BES Assignment Five - IWM

The Imperial War Museum was fantastic. I decided to go against the advice of some, and I started with the Holocaust exhibit. The main reason for this was for time reasons; I knew I would spend the most time in that exhibit. I think the IWM did an excellent job with the setup of the exhibit. It was designed to be very simple to travel through, and it was set up as a timeline. The exhibit was one large story that flowed through the Walkways. It allowed me to learn about the Holocaust from start to finish.

 There were many individual stories placed around the exhibit that really helped me to connect to the people that endured this tragedy. My favorite part of the exhibit was the model of a concentration camp. I have heard plenty of stories about concentration camps and seen pictures, but this model really drove it home for me. I could follow the whole process of the camps, and it made my mind understand the horrific events that took place in these camps. After the Holocaust exhibit, I thought I would take a small break to recover so I spent a while looking at the three fighter planes.

I am your typically male that gets excited over the fighter planes. I loved being able to see them so close up. I wish they would have had one on the ground though. I wanted to see the controls and the cockpit in general. It is one thing seeing the outside, but it would have been amazing to get a look at the entire plane! Now that I was in a better mood, I was ready for the rest of the museum.

My favorite exhibit at the IWM was the Secret War exhibit. This was an exhibit about Britain’s history with spies. I love the idea of the spy world and the gadgets so naturally when I saw the exhibit I was all ready for it! The exhibit lived up to my expectations. The setup made it a little difficult to see everything, but it was packed with items so I understand why they designed it in the manner they did. What really fascinated me about the exhibit was the amount of gadgets that I once thought were purely fiction.

I have seen plenty of the gadgets in movies, but never thought most of them were real. Turns out I was wrong. They had trackers built into pens, radio transmitters disguised in all sorts of ways, and tiny spy cameras (of course many types of weapons as well). The exhibit also had many interactive games such as code breaking, and audio diaries of true spies. This was a perfect place of my inner child to surface and explore. It was a little nostalgic to have such fascination for something again. It has been a long while since I have experienced that.