Adventures in England: Imperial War Museum Duxford

On the 5th of June, we visited the Imperial War Museum at Duxford. It was an amazing place and has an incredibly interesting history. Since before WWI it was a military base and continued to be one until the 70s when it became a museum.

Many of the rooms housing the exhibits are the original rooms from when it was a RAF base, huge plane garages and long runways between them. One of the exhibits was the operations room, where decisions were made about where to send out squadrons of planes and what planes should be sent.

The main exhibits were WWII planes and other things from the World Wars. Some of the latter were searchlights which would have scanned the skys of London during the blitz for planes flying overhead under cover of Darkness, and gun turrets (I think that was the name, please correct me if I am wrong) that were dome shaped and made of concrete. There was a slit in them and a man would sit inside and fire out of the slits with a gun. There was also a truck with a winch on it for inflating barrage balloons.

However the imperial war museum mainly housed planes, from modern planes to biplanes and WWII fighters, it had it all, even a piece of the Wright Brothers' flying machine, the first ever flying machine capable of powered flight. We went inside a Concorde plane, explored the science of how planes fly in some science experiments, and saw many WWII fighters and bombers. It even had a Harrier plane, the only plane able to take off and land vertically!

The Imperial War Museum was great!!!!