Despite its title, this museum of 20th-century warfare does not glorify bloodshed but attempts to evoke what it was like to live through the two world wars. There's hardware and interactive material for martial-minded children -- a Battle of Britain Spitfire, a German V2 rocket, tanks, guns, submarines -- but there's an equal amount of war art (David Bomberg, Henry Moore, John Singer Sargent, Graham Sutherland, to name a few), poetry, photography, and documentary film footage. One very affecting exhibit is The Blitz Experience, which is just what it sounds like -- a 10-minute taste of an air raid in a street of acrid smoke with sirens blaring and searchlights glaring. There's also a permanent Holocaust exhibition, and a Crimes Against Humanity exhibition, funded from a generous lottery grant. More recent wars attended by British forces are commemorated, too.

The museum is housed in an elegant domed and colonnaded building, erected in the early 19th century to house the Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane, better known as the infamous Bedlam. By 1816, when the patients were moved here, they were no longer kept in cages to be taunted by tourists (see the final scene of Hogarth's Rake's Progress at Sir John Soane's Museum for some sense of how horrific it was), since reformers -- and George III's madness -- had effected more humane standards of confinement. Bedlam moved to Surrey in 1930. COST: Free. Tube: Lambeth North.