Imperial War Museum

The museum was founded in 1917 to record Britain’s wartime experience during the First World War. Its original remit included military operations, industry, science, and the experiences of civilians, rather than only weapons or battlefield history.² The institution opened to the public at the Crystal Palace in 1920, moved to the Imperial Institute in South Kensington in 1924, and established its present London home in the former Bethlem Royal Hospital building at Lambeth in 1936.

After the Second World War, the organization broadened its collecting and interpretation to encompass conflicts involving Britain and the Commonwealth from 1914 onward. The name retained the word “Imperial,” reflecting its foundation in the British Empire, while later exhibitions increasingly addressed decolonization, migration, contested memory, and the experiences of formerly colonized peoples.¹

The organization operates a group of specialized museums rather than a single building. IWM London presents major galleries on the First and Second World Wars, later conflicts, the Holocaust, and contemporary war; IWM Duxford combines military aviation collections with a former Royal Air Force airfield in Cambridgeshire; and IWM North in Manchester uses architecture and immersive displays to interpret conflict and its human consequences.¹

Two London sites focus on particular historical settings: the Churchill War Rooms preserve the underground headquarters used by the British government during the Second World War, while HMS Belfast, a light cruiser moored on the River Thames, provides a preserved naval setting. The sites therefore present different kinds of evidence—objects, buildings, vehicles, landscapes, and reconstructed rooms—rather than repeating one national narrative.

IWM’s collections document both combat and the wider social history of war. They include weapons and vehicles alongside uniforms, personal letters, diaries, posters, paintings, photographs, film, sound recordings, maps, and official documents.³ The collection’s breadth allows researchers to connect military decisions with working life, displacement, medical care, propaganda, remembrance, and changes in technology.

Art has been part of the institution’s work since its foundation, and the museum holds works commissioned or collected as records of conflict. Its oral history holdings preserve first-person testimony from service personnel, civilians, and other witnesses; such testimony is interpreted alongside documentary and material evidence rather than treated as a complete or neutral record by itself. Digital catalogues and online exhibitions extend access beyond the physical museums.

The museum’s less visible work includes conservation, cataloguing, digitization, and the long-term preservation of fragile audiovisual material. These activities determine what can be studied in the future, especially where film, magnetic tape, paper, textiles, and metals require different environmental and technical treatment.

Its scope also reaches beyond famous battles and leaders. Exhibitions and collections examine the Holocaust, genocide, refugees, colonial violence, protest, espionage, medical services, children’s experiences, and the changing relationship between civilians and armed forces.¹ The Holocaust Galleries at IWM London, opened in 2021, place the persecution and murder of Europe’s Jews within a broader history of Nazi racial policy and the war, while also using survivor testimony and personal objects to keep individual lives visible.⁴ IWM’s status as a public body also gives it a national collecting role distinct from a regimental or purely service museum.

IWM London

The principal Imperial War Museum site in Lambeth, London, with galleries covering modern conflict and its human consequences.

IWM Duxford

A museum and historic airfield in Cambridgeshire known for military aviation collections and preserved flying facilities.

oral history

The collection and preservation of recorded testimony from people describing their own experiences.

material culture

Physical objects studied as evidence of the practices, values, and experiences of societies.