Although the museum have about 65000 visitors a year, we almost had the place to ourselves which meant that Jon Clapworthy, their director, was able to spend two full sessions with us. The first one of these was behind the scenes in their archives. This is where active research is done and we chatted to one of their volunteers working her way through the detailed records of a bequest left to the museum.

We saw one of the original geology maps prepared for the D-day landings and marked TOP SECRET. Then it was off to see a small proportion of the thousands of exhibits stored in a mobile racking system.