"War - what's it good for? Absolutely nothing." E. Starr

n Manchester yesterday on a college trip to look at interactive displays (the Clore Gallery in the Manchester Art Gallery and then the Museum of Science and Industry), we went to the Imperial War Museum in Salford Quays.

The quays are a wasteland of hideous architecture. In the case of the War Museum, I can understand why the building is so harsh, but the rest exemplifies everything that's wrong with urban regeneration ( and I write as a former proponent of the profession).

I can't make my mind up about the museum. First impressions were poor. Huge blank walls seemed to imply sparse content, backed up by the large volume of the building which is far greater than it need be. Every hour, on the hour, an audio visual presentation starts, but this is on a scale I've never experienced before. The entire hall goes dark and images are thrown onto the huge, fragmented walls from at least twenty banks of projectors, so that faces tower over you from all directions. No single viewpoint lets you see everything, which encourages wandering around, though few visitors yesterday were doing so.

There are three presentations in all, and the one that had just started when we arrived was Children in War. Considering the power of the subject and the depth of immersion in the presentation, this could have been very moving, but I felt the presentation lacked impact and I was left cold.

The other presentation I saw was War at Home, about the impact on civilians. Like the first one, most of it dealt with the Second World War, which linked neatly with my recent reading of Our Hidden Lives, but there were parts about wars in other countries. This was more effective than the first, but I was told afterwards that the third, about combat, is the most powerful of all.

I used the time between the two presentations to explore the displays hidden in what are called 'silos' behind the blank walls and on the walls behond the silos. The build-up to the First World War is the earliest conflict covered and the first Gulf War is the latest. That's still a lot to cover, and much of the content is superficial - one paragraph on the conflict in former Yugoslavia and two sentences on the genocide in Rwanda - but the complete failure even to mention the recent invasion of Iraq is staggering. Doesn't it count if we do the invading? (And what's with the 'Imperial' in the museum's name? What's that about?)