Announcement by Imperial War Museum on 25 February 2025.
Like all museums, we regularly update our galleries to ensure we can share as much of the 33 million items in our collection as possible with the public.
We are very proud to have displayed the Lord Ashcroft Medal Collection at IWM London since 2010, made possible thanks to a generous 15-year loan by Lord Ashcroft.
IWM London has proudly displayed Victoria Crosses and George Crosses since 1968, and we remain committed to sharing these stories of the greatest acts of bravery and sacrifice in defence of our nation with the public. We plan for VC and GC medals from IWM’s collection to continue to be displayed across our UK branches, integrated within galleries that tell the full story of the conflicts in which these acts of bravery occurred.
Over the past 10 years at IWM London, we have opened new galleries exploring the First and Second World Wars, The Holocaust, and our art, film and photography collection. Our displays exploring the past 80 years of post-Second World War conflict, including the Cold War, Falklands War and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, are less well represented. Our aim is to address this by creating new gallery spaces on upper floors at IWM London, which will allow us to share more stories of conflicts that are within many of our visitors’ living memory.
To prepare for the development of these new spaces, The Lord Ashcroft Gallery at IWM London will close permanently from 1 June 2025. We are enormously grateful to Lord Ashcroft and the other private lenders who have enabled us to display these important medals since the gallery opened.
Read this announcement on iwm.org.uk
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