National War Museum

Location and description

The museum occupies a two-storey, ten-bay rectangular-plan building in Hospital Square of Edinburgh Castle, within Edinburgh's Old Town. The structure, category-B listed since 1970, was built in 1748 as an ordnance storehouse. Admission is included in the castle entry charge. Its collection includes broadswords, chemical warfare protection items, and letters from combat personnel, and it houses a gallery featuring works such as Robert Gibb's The Thin Red Line, plus a library.

History

Proposals for a warfare museum arose during World War I, with a regional focus. In 1917, Alexander Ormiston Curle, curator of the National Museum of Scotland, drafted preliminary ideas with advice from London organisers and a civic committee of Edinburgh council established by Lord Provost John Lorne MacLeod. The 8th Duke of Atholl supported the project. The committee worked through 1918 and 1919 on plans and exhibit procurement, but after the war priority shifted to the Scottish National War Memorial, which opened in 1927, delaying the museum.

The Duke of Atholl revived the project in the late 1920s, using a building inside Edinburgh Castle built in 1748 by William Skinner as an ordnance storehouse. Construction took over three years, and the museum opened as the Scottish Naval and Military Museum on 23 May 1933, with Lord High Commissioner John Buchan presiding. In 1949, reflecting the Air Force's role in World War II, it was renamed the United Services Museum. After refurbishment in 2000, it reopened as the National War Museum.