would be lost forever.

The War Cabinet agreed on 5 March 1917. By the end of that year, with India and the wider Commonwealth's immense contributions in mind, the institution was renamed the Imperial War Museum. Its first director-general, Sir Martin Conway, declared that the museum's exhibits must "be vitalised by contributions expressive of the action, the experiences, the valour" of individual people. It was never intended as a monument to military glory. From its first breath, this was a place for human stories.

From Crystal Palace to Lambeth Road

Photo: Peter Trimming, CC BY-SA 2.0. Source

King George V opened the museum at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham on 9 June 1920. It moved to the Imperial Institute in South Kensington in 1924, and then in 1936 found its permanent London home in the grand former Bethlem Royal Hospital on Lambeth Road, Southwark — a building that carried its own long, complex history.

The museum has never been allowed a quiet life. On 31 January 1941, a Luftwaffe bomb struck the building, destroying a Short Type 184 seaplane that had flown at the Battle of Jutland and damaging scores of irreplaceable ship models. The institution closed during the Second World War and only partially reopened in November 1946. Yet it endured — and grew. In 1953, its collecting remit expanded beyond the two World Wars to encompass all modern conflicts involving British and Commonwealth forces.

Five Branches, One Mission

Today, Imperial War Museums is not a single building but a family of five. IWM London remains the flagship. IWM Duxford, housed on a historic RAF airfield in Cambridgeshire, is Britain's largest aviation museum, sheltering some two hundred aircraft beneath its hangars. HMS Belfast, the Town-class cruiser that served in the Second World War and Korea, rides permanently at anchor in the Pool of London. The Churchill War Rooms preserve the underground nerve centre from which Winston Churchill directed the war effort. And IWM North, Daniel Libeskind's striking aluminium-clad building in Trafford, Greater Manchester — opened in 2002 — brought the museum's reach to the north of England for the first time.

What the Walls Hold

The scale of IWM's collections is staggering: more than thirty-three million archival items and over 435,000 museum objects. Among them are Field Marshal Montgomery's personal papers, 150,000 aerial photographs from the First World War, and the rifle carried by T.E. Lawrence. The art collection alone numbers nearly 85,000 works, including paintings by John Singer Sargent, Wyndham Lewis, and Christopher Nevinson. The film archive holds over 23,000 hours of footage, including the 1916 documentary The Battle of the Somme — recognised by UNESCO as a Memory of the World.

The Lord Ashcroft Gallery houses 241 Victoria Cross and George Cross medals, the largest collection of supreme gallantry awards anywhere on earth. And in June 2000, Queen Elizabeth II opened the museum's permanent Holocaust Exhibition — the first of its kind in the United Kingdom — a project that took five years and five million pounds to realise.

Stories That Refuse to Be Forgotten

Perhaps the most remarkable episode in IWM's own history came during the Dunkirk crisis of May 1940. With British forces retreating across the Channel and military equipment abandoned on the beaches of France, eighteen artillery pieces from the museum's collection were returned to active service to help defend Britain against invasion. The museum's staff, however, drew a line: they refused to surrender the naval gun from HMS Lance, which had fired Britain's first shot of the Great War, and a gun served by the teenage Victoria Cross recipient Jack Cornwell. Some things, they understood, must be preserved no matter the cost.

That instinct — the conviction that memory itself is worth defending — has guided Imperial War Museums for more than a century. Without it, the personal letters, the scratched trench art, the fading photographs, the trembling voices of testimony recordings would have no sanctuary. The lived experience of conflict, in all its horror and humanity, would thin to dates and statistics in textbooks.

Imperial War Museums exists so that does not happen. It stands as one of the great acts of national conscience: the decision, taken in the middle of a war not yet won, that the stories of those who endured it deserved to be kept safe — not for propaganda, but for truth.

This article was inspired in part by personal memories connected to Imperial War Museums that were recently preserved through digitisation. If anyone holds old photographs, film footage, or recordings connected to this institution, professional services like EachMoment can help ensure they survive for future generations.