War museum set to deploy exhibition throughout UK

The Imperial War Museum is putting the finishing touches to its first UK-wide £1.1m touring exhibition, Their Past, Your Future, designed by Land Design Studios with graphics by Thomas Matthews. It forms part of a £10m commemorative programme to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.

The exhibition, funded by the Big Lottery Fund, will focus on how the war affected citizens living across the UK and aims to ‘educate the younger generation’, says project co-ordinator James Eddis.

Land Design Studio was appointed following a four-way pitch in June last year to create the scaffold structure. It hired Thomas Matthews to design 400 different graphic panels making up the structure.

The exhibition will display local historical material, as well as items from the Imperial War Museum archives, such as reproductions of old love letters, photographs and statistics.

Nine different customised versions will be displayed in museums, shopping centres, art galleries, art centres, town halls and churches across 70 towns, including six regions in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. The exhibition launches on 17 February and is scheduled to travel until March 2006.

‘The challenge was to create something robust and exciting to attract people from a different audience,’ explains Katherine Skellon, project designer at Land Design Studio.

As part of the project, The Imperial War Museum is also launching a rolling programme to put 30 000 more of its images on to its on-line catalogue, at www.iwmcollections. org.uk. The archive currently holds more than 160 000 items.

‘We want to make it more accessible to designers and researches,’ a spokeswoman for the Imperial War Museum adds.