IWM North

I visited the swanky new Imperial War Museum North in Manchester at the weekend.

This ties up very neatly with the ‘suspended aircraft’ thread earlier.

It is the most incredible waste of space you have ever seen.

Fair enough, in current jargon it it a ‘landmark buiding’. But in a structure about four times bigger than the AAFM at Duxford there is

A Landrover
A Trabant
A searchlight
A Harrier (AV8)
A fire pump
A T34

That’s it.

There is even a vast, empty (except for the searchlight) observation tower which has no windows and from which you can only observe in one direction, and this through a wire grating (But it does incline at an angle of four degrees, so that must be OK then.)

The curators are very big on sound though. So instead of filling the place with artefacts they fill it with overlapping noise.

Hate it, hate it, hate it.

Fire the management, chuck the Trabant out and fill the place with aircraft now!

Moggy

And talking of ‘missing the point’ the thing is on a quayside. There was a plan to moor some Royal Navy boat adjacent to it. But the architecture luvvies are objecting to the plan as this old junk might spoil the vistas of their precious building with its non-observation tower inclined at exactly four degrees.

Bah! 😡 😡 😡 😡 😡 😡 😡 😡