Imperial War Museum London

1. Lead

The Imperial War Museum London is Britain’s national museum of modern conflict, founded in 1917 while the First World War was still being fought. Its home since 1936 is the former Bethlem Royal Hospital on Lambeth Road, in south London, a domed building that has become one of the city’s most recognisable landmarks, with two naval guns standing outside its entrance.

The museum’s purpose, set out at its foundation, was to record the experience of war and to preserve the objects, documents, photographs, films, and personal testimony through which future generations could understand it. Today the museum holds one of the largest collections of its kind in the world, covering the First and Second World Wars, the conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the Holocaust.

Its First World War Galleries, opened in 2014 for the centenary of the war, and its Holocaust Exhibition, opened in 2000 and redesigned in 2021, are among the most visited historical exhibitions in Britain. The museum is part of a family of five branches — London, Duxford, the Churchill War Rooms, HMS Belfast, and the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester — but the London site remains the heart of the institution.

This article traces the museum’s history, its collections, its galleries, and its role as a place of remembrance, research, and education.

2. Key Facts

Field	Value
Name	Imperial War Museum London (IWM London)
Founded	1917, as the National War Museum; renamed Imperial War Museum in 1918
Location	Lambeth Road, London, in the former Bethlem Royal Hospital (opened as museum in 1936)
Part of	Imperial War Museums, five branches across England
Collections	Objects, documents, photographs, film, sound recordings, art, and books on conflict since 1914
Key galleries	First World War Galleries (opened 2014), Second World War Galleries (opened 2021), Holocaust Exhibition (opened 2000, redesigned 2021)
Iconic objects	Two 15-inch naval guns outside the entrance; a Spitfire and a V-2 rocket in the atrium
Admission	Free to the main galleries; charges apply to some special exhibitions
Research	Library, archives, and a research department used by historians worldwide
Annual visitors	Over one million in a typical year before the pandemic; figures vary by year
Mission	To record and preserve the experience of war and conflict and its impact on people

3. Background

A Museum Founded During the War

The Imperial War Museum was founded in an unusual way: while the First World War was still being fought. In March 1917, the British government established a National War Museum committee, led by Sir Martin Conway, with the aim of collecting material that would record the war for future generations. The idea was radical for its time.

Museums had traditionally collected the art and artefacts of the distant past; this museum would collect the present, gathering objects from the battlefield, the factory, and the home front before they were lost. The committee appealed to the armed services, to industry, and to the public, and objects began to arrive: weapons, uniforms, photographs, posters, and personal items sent home by soldiers.

In 1918 the museum was renamed the Imperial War Museum, reflecting the participation of the whole British Empire in the war, and in 1920 it opened its first home at the Crystal Palace in south London. The collection grew quickly, and the museum’s founders understood that its value would increase with time: the objects of an ordinary soldier’s kit, collected in 1917, would one day be the primary evidence of how the war had been fought and endured.

That founding idea — that the museum should collect the experience of war, not only its weapons — has shaped the institution ever since.

From Crystal Palace to Lambeth Road

The museum’s early years were unsettled. The Crystal Palace, its first home, was damaged by fire and proved unsuitable, and in 1924 the museum moved to South Kensington, sharing space with other institutions. The search for a permanent home ended in 1936, when the museum moved into the former Bethlem Royal Hospital on Lambeth Road, a building with its own long history as a hospital for people with mental illness — the origin of the word bedlam.

The move gave the museum room to display its growing collection, including large objects such as artillery pieces, aircraft, and vehicles, and it established the museum in a building that could be expanded. The Second World War added a second great collection, gathered even as the war was fought, and the museum’s remit was extended to cover the Second World War and, later, all conflicts involving Britain and the Commonwealth since 1914.

The building survived the Blitz, though it was damaged, and it was repaired and extended in the post-war decades. In the 1980s and 1990s the museum was modernised, and in the 2010s it underwent a major redevelopment for the centenary of the First World War. The domed building on Lambeth Road, with its two naval guns, remains the museum’s home and its public face.

The Bethlem Building and Its History

The building that houses the museum has a history of its own that predates the museum by more than a century. The Bethlem Royal Hospital, founded in the thirteenth century, moved to Lambeth Road in 1815, and the building the museum now occupies was designed by the architect James Lewis as a hospital, with its central dome and wings arranged around courtyards.

The hospital moved to Beckenham in 1930, and the building stood empty until the museum took it over. The museum has preserved the building’s character: the dome, the portico, and the long galleries of the former wards now house exhibitions, and the building’s history as a hospital is acknowledged in the museum’s interpretation.

The contrast between the building’s past and its present use is part of its interest: a place once associated with confinement and suffering now preserves the memory of war and its human cost. The two 15-inch naval guns outside the entrance, from the battleships HMS Ramillies and HMS Resolution, were placed there in 1968 and have become the museum’s most photographed feature, signalling its subject to every visitor who approaches along Lambeth Road.

4. History

The Interwar Years and the Second World War

Between the wars, the museum established itself as the national record of the First World War, collecting the art of the war — including works by the official war artists such as Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, and Wyndham Lewis — and building an archive of photographs and documents.

The museum’s staff also began to collect the personal testimony of veterans, recognising that the memory of the war would fade with the generation that had fought it. When the Second World War began, the museum immediately began collecting again, and its staff worked under bombing to gather material from the Blitz, the armed services, and the home front.

The museum’s building was damaged by bombing, but the collection survived, much of it evacuated to safer locations. After the war, the museum’s remit was formally extended to cover the Second World War, and its collection grew to include the objects of a global conflict: aircraft, tanks, uniforms, and the personal items of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and civilians.

The post-war decades saw the museum expand its scope further, collecting material on the Korean War, the Falklands War, the Gulf Wars, and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on the experience of civilians in war.

Modernisation and the Centenary Redevelopment

The museum’s modern history has been shaped by a series of redevelopments. In the 1980s, a new wing was added, and the museum’s galleries were modernised to meet the expectations of a new generation of visitors. The most important change came in the 2010s, when the museum undertook a major redevelopment for the centenary of the First World War.

The First World War Galleries, opened in July 2014, replaced the old displays with a new narrative that follows the war from its origins to its aftermath, using objects, film, and personal testimony. At the same time, the museum’s atrium was redesigned as a dramatic vertical space in which large objects — a Spitfire, a V-2 rocket, a Harrier, and a car damaged in the Iraq War — hang above the visitor, suggesting the scale and reach of modern conflict.

In 2021, the museum opened new Second World War Galleries and a redesigned Holocaust Exhibition, completing the transformation of its permanent displays. The redevelopment also improved the museum’s research facilities, its library, and its education spaces, and it established the museum as a place where the history of war is presented not as a series of battles but as a human experience.

The First World War Centenary

The centenary of the First World War, marked between 2014 and 2018, was the largest public history project in Britain in a generation, and the Imperial War Museum was at its centre. The museum led the national programme, working with hundreds of local museums, schools, and community groups to mark the anniversary, and its own galleries and exhibitions drew record numbers of visitors.

The centenary changed the way the war is remembered in Britain: it brought attention to the experience of soldiers from across the Empire, to the role of women, and to the war’s global scale, and it encouraged families to research the service of their ancestors.

The museum’s centenary work also produced a lasting legacy in the form of the Lives of the First World War project, a digital memorial that recorded the stories of more than eight million people who served. The centenary showed that the museum’s founding idea — that the war should be recorded while its witnesses were still alive — had been replaced by a new task: to keep the memory alive when the witnesses were gone.

5. Collections

Objects, Art and the Material of War

The museum’s collection is one of the largest of its kind, and its strength lies in its range. It holds weapons, vehicles, aircraft, uniforms, medals, and equipment, but it also holds the objects of civilian life in wartime: ration books, gas masks, posters, toys, and the personal possessions of soldiers and their families. The art collection is particularly important.

The museum holds more than twenty thousand works of art, including paintings, drawings, and sculpture by official war artists and by artists who experienced war as soldiers or civilians. The collection includes Paul Nash’s paintings of the Western Front, Stanley Spencer’s work on the home front, and the art of the Second World War, the Falklands, and Iraq.

The museum also holds a large collection of posters, including the recruitment and propaganda posters of both world wars, which are among the most reproduced images of the period. The collection is not a trophy cabinet. It is organised to show how war was experienced, and the museum’s curators choose objects for their human story as much as for their rarity: a soldier’s diary, a child’s gas mask, a letter home, and a damaged vehicle each tell a part of the story that a weapon alone cannot.

Documents, Photographs, Film and Sound

The museum’s archive is a resource for historians worldwide. It holds millions of photographs, including the official photographs of both world wars and the work of press photographers, and it holds the papers of soldiers, officers, politicians, and civilians, from field diaries to official reports.

The film archive, one of the oldest and largest in the world, holds footage from the First World War onwards, including the famous film The Battle of the Somme, made in 1916 and shown to millions of people in Britain at the time.

The sound archive holds thousands of hours of recorded interviews with veterans and civilians, collected since the 1970s, and it continues to grow as the museum records the testimony of those who served in more recent conflicts. The library holds books, pamphlets, and periodicals on the history of war, and it is open to researchers.

Together, these collections make the museum not only a place for visitors but a centre for research, and historians from many countries use its archives to write the history of the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Photograph and Film Archives

The photograph and film archives deserve particular attention because they are among the museum’s most used resources. The photograph collection includes the work of the official photographers of the First World War, who recorded the Western Front, the Middle East, and the home front, and the photographs of the Second World War, including the images of the liberation of the camps.

The film archive holds not only British footage but material from many countries, and it has been used in countless documentaries and exhibitions. The museum has digitised much of its photograph and film collection, making it available online, and it licenses material to broadcasters and publishers, which helps fund its work.

The archives also hold the personal photographs of soldiers and families, which often show the war from a perspective that official photographs do not: the boredom of waiting, the humour of comradeship, and the home that the soldier had left behind. These personal images are among the most powerful in the collection, because they show war as it was lived rather than as it was presented.

6. Key People and Places

Founders, Directors and War Artists

The museum’s founders set its character. Sir Martin Conway, the first director, was an art historian and mountaineer who believed that a museum should record the present as well as the past, and his vision shaped the collection from the start. His successor, and the directors who followed, maintained that vision through war, financial difficulty, and changing public attitudes to war.

The museum’s war artists were central to its collection: the official artists of the First World War, including Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, C. R. W. Nevinson, and William Beatty, were sent to the front to record what they saw, and their work remains one of the most powerful records of the war.

In the Second World War, artists such as Henry Moore, who drew the people sheltering in the London Underground during the Blitz, and Graham Sutherland continued that tradition. The museum’s curators, archivists, and historians have also shaped it, building the photograph, film, and sound archives and developing the galleries that visitors see today.

The museum’s staff includes specialists in the history of the First and Second World Wars, the Holocaust, and recent conflicts, and their research underpins the exhibitions and the museum’s publications.

The Building, the Atrium and the Branches

The London museum’s most important place is the building itself, and within it the atrium, where large objects hang in a vertical space that rises through the building. The atrium’s display — a Spitfire, a V-2 rocket, a Harrier jump jet, and a car damaged by a bomb in Baghdad — is designed to show the reach of modern conflict, from the air war of the 1940s to the wars of the twenty-first century.

The galleries on the floors around the atrium tell the stories of the First and Second World Wars, the Holocaust, and the conflicts since 1945. Beyond London, the museum’s branches each have their own character: IWM Duxford, a former airfield in Cambridgeshire, displays aircraft and vehicles; HMS Belfast, moored on the Thames, is a preserved Second World War cruiser; the Churchill War Rooms preserve the underground headquarters from which Churchill directed the war; and IWM North, in Manchester, is a modern building designed by Daniel Libeskind that presents the experience of war from 1914 to the present.

Together the five branches form a single institution, and the London site remains the place where the collection is largest and the research is centred.

The Two Naval Guns

The two 15-inch naval guns outside the museum’s entrance are among its most famous objects, and they illustrate the museum’s approach to collecting. The guns came from the battleships HMS Ramillies and HMS Resolution, and they were placed outside the museum in 1968, where they have become a landmark for south London.

Each gun weighs more than one hundred tonnes, and their size gives visitors an immediate sense of the scale of naval warfare in the first half of the twentieth century. The guns are also a reminder that the museum’s collection includes objects of enormous scale as well as small personal items, and that the contrast between the two is part of the story: the same war that required a gun of this size also required the ration book, the gas mask, and the letter home.

The guns are maintained by the museum and are regularly repainted, and they appear in almost every photograph of the building, making them the museum’s most recognisable symbol.

7. Galleries and Exhibitions

The First and Second World War Galleries

The First World War Galleries, opened in 2014, present the war in a sequence that follows its course from the assassination at Sarajevo to the aftermath and the peace settlement. The galleries use objects, film, photographs, and personal testimony to show the war as it was experienced by soldiers and civilians, and they give particular attention to the global scale of the war, including the contribution of troops from India, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Dominions.

The galleries include a reconstructed trench, a Sopwith Camel aircraft, and the personal items of soldiers, and they use sound and film to create an immersive experience without resorting to spectacle. The Second World War Galleries, opened in 2021, follow a similar approach for the war of 1939–45, presenting the war as a global conflict that affected civilians as much as soldiers, and giving attention to the Holocaust, the bombing of cities, and the experience of occupation and resistance.

Both sets of galleries are designed to be visited in order, but they can also be explored in part, and they are supported by guides, audio tours, and materials for schools. The galleries are free to visit, and they are among the most visited historical displays in Britain.

The Holocaust Exhibition and Special Exhibitions

The Holocaust Exhibition, first opened in 2000 and redesigned and reopened in 2021, is one of the museum’s most important galleries. It presents the history of the Holocaust from the persecution of Jews in Germany in the 1930s through the ghettos, the deportations, and the camps, to the liberation and the aftermath, using documents, photographs, film, and the testimony of survivors.

The exhibition is designed to be educational rather than shocking: it does not display graphic images without context, and it focuses on the individual stories of victims, survivors, and rescuers. The museum’s staff worked with survivors and their families in designing the exhibition, and it includes the testimony of British survivors and of those who were liberated by British forces.

Alongside its permanent galleries, the museum mounts special exhibitions on themes ranging from the art of war to the history of espionage, the experience of refugees, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These exhibitions allow the museum to address subjects that the permanent galleries cannot cover in depth, and they draw new audiences to the museum.

The museum also lends objects to other museums in Britain and abroad, extending its reach beyond London.

Designing an Exhibition on the Holocaust

Designing an exhibition on the Holocaust presents challenges that are different from those of any other historical subject. The museum’s curators had to decide how to present a history of mass murder without sensationalism, how to give voice to the victims without reducing them to statistics, and how to make the exhibition accessible to young visitors while remaining truthful.

The solution, in the 2021 redesign, was to follow the stories of individuals through the exhibition, using their photographs, letters, and testimony to show the human scale of the persecution. The exhibition also includes the history of the perpetrators and of the bystanders, and it asks visitors to consider the choices that people made.

The museum provides guidance for teachers and for parents bringing children, and it offers quiet spaces for reflection. The exhibition has been widely praised for its restraint and its educational value, and it is used by schools across Britain as part of the teaching of the Holocaust.

8. Research and Education

The Library, Archives and Research Department

The museum’s research facilities are among its most important resources, and they are used by historians, students, and the public from many countries. The library holds a large collection of books and periodicals on the history of war, and the archives hold the papers, photographs, and sound recordings described above.

The museum’s research department employs historians who work on the collection, publish books and articles, and advise on exhibitions and broadcasts. The museum also supports external researchers, providing access to the archives and guidance on the collection, and it collaborates with universities on research projects.

The museum’s research has shaped the history of the First and Second World Wars, the Holocaust, and recent conflicts, and its publications are widely used in schools and universities. The museum also runs a programme of lectures, conferences, and seminars, bringing historians and the public together to discuss the history of war and its remembrance.

The research department’s work is the foundation of the museum’s authority: its exhibitions are based on the latest historical research, and its curators are expected to be scholars as well as exhibition designers.

Schools, Families and Public Learning

Education is central to the museum’s mission, and its learning department works with schools across Britain to teach the history of war and the Holocaust. The museum provides teaching materials, workshops, and guided visits, and it runs programmes for young people that use the collection to explore the experience of war.

The museum’s family programme includes trails, activities, and events designed to help children understand the history of war in an age-appropriate way, and its public programme includes talks, film screenings, and commemorative events. The museum also works with veterans and their families, recording their testimony and helping them to research the service of relatives.

The education work is based on the museum’s founding idea: that the experience of war should be recorded and understood, not forgotten, and that young people who have no personal memory of war should have the opportunity to learn about it from the objects and testimony that the museum preserves.

The museum’s digital resources, including its online collections and its teaching materials, extend that work beyond London to schools and families across the country and abroad.

The Sound Archive and Oral History

The museum’s sound archive, built up since the 1970s, is one of its most valuable resources for education and research. It holds thousands of hours of recorded interviews with veterans of the First and Second World Wars, with civilians who lived through the Blitz, and with those who served in Korea, the Falklands, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

The interviews were recorded by museum staff and by volunteers, and they capture the voices of people who would otherwise have left no record of their experience. The archive continues to grow, and the museum now records the testimony of those who served in recent conflicts, recognising that the memory of those wars will also fade.

The recordings are used in the galleries, where visitors can listen to veterans describing their experiences, and they are available to researchers and, increasingly, online. The sound archive is a reminder that the museum’s collection is not only objects but voices, and that the history of war is best understood through the people who lived it.

9. The Site Today

Visiting the Museum Today

The museum today is a busy public institution, welcoming more than a million visitors in a typical year. The main galleries are free, and the museum is open every day except for a few holidays. Visitors enter through the portico, past the two naval guns, and into the atrium, where the large objects hang above them.

From there they can visit the First and Second World War Galleries, the Holocaust Exhibition, and the museum’s other displays, and they can use the café, the shop, and the research facilities. The museum is accessible to visitors with disabilities, and it provides guides, audio tours, and materials in several languages.

The museum also hosts commemorative events, including the annual Remembrance Sunday service, when the building and its surroundings become a focus for the nation’s remembrance of the war dead. The museum’s shop sells books, replicas, and educational materials, and its café is a popular meeting place for visitors and local residents.

The museum is easy to reach by public transport, with Lambeth North and Elephant and Castle stations nearby, and it is a short walk from the Thames and the South Bank.

Conservation and the Future of the Building

Maintaining a museum of this size is a constant task. The building, which dates from the early nineteenth century, requires regular conservation, and the collection, which includes objects of many kinds, needs specialist care. The museum’s conservators work on everything from paintings and paper to aircraft and vehicles, and they balance the need to preserve objects with the need to display them.

The museum has also invested in digital technology, digitising its photograph and film collections and making them available online, and developing digital resources for schools. The museum’s future plans include further improvements to its galleries and its research facilities, and continued work on its branches.

The museum is funded by the government, by admissions to special exhibitions, by its shop and café, and by donations and sponsorship, and it must balance its public mission with the need to raise funds. The museum’s trustees and director are responsible for ensuring that the institution remains true to its founding purpose while adapting to the needs of a new generation of visitors.

Remembrance Sunday at the Museum

Remembrance Sunday, held each November, is one of the most important days in the museum’s calendar. The museum’s building and its surroundings become a place of ceremony, with wreaths laid at the memorials and a service held in the museum’s grounds.

The museum’s staff work with veterans’ organisations and with schools to mark the day, and the museum’s galleries are open to visitors who wish to reflect on the history of war. The day is a reminder that the museum is not only a place for tourists but a place of remembrance for the nation, and that its founding purpose — to record the experience of war so that it is not forgotten — remains relevant.

The museum’s role on Remembrance Sunday, and on other days of commemoration, shows that a museum can be both a place of learning and a place of mourning, and that the two purposes are connected. Visitors who attend the service often stay to visit the galleries, and the day brings together veterans, families, schoolchildren, and tourists in a shared act of remembrance.

10. Legacy

The Museum’s Place in British Memory

The legacy of the Imperial War Museum is the record it has created and preserved. Without the museum, much of the material evidence of the First and Second World Wars — the objects, photographs, films, and testimony — would have been lost, and the history of those wars would be poorer.

The museum’s collection has shaped the way Britain remembers war: its photographs and films are the images that most people associate with the wars, its art collection has defined the visual memory of the Western Front and the Blitz, and its galleries are where schoolchildren first encounter the history of war.

The museum has also shaped the work of historians, providing the archives on which much of the history of the wars has been written. Its influence extends beyond Britain: museums in other countries have modelled themselves on the Imperial War Museum, and its approach to collecting the experience of war has been widely copied.

The museum’s legacy is therefore not only the objects it holds but the idea it represents: that war should be recorded honestly, that its human cost should be shown, and that remembrance should be based on evidence rather than on myth.

Lessons, Debates and the Future

The museum’s legacy is also a subject of debate. The museum must decide how to present wars that remain controversial, how to represent the experience of soldiers and civilians from different countries and backgrounds, and how to address the wars of the present without taking a political position.

Its galleries on recent conflicts, and its treatment of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been the subject of discussion, and the museum’s staff are aware that the history of war is never neutral. The museum’s answer has been to base its displays on evidence, to include a range of voices, and to allow visitors to draw their own conclusions.

The museum’s future will be shaped by the same questions: how to keep the memory of the world wars alive when their witnesses are gone, how to record the conflicts of the present, and how to remain relevant to a generation for whom war is experienced through news and social media rather than through personal memory.

The museum’s founding idea — that the experience of war should be collected and preserved — remains its guide, and its collection, its galleries, and its research continue to grow.

A Museum for a New Generation

The museum’s work for a new generation is focused on digital access and on education. Its online collections, its teaching materials, and its digital projects, including the Lives of the First World War project, make the collection available to people who may never visit London.

The museum’s social media and its online exhibitions reach a younger audience, and its learning department works with schools to use digital resources in the classroom. The museum’s staff recognise that the way people learn about history is changing, and that a museum that only displays objects in glass cases will not reach a generation that learns online.

At the same time, the museum insists that the physical object and the physical place matter: that standing in front of a Spitfire, or walking through the First World War Galleries, or listening to a veteran’s voice, is different from reading about war on a screen. The museum’s future lies in combining the two: the digital and the physical, the archive and the gallery, the object and the story.

Frequently Asked Questions

When was the Imperial War Museum founded?
The museum was founded in 1917, while the First World War was still being fought, as the National War Museum. It was renamed the Imperial War Museum in 1918 and opened its first home at the Crystal Palace in 1920.

Where is Imperial War Museum London?
It is on Lambeth Road in south London, in the former Bethlem Royal Hospital, which it has occupied since 1936. The nearest Underground stations are Lambeth North and Elephant and Castle.

Is Imperial War Museum London free?
Yes, admission to the main galleries, including the First and Second World War Galleries and the Holocaust Exhibition, is free. Some special exhibitions charge for admission.

What are the most famous objects at the museum?
The two 15-inch naval guns outside the entrance are the museum’s most recognisable objects. Inside, the atrium displays a Spitfire, a V-2 rocket, a Harrier, and a car damaged in the Iraq War, and the galleries hold a Sopwith Camel, a reconstructed trench, and many personal objects.

What is the Holocaust Exhibition?
The Holocaust Exhibition presents the history of the Holocaust from persecution in the 1930s through the ghettos, deportations, and camps to liberation and the aftermath, using documents, photographs, film, and survivor testimony. It was first opened in 2000 and redesigned in 2021.

Does the museum have other branches?
Yes. Imperial War Museums has five branches: IWM London, IWM Duxford, the Churchill War Rooms, HMS Belfast, and IWM North in Manchester. Each has its own character and collections.

Related articles

• French Resistance
• Mauthausen Concentration Camp
• De-Stalinization

Sources

• Imperial War Museum, official guides and gallery texts, London
• Imperial War Museum, First World War Galleries and Holocaust Exhibition, exhibition material
• Nigel Steel and Peter Hart, Tumult in the Clouds (1997)
• Paul Cornish, The First World War Galleries at IWM London, in museum publications
• Imperial War Museum, Collections online and archive catalogues
• James Taylor, The Imperial War Museum: A History, in institutional histories
• Wikipedia, "Imperial War Museum"