Trafford Wharf
The museum sits on Trafford Wharf Road, overlooking the Manchester Ship Canal, in the middle of what was once one of the most important industrial zones in Britain. Trafford Park during the Second World War was a prime target for the Luftwaffe. Metropolitan-Vickers built Manchester and Lancaster bombers here under licence from Avro, alongside searchlights and gun mountings. Ford employed 17,000 workers making Merlin aero engines. The factories stretched for miles along the canal, and the Germans knew exactly where they were.
On the nights of 22 and 23 December 1940, the Manchester Blitz hit. Over two nights, an estimated 684 people were killed and more than 2,000 injured. The area around Trafford Wharf was heavily hit. The site where the museum now stands was industrial land, part of the same target zone that the Luftwaffe was trying to flatten.
The Shattered Globe
The building was designed by Daniel Libeskind, the architect behind the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the masterplan for the Ground Zero site in New York. IWM North was his first building in the UK. The design concept is a globe shattered by conflict and then reassembled, the pieces no longer fitting together quite right. Three interlocking shards make up the building's form, each representing a theatre of war: Earth, Air, and Water.
The Earth Shard forms the main museum space. The Air Shard is the dramatic entrance, housing projected images and education spaces, rising 55 metres to a viewing platform, now closed to the public. The Water Shard holds the restaurant and performance space, its platform extending towards the water. The angles are sharp. The floors slope. The walls lean. None of it is accidental. Libeskind wanted visitors to feel unsettled from the moment they walked in, and the building does that before a single exhibit is seen.
The story of how he arrived at the shape is worth knowing. In his Berlin studio, Libeskind is said to have smashed a teapot and used the broken pieces to visualise a world fractured by conflict. A shattered teapot became a building on the Manchester Ship Canal.
The Objects
The collection holds over 2,000 objects spanning conflict from the First World War to the present day. The first thing most visitors see is the Harrier jump jet, a United States Marine Corps AV-8A, suspended from the ceiling on cables at the entrance. It hangs above your head as you walk in, which is exactly the point. War is not something you look at from a comfortable distance.
On the floor below the Harrier sits a Russian T-34 tank, the machine that turned the Eastern Front. Nearby is a QF 13-pounder field gun that fired the British Army's first shot of the First World War, on 22 August 1914 in Belgium. There are pieces of the Messerschmitt Bf 110 that Rudolf Hess crashed in Scotland in May 1941, when the Deputy Fuhrer flew solo on a bizarre and unauthorised peace mission. There is a piece of the Berlin Wall. There is a WE 177, a British nuclear bomb. And there is a section of twisted, rusted steel from the World Trade Center, recovered from the wreckage of 11 September 2001.
The objects are not arranged by date or by conflict. They sit together, sometimes uncomfortably, because that is how war works. A nuclear bomb and a field gun from 1914 occupy the same space. The first British shot of one war and the capacity to end all wars stand a few metres apart.
"A shattered teapot became a building on the Manchester Ship Canal. Inside it, a Harrier hangs from the ceiling, a 1914 field gun sits next to a nuclear bomb, and twisted steel from the Twin Towers stands in a space shaped like the world coming apart."
The Big Picture Show
Every hour, the lights in the main exhibition space go down and the Big Picture Show begins. It is a 360-degree immersive experience, projected onto the walls and floors of the Earth Shard, using surround sound, digital images, and photographs to tell a story about conflict and its aftermath. The original version ran off 60 synchronised slide projectors. It was replaced by digital projection in 2011, but the effect is the same. The shows change regularly. They do not glorify. They do not simplify. They put you inside something and ask you to sit with it.
The show is the reason many people come back. The objects are powerful, but the Big Picture Show does something different. It uses the building itself as the screen, filling Libeskind's angular walls with images that shift and fracture in the same way the architecture does. The building was designed to unsettle. The show uses that quality and turns it into something you feel rather than something you see. It is worth the visit on its own.
Why Here
IWM North opened on 5 July 2002, just before the Commonwealth Games brought the world to Manchester. It had been budgeted at £40 million, but when the Lottery turned it down, the project was scaled back to £28.5 million. Peel Holdings put in £12.5 million, reportedly the largest private donation to a UK cultural project at the time, and Kate Adie fronted a public campaign that raised the last £3 million. A war museum built without Lottery money, on Peel's land. It passed its target of 300,000 visitors in six months and drew 470,000 in its first year. The building was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize in 2004. Entry is free.
The location is not a coincidence. This stretch of Trafford Park made the weapons that helped win the war. Metropolitan-Vickers built Lancasters under licence from Avro in the factories along the canal. Merlin engines, built by Ford a few hundred yards away, powered them. Beatrice Shilling's restrictor washers kept the engines running in combat. Roy Chadwick designed the aircraft that carried the bombs. The Blitz was an attempt to stop all of that. A museum about war, standing on the ground that built the weapons, in a building shaped like a world torn apart. There is no better place for it.
That's Hidden Manchester.