Image: The dome of the Imperial War Museum, Lambeth Road, London.

The Imperial War Museum was founded on 5 March 1917, when the War Cabinet approved a proposal by Sir Alfred Mond, the Commissioner of Works, for a new museum to be established which would record the events of the ongoing war. It was originally called the National War Museum, with a small team of staff attached to General Headquarters on the Western Front tasked with gathering material for the museum’s collections. It was intended to reflect the experiences of everyone during that war, both civilian and military.

The name was then changed in November 1917 at the request of the India and Dominions Sub-Committee, to ensure that “India and the Dominions would feel that their part in the War would be permanently commemorated in the centre of the Empire.”

The first location for the museum was the Crystal Palace in 1920, by which time they had already collected some 150,000 items. In 1924 they moved to the Western Galleries of the Imperial Institute in South Kensington, a space less than a quarter the size. Thus a large proportion of the museum’s exhibits were disposed of and its entire aircraft collection loaned to the Science Museum. The museum remained there for the next eleven years until its closure on Armistice Day 1935. It reopened at its current home on Lambeth Road, Southwark, in 1936, in a building which formerly housed the Bethlem Royal Hospital (constructed in 1815 and nicknamed ‘Bedlam’ due to its care of the mentally ill). The distinctive dome was added in 1846, and was used as the hosptal chapel. The two wings of the hospital were later demolished to allow for a new park to surround the museum. “This particular building can be made to contain our collection admirably, and we shall preserve from destruction quite a fine building which otherwise will disappear,” noted Sir Martin Conway, the museum director at that time.

One floor now also houses the Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries, an impressive collection of artworks reflecting on war through the eyes of artists, filmmakers and photographers.

The research room at the museum is open five days a week and provides access to original documents, sound recordings, photographs, and library material which cover 20th and 21st century conflicts involving British and Commonwealth countries.

You can find battalion diaries here, as well as personal archive materials donated to the museum over the years. For example, the museum holds a photograph album entitled 'With the Armoured Cars in Russia, Rumania, Mesopotamia and Persia' covering the service of George Matthews with Commander Locker-Lampson's Royal Naval Armoured Car Expeditionary Force (ACEF) during the First World War. It includes images of Georgia and Azerbaijan.