For many of us museumgoing mothers, the Imperial War Museum in London is it. Off the beaten track, easy to park near, never too full, wholesome café, crammed with Spitfires flying from the ceiling, tanks to peer into and enough evacuee outfits to keep the most hyperactive kids busy for a full afternoon. The Imperial War Museum never dampens enthusiasm with Do Not Touch signs, and always moves me to tears. Suddenly I am struck by a photograph, a child's gas mask or a plate with a day's rations on it - hit in the gut by a profound sense of war's waste. Even if you miss out the permanent galleries, with the Holocaust Exhibition or Crimes Against Humanity (not for under-16s), you cannot fail to be touched by the gore and glamour of war.

So, travelling up to Manchester to visit the Imperial War Museum North, and its Horrible Histories exhibition on the First World War, I wondered how this well-tested formula could be bettered.

On the train I ask my 11-year-old son Humphrey how many times he has visited the Trench Experience in the London war museum, for example. “About six,” he replies. I have never dared to join him inside, so he describes it in detail. “It's dark when you go in and you feel your way around moulded walls, with realistic models of soldiers writing letters home or shouting for ‘More ammo!' There are voices, noises of shells, machine guns and a foul smell everywhere. There are wounded people around, which makes it a bit disgusting...but also more effective.” The experience is neither funny nor pleasant. So how could a cartoon trench with high-tech floor pads compare in the Horrible Histories equivalent up North?

It doesn't. From the very first, the Imperial War Museum North is a completely different proposition. Designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind and clad in aluminium, it shimmers and stretches up to the sky with not a straight wall in sight. When designing it, Libeskind was said to have thrown a teapot out of a window to see how it broke, and the three shards of its asymmetrical build are supposed to reflect the disruption and displacement of war. The utterly modern building on the site of Salford Quays - Manchester's answer to Canary Wharf - is everything that its southern cousin is not. If it wasn't for a lone tank at the front pointing the way to the entrance, you could easily spend the afternoon stroking the walls to find a way in.

In keeping with this embrace of modernity, the Horrible Histories exhibition is a contemporary take on an old subject. Terry Deary's Horrible Histories books have sold more than 20 million copies worldwide, with audio CDs given out free on the back of cereal packets. The director of Imperial War Museum North, Jim Forrester, is hoping to harness this popularity. “This exhibition is a way in to history, a gateway to history,” he says, “I used to work in theatre, and this is putting on a show.”

It opens on Saturday and the opening weekend will include building your own mend-and-make-do toys, actors re-enacting a Manchester soldier's trench experience, and a chance for children to get their hands on the real knuckledusters and spiked clubs used in closequarter trench combat. The more dangerous items, such as man traps and home-made “jam tin” grenades, will be kept firmly behind glass. In addition, interactive touch-screen quizzes and films on loop will give the old artefacts a new and shiny twist. “This will be cutting-edge and very popular,” Forrester says. “We are lightening the touch to make more people feel it is for them.”

I admit I don't “get” the Horrible Histories books: I think they are just lavatorial jokes with little respect for historical narrative, and I find the captions to Martin Brown's illustrations corny and irritating (for example, one soldier shouts “Tanks!”, another answers “You're welcome!”). Millions can't be wrong, but Deary's “serves-'em-right-for-being- up-themselves” approach to every historical figure - from Kaiser Wilhelm (referred to predictably as “Willy”) to the war poet Rupert Brooke: “He'd written a poem about the glory of war. (This was a dumb thing to do since he'd never seen the horror of it)” - grates on my nerves.

Themes from the books, such as Zeppelins and camouflage trees (actually a real form of surveillance, I was astonished to discover), have been pulled out to display items from the large Imperial War Museum Collection. So photographs, fragments of Zeppelins and souvenir rings made out of Zeppelin wreckage, along with 1916 drawings of these curious “sausages” by Hubert, a young scout from Bristol, are on display. Illustrations from the Horrible Histories cartoons line the exhibition with jokes, competing with letters home from the front line, including a poignant one from the poet Siegfried Sassoon, written to his former schoolmaster while in hospital suffering from shell shock.

For me, it was the large photograph of a smiling soldier with a bandaged head that had that familiar Imperial War Museum stomach-twisting effect. But this is an exhibition specifically for kids, and Humphrey completely disagrees with me about the books. “Come on, Mum, they're great,” he protests. “I usually skim-read normal history books, but with Horrible Histories I actually bother to read all of it.” He wanted to give the show five stars. It must be a Generation X meets X-Box generation thing.

The Horrible Histories: Frightful First World War (free entry) opens at the Imperial War Museum North, Manchester (0161-836 4000, north.iwm.org.uk), on Saturday with a day of costumes, craft, music and drama. The exhibition runs until January 2009

Humphrey's Horrible Histories hit list

Object-handling session: “The object-handling session scored top because it feels special to hold and wear real First World War items. The hats were itchier, the grenades were heavier and the shells for the 13- pounder gun were much bigger than expected.”

Interactive touch-screen quizzes: “I learnt that people weren't allowed to write abroad in invisible ink or speak in a foreign language on the phone.”

Martin Brown's cartoons: “The cartoons made things seem a bit happier than they were and should stop kids being put off by all the misery.”

German trench gun: “It was like a tiny cannon from a ship. I like anything that you can touch or look down the barrel of; it makes history more real.”

And what didn't work:

Letters home: “There were a lot of letters where the writing was small and unclear.”

Trench smells: “The mustard gas and stink of socks really got stuck in your nostrils.”

Films on a loop: “The Battle of the Somme film was good, but I wasn't interested in the munitionette women playing football outside their factory in Southend.”

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