THE Imperial War Museum North opens soon on the bank of the Manchester Ship Canal in Salford. Feature writer Frank Elson went along for a preview...

IT is one of the North-west's most magnificent buildings -- and is destined to become one of the country's national treasures. At barely half an hour's drive from Bolton, the Imperial War Museum North is going to interest and amaze Bolton folk for many years to come.

Sitting alongside the Manchester Ship Canal -- almost directly opposite the Lowry -- Imperial War Museum North is an impressive sight.

As I drove up to the building for an appointment with the museum's press officer, Paula Robinson, I could hardly believe what I was seeing.

The first design to be built in the UK by acclaimed architect Daniel Libeskind, the building looks like an explosion. The museum is housed inside the three "shards" -- representing war on land, sea and air.

The shapes are reproduced inside a building that is often not quite what it seems. Corridors slope downwards, corners are not quite square, doors appear to lean.

Perhaps not to everyone's taste but, as Paula says: "The feeling we are aiming for is that war is a shattering experience, not something you can relax around." Inside, exhibits were still arriving as Paula showed me around. It opens to the public early in July.

From the first exhibit -- a full-size Harrier Jump Jet -- to the smallest uniform button, Imperial War Museum North is experimenting with different display ideas. In a very forward move for a museum, visitors will be able to handle many items.

As you wander around the building, with its strange shapes and weird levels, audio-visual displays are all around, to the point where you actually feel part of them. Paula has been at the building for well over a year and has seen it turn from an empty shell into a functional, futuristic look at the past.

"It is truly exciting," she says. "Instead of being what many expected when the project was first thought of -- just a secondary museum to the main one in London -- it is most certainly going to be a great museum in its own right.

"Of course, both museums will have their own, mostly permanent, exhibits -- we can't move a Harrier back and forth between Manchester and London -- and both will be able to exchange items, but it was decided very early on that here we will always have an exhibition relating directly to the north and to local people."

Just over a year ago the Bolton Evening News was one of the newspapers throughout the north to run requests from the museum for any wartime mementoes and memories.

"This 'Experiences of War' exhibition -- personal stories of soldiers, prisoners, evacuees -- will be a very important part of the museum as a whole," says Paula.

"It will be housed in one of six self-contained display areas that we are calling 'silos'."

As well as the permanent exhibitions in the silos and the interactive areas, the Special Exhibitions Gallery will extend the museum by housing a changing programme of exhibitions covering a wide range of subjects and using a variety of media.

THE Imperial War Museum North opens to the public on Friday, July 5.