We had an exciting opportunity to go to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford on Tuesday as part of our World War II studies in history. Firstly, we were faced with a documentary challenge in which we had to explore The Battle of Britain hangar before, in groups of three, creating and filming three short one-minute videos about an item in the museum. We thought about how these items were used during the war as well as any exciting stories linked to them and then how they linked to modern day Britain.

Later in the day, we explored the retired commercial planes, which we found were very different to the ones nowadays. We even got to enter a test Concorde that travelled faster than the speed of sound! Next, we walked to the Land Warfare hangar, where there were lots of vehicles including tanks, military Jeeps and much more. We also got to see the olden day military uniform, which we enjoyed trying on.

We then walked to the American hangar, in which we very excited to see the SR-71 Blackbird, which goes at about eight times faster than the speed of the Concorde! We got a glimpse of two Spitfires taking off side by side and circling round before performing a smooth landing. We even got a wave from the passenger!

We then went to the operations control room, where there was a short film and a re-enactment of conversations and processes that resulted in the scrambling of multiple Spitfires based on new intelligence. In there, we also read about different methods and equipment that were used to communicate.

Everybody enjoyed the trip and found it exciting and extremely interesting. One thing that shocked us all however, was when we came across a mural which showed the 7000 planes lost in the war in a visual wall. It was very powerful and showed us all just how catastrophic World War II was and how many lives were lost.

Avyan, Harper & Sienna, Year 6 Heads of School