Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/January 2023/Review essay

By Nick-D

During September and early October last year I travelled from Australia to the United Kingdom for a holiday. This was my fourth visit to the UK. During the trip I visited a number of military museums and sites, and I'd like to share my views on them.

The main military museum I visited in London was the National Army Museum. I'd visited it previously in 2011, and was interested in seeing how it had changed following a major refurbishment between 2014 and 2017. The short answer is that a good museum has now become better. The NAM presents the history of the British Army intelligently, with a good range of displays and artefacts. The focus is generally on the Army's social history and the experiences of soldiers and their families in war and peace. The displays include some useful critical analysis, though a few punches are pulled - for instance, there's no discussion of the rights or wrongs the Army's role in Britain's imperial expansion. Overall, the NAM is well worth visiting. It also has a pretty good cafe.

I also visited the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. It had also received a major revamp since my previous visit in 2006, to good effect. While not focused on the Royal Navy, the NMM includes several galleries covering key periods of its history. These were well done, and included some pretty sharp analysis. It was disappointing that the gallery on the Napoleonic Wars only covered the period up to the death of Nelson, but it's hard to quibble when the quality of what's on display is so high.

One of the main purposes of my trip was to see Hadrian's Wall in the north of England. My first contact with the Roman fortifications in this area (broadly defined) was the excellent gallery on the Antonine Wall at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow. This museum houses an impressive range of artefacts from the lesser-known wall the Romans built across modern Scotland, as well as some good displays explaining its history.

I later joined a day trip of the central section of Hadrian's Wall. This started out in Carlisle, where I was able to squeeze in a quick visit to the Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery's gallery on the wall - it was pretty impressive. The tour then traced the route of the wall from the Carlisle area to Vindolanda, with a walk along a section of the wall near Birdoswald Roman Fort and a stopover at the Roman Army Museum. All of these sites were excellent. This was a busy but very rewarding day. Being part of a tour worked out well, as the guide did a good job of explaining how the wall operated and how to interpret its remains. Take a packed lunch though if you have a busy schedule.

I later visited several sites associated with Hadrian's Wall in the Tyneside area. The Great North Museum: Hancock has a large and excellent gallery on the wall which features a model of it and a wide range of important artefacts. The next day I trekked out via an interminable rail replacement bus to South Shields to see the Arbeia Roman fort. This was one of the key logistics bases for Hadrian's Wall, and its foundations have been preserved. The site also features convincing reconstructions of one of the fort's gates, a barracks block and the commander's residence. It's a shame that none of the supply buildings have been reconstructed given this was the main purpose of the fort, but nevertheless I enjoyed my visit. On my way back to Newcastle I stopped in at the Segedunum Roman fort at Wallsend which was disappointing - very little remains of the Roman fort, and the museum is dull and outdated.

From Glasgow, I made a day trip to Stirling to see Stirling Castle. While the castle is impressive, it's not particularly well preserved or presented. It's seen a wide range of uses over the centuries, and the end result is a rather confusing site - in parts a castle, in parts a royal residence, and in parts the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders' mediocre regimental museum.

Aside from the Hadrian's Wall sites, I visited some other military-related sites in the Tyneside. The Discovery Museum in Newcastle includes interesting displays on the city's role in building equipment for the Royal Navy and British Army. These included fascinating models of shipyards in the region and some of the warships they produced. The Discovery Museum also houses the Light Dragoons regimental museum, which was dull. The Tynemouth Castle and Priory in Tynemouth was a bit disappointing: the castle is impressive and also includes some early 20th Century coastal fortifications, but is let down by a lack of signage explaining the site.

During a few days in Leeds I visited the Royal Armouries Museum. I'd done almost no research before visiting, and was expecting it to be an unremarkable offshoot of the Tower of London. I couldn't have been more wrong, as it's vast and has an extraordinary collection of weapons and armour. I found the scale of the museum to be almost overwhelming, and it really needed a full day rather than the half day I could give it. This is a genuinely excellent museum that deserves to be much better known.

I started a day trip to York with what turned out to be a chilling tour of the York Cold War Bunker. The bunker is a former Royal Observer Corps regional headquarters that was designed to house a staff of around 80 volunteers (most of whom would have been women) during the 30 days after a nuclear attack on the UK. The ROC personnel would have been tasked with reporting on fallout dispersion across the district. The tour guide praised the bravery and self-sacrifice of the volunteers, but also made it clear that their task would have likely been futile given the near total destruction a nuclear war would have caused.

From Birmingham I made a trip by train out to the Royal Air Force Museum Midlands. One of two official RAF museums (the other being Royal Air Force Museum London), it houses an impressive and well presented collection of aircraft. The highlights were the collection of experimental aircraft and the National Cold War Exhibition. The later includes examples of all three types of V bombers, as well as various other aircraft and missiles operated by the RAF during the Cold War. All up, this is a very impressive museum. Public transport access to it is rubbish though unfortunately - it's served by only hourly trains, and there isn't even a paved footpath from Cosford railway station to the museum! To make matters worse my return train was cancelled, leaving me with a lengthy wait on a windswept platform at the station. As a result, I'd only suggest visiting the museum if you have a car.

During a day trip to Coventry I visited the ruins of the second Coventry Cathedral and its modern replacement. The ruins were interesting, though similar to the other bombed churches that have been preserved as memorials to World War II across Europe. While I am not religious, I found the modern cathedral's emphasis on reconciliation to be genuinely moving and a stronger memorial to the war than the ruins. The gallery covering the history of Coventry in the nearby Herbert Art Gallery and Museum has a small section on World War II which is well executed.

Not surprisingly, the UK has a similar culture of war memorials to Australia. Local war memorials dot towns and areas of cities, and most major churches have at least one war memorial to members of the congregation or locally-raised units.

In terms of churches, Glasgow Cathedral had an particularly large and interesting range of memorials to men killed in Britain's various colonial wars and on garrison duty overseas. York Minister features a monument to members of Bomber Command who served in the region during World War II, and Durham Cathedral has a moving memorial to members of the Durham Light Infantry which includes a cross originally erected over a battle site during World War I. The stained glass window in Newcastle Cathedral that commemorates the city's role as an adopted home for Danish sailors during World War II is also striking. St Clement Danes in London is also well worth visiting - it's the central church of the Royal Air Force and is liberally decorated with air force memorabilia and memorials. The use of squadron badges to decorate the floor and commemorate these units was particularly interesting and effective.

While in York, I also stumbled upon the North Eastern Railway War Memorial and was impressed by it - this is a site I knew a lot about beforehand thanks to our excellent article on the topic. The Response memorial in Newcastle was also striking, as was the nearby memorial to battleship builder William George Armstrong.

In London, I was impressed by the RAF Bomber Command Memorial and Royal Artillery Memorial. The nearby Australian and New Zealand War Memorials were a bit odd: it's hard to understand the reasoning behind erecting such large monuments on the other side of the world from these countries in the 2000s, and the Australian memorial has a bland design and the NZ memorial is almost unlabelled so it's hard to know what it's commemorating. They make for interesting memorials to the legacy of the British Empire though.