Outside the IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM stand the massive 16-inch guns of a First World War battleship. The museum, perhaps appropriately housed in the old madhouse of Bedlam, displays a fascinating collection of machines of war and the horrors they bring.
The First World War exhibits include a walk-through recreation of a front line trench telling the story of how men fought and died in often appalling conditions. Other galleries are devoted to the war at sea, where the U-Boats almost starved Britain into submission, and the war in the air where Zeppelins brought the war to civilians for the first time.
The Second World War exhibits show an air-raid shelter and a blitzed street in 1940; the heroic efforts of the RAF pilots in The Battle of Britain whose exploits were immortalised by Churchill who said "Never was so much owed by so many to so few"; the controversial Bomber Offensive which flattened Dresden; the war in the Far East and the war at sea.
Permanent exhibitions include the harrowing account of the Holocaust.
Website: www.iwm.org.uk
Tube station: Lambeth North