The Imperial War Museum (IWM) North in Manchester lies on Trafford Wharf Road, overlooking the Manchester Ship Canal. In stark contrast to its older and more prominent sibling in London, the IWM North has to its credit an air of contemporaneity that is made prominent by its twenty-first-century aluminium-clad deconstructivist building. Opened in 2002, the museum was designed by Daniel Libeskind, who was also behind the design of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. While the London IWM is over a century old, having opened in 1920 in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, its chic sibling in Manchester stands on the ruins of a Second World War bomb site. That the two World Wars account for much of what’s on display hardly comes as a surprise.
However, it was not the World Wars that caught my eye on a recent visit; it was something more recent than that – an exhibit crammed into a rather crowded showcase among the final galleries of the museum. To my surprise, I had stumbled upon a piece of Absolut’s official merchandise. Striking and oddly out of place, it made me wonder what business vodka had in a war museum?