Paperjam

Day out at Imperial War Museum Duxford

Art // James // 16th January 2005

The Imperial War Museum Duxford located on a former Second World War airfield and is easily the largest museum of its type in Europe.

Admission is not cheap at £12 for adults, but the scale of the museum warrants that kind of charge, as it is really three museums on one site with the American Airforces in Europe museum, the Land Warfare museum and the Air Museum itself.

The Land Warfare museum is housed in a separate purpose built hall at the end of the site, a good half hour walk from your starting point. I have to admit that I've usually ignored this part of the site, there being so many 'winged' exhibits to take in let alone the 'tracked' variety too, but it is well worth a look - containing a well laid out story of land warfare in dioramas from the First World War until present, including Monty's caravan and recently captured Iraqi tanks.

Land Warfare Museum hall

The American Airforce Museum is housed in a very impressive pupose built dome shaped glass fronted building which won building of the year contest in 1996.

American Airford Museum hangar

It houses American aircraft representative of those that served in Europe from WWII onward, included a giant B52 Stratofortress bomber, a Lockheed U2 spyplane, an evil-looking Lockheed SR71 Blackbird and a wartime B17 Flying Fortress.

The police would have trouble catching
you in this - an SR71 Blackbird

The aircraft here are crammed into the building, some hung dramatically from the roof.

Death from above - looking at a B25 Mitchell

Worth taking time to look at are personal accounts of personnel sent to serve in England throughout World War 2 and the Cold War.

One of the most impressive aspects of the aircraft collection at Duxford is that a large amount of the aircraft here are kept working and indeed oftern flying from here to airshows around the country.

Right down the nose of an F-100 Super Sabre
- a type that saw action in Vietnam

It is possible to look around the maintenance and restoration hangars, where oftern unrecognisable heaps of rust are transformed into fully working warbirds.

Non-flying examples in the collection include a prototype Concorde that you can walk onboard, Avro Vulcan cold war bomber, Avro Lancaster bomber and a BAC TSR-2, Britain's cancelled trike aircraft from the 1960's.

Britain's very own TSR-2, which
never got out of the prototype stage

I recommend that a full day is spent looking around the museum, as the smaller, often ignored side displays give a more personal insight to the lives of the people that worked, lived and sometimes died with the impressive hardware on display.

Imperial War Museum Duxford is located south of Cambridge on the M11.

Links

Imperial War Museum Duxford

Fancy hotwiring a Vulcan? Let's you and me go carpet bombing together over London, no-one will notice...