The refurbishment of the National Army Museum has proved to be one of the more controversial issues in the museum sector in recent years. Its reopening earlier this year after a comprehensive £23.75m redesign was greeted with polarised responses. In general, responses from the heritage sector and the press were very positive, whereas there has been grumbling in the more traditional corners of military history. Andrew Roberts in the Spectator, for example, lambasted the new museum for factual inaccuracies and for indulging in ‘guilt, apology and political correctness’.

Roberts’s review highlights some of the challenges that the NAM faced when approaching this refurbishment. Roberts lamented the passing of the old museum – and I was fond of it too – but it was undoubtedly showing its age. Wonderful objects were presented in a fairly unimaginative way, within a tired and awkward space. He asked, ‘Why can’t it just be a museum that houses the paraphernalia of the national Army?’ Quite apart from the political issues around presenting the military from the perspective of the military, there is the question of the visitor experience. Military historians might enjoy seeing materiel presented with little context, but the general visitor (particularly a younger one) needs a way into this stuff. Now that we no longer have the Second World War generation as ‘grandparent guides’, several key military museums have recently rethought how they mediate their collections.

Additionally, unlike the Navy or the Air Force, the regimental history of the Army means that practically every county has a museum that presents army paraphernalia in a traditional way. If the NAM was going to draw visitors from across the UK and beyond to an out-of-the-way corner of Chelsea, it needed to offer something different and more imaginative.

The reshaping of the building is certainly comprehensive. The building has been extended at the front and the new entrance on the street leads to a huge, if rather empty-looking space. (Given the vehicles and other large items they have in their store in Stevenage, was there not an opportunity to display one of them here?) The old, spiral layout over several floors has now gone, replaced with two large floors for galleries and a lower one which houses the superb Templer Study Centre and a children’s play area. The old picture gallery on the top floor has gone, its artworks instead distributed throughout the displays.

The major change to the presentation of the collections is the shift from a chronological to a thematic structure. Whereas the Georgian army was formerly catered for in a single gallery, there are now eighteenth-century examples throughout the galleries that focus on ‘Soldier’, ‘Army’, ‘Battle’ and ‘Society’. This has advantages and disadvantages. As an eighteenth-centuryist, this encourages me to engage with more of the museum than I might have done previously, and the same must be true for fans of other periods too. The thematic approach can also bring interesting insights, as well as raising the kinds of ethical and political questions that cannot be posed with a chronological approach (which tends to emphasise technological progress).

For example, a split-screen projection on panels shaped like shards emphasises the trauma and suffering experienced by ordinary soldiers across history. It draws on powerful examples from the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A downside of this is that the experience of the Poor Bloody Infantry comes across as unchanging, which goes against the historian’s ethos of explaining change and putting things in context.

The ‘Battle’ gallery is organised chronologically and there is a timeline for 1642-90, but chronology is no longer the organising principle here. Indeed, the lively ‘Society’ gallery goes for a bricolage approach, juxtaposing a myriad of examples from four centuries to show the army’s relationship with the wider culture. The effect is not unlike the chaos of today’s internet media, which nicely reflects how war is experienced vicariously today.

Some of the museum’s more traditional exhibits benefit here from a new approach to their presentation. For example, William Silborne’s 1838 model of the Battle of Waterloo can now be experienced via augmented reality, as the visitor can engage with the topography through tablet screens, which offer information about the events and link to objects in the collection.

The new museum also does the simple things well. Paintings from the collection are presented interestingly alongside other objects: the captions draw out how the images relate to the themes of the exhibition, although I would like to have seen more information about the paintings and the painters themselves. Examples from life-writing are presented along the way, foregrounding the soldier’s experience and encouraging the visitor to empathise with it.

This, for me, is the main effect of the refurbishment. The NAM is now more about the soldier than the army. Rather than telling a story of institutional, strategic and technological development, the story is now told from the soldier’s point of view, and highlights his or her experiences, good and bad. In this respect, the refurbishment reflects developments in the history of war, which has seen the rise of social and cultural approaches, and a ‘bottom-up’ focus on human perspective. The museum also seeks to engage with troubling aspects of the army’s past, both in terms of empire and its role within the UK.

This won’t please everybody, but I suspect it is more in line with what visitors in the twenty-first century will want to see. The museum is therefore to be applauded for its bold and relevant update.

The National Army Museum reopened in March 2017 and is open daily, 10am-5.30pm.