This exhibition was conceived as an experimental research project, in that it presented the Spitfire in a new way, by deconstructing it to constituent parts, and stripping it back to bare metal. The conventional exhibition route would have been to restore the aircraft to a high standard. My research question, in effect, was to study what communicative power the aircraft would have in this deconstructed form.

The public response was positive since my approach allowed, and invited, consideration of the Spitfire from a design point of view, and as an intelligent structural solution to the problem of speed and performance.

The bare metal presentation also encouraged a link to the comparatively little-known story of Spitfire production. Hence the constituent parts of the fuselage and so on could be connected by the visitor to actual workers handling and assembling these components seen in contemporary photographs at the original Southampton factory sites and later at the new mass production plant at Castle Bromwich near Birmingham.

The project included research into contemporary film, including the period gem shown on the gallery, Jane Brown Changes her Job (starring Anne Firth), produced by the Ministry of Labour to encourage women to re-train from secretarial and other jobs to become aircraft assemblers. My research for this project also extended to personal stories of Castle Bromwich assembly girls, and to the remarkably diverse range of pilots from the West Indies, India and other parts of the Commonwealth that also came to fly the Spitfire.

A particular strength of the exhibition was that much of the supporting memorabilia were the personal property of people who had been associated with the aircraft. The assembly of smaller artefacts therefore represented a genuine 'popular history' rather than an 'institutional' or 'museum' history.