Materialising the Reconception, 1940–1948

Museum reinvention does not begin and end with the conceptualisation of some new philosophical or practical organisational paradigm. Importantly, it also involves physically realising that new paradigm through a museum’s various organisational elements. This process has been termed herein as ‘translating reinvention’. The current chapter uses the case of the Imperial War Museum during the broader Second World War era and its work averting post-war cultural irrelevancy—specifically its actions towards materialising its institutional reconception for the post-war world—to demonstrate the process. The chapter theorises and instantiates translating reinvention and shows that any translating reinvention work must be flexible and reflexive to the reinventing museum’s multilayered environment.