Imperial War Museum

This guide to the Imperial War Museum in London opens not with tanks or uniforms but with Bedlam, the Bethlem Royal Hospital that stood on this site for over a century. It follows the 122 patients carried here from Moorfields in 1815, and the grim first winter inside a building whose glassless windows staff called ventilation, before tracing how the grounds passed to Viscount Rothermere in 1930 and how a museum born in 1917, during the war itself, came to take over the central block. Listen for the words a Liberal MP used to define what this place was meant to be.