Images of soldiers piling out of a Chinook helicopter flash from the front window of an army showroom in London, the first of its kind in Britain, as part of an attempt to demystify and increase interest in the Armed Forces.

A military buggy manned by a dummy in soldier’s fatigues greets visitors as they step inside, while computer terminals play interactive combat missions with the intention of enabling young people to learn more about army life. The main attraction is at the back of the store, where visitors try their aim with a life-size rifle, firing simulated rounds at a wall of circular targets.

This showroom in a shopping centre in Hackney, East London, is an example of a range of recruitment methods in use across the country as the Army strives to reach full strength within two years.

Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Meldon, commander of regional recruiting London, said that almost 7,000 people had visited the Hackney store since it opened six weeks ago. He plans to open another showroom in Hounslow, West London, within the next fortnight and a third in the Glades Shopping Centre in Bromley, southeast London, by September, which will double up as a recruitment office. “What we are trying to achieve is to go fishing where the fish are, as opposed to going where the rent is cheap, which has been the thinking of the past,” Colonel Meldon said.

Army recruitment offices are typically based at the wrong end of the high street, where running costs are low, but this has been reflected in the number of people coming through the door. The Ministry of Defence has had a sub-strength army for at least the past ten years, with a deficit of 2,550 last year.

Major-General Gerald Berragan, director-general of the Army’s recruiting and training department, said: “Some of our offices are in the wrong place and some of them are a bit tired, so we want to move to something that is more relevant to what’s going on today in society.”

Making the Army more representative of Britain’s ethnic mix is also an ambition, with ethnic minorities comprising 9.3 per cent of current troop levels. The showroom in Hackney, which has a large Afro-Caribbean population, features a display on a pillar by the front door of pictures and stories about veterans from ethnic minorities who fought for Britain in the past.

The recession has given the recruitment drive extra impetus by forcing school-leavers to consider different careers, such as the Army, as the job market dries up.

Christopher Day decided to become a soldier after he gave up looking for civilian work. “There are no jobs because of the recession. I have been looking for about three months,” said Mr Day, 19, of Nottingham. “The Army is a good career,” he said, adding that he hoped to become a tank commander.

With competition increasing for places, the Army can be more selective about its recruits, preferring people who embarked on further education rather than those who left school at 16 and may have difficulty reading and writing.

The demographic profile of the Armed Forces has changed since the 1990s, with the number of junior soldiers, those aged 16 or just turned 17, falling from one third to one eighth of total manpower.

Lieutenant-Colonel David Hollas, commander of regional recruitment in the East of England, said that his prime target was the 17½-to-24 age group. To this end, the military increasingly has contact with further education colleges rather than schools, with servicemen and women giving talks and running stalls at recruitment fairs. The maximum age to sign up is 33.

The Armed Forces are one of the few employers to raise their intake target for university graduates, according to Martin Birchall, managing director of High Fliers Research, which published a report this week on which jobs final-year students from the top 30 universities were applying for. Applications for the Army, Royal Navy and RAF were up 3 per cent from the year before, the first rise in three years.

In increasingly difficult economic times, job security and the availability of jobs were becoming more important to graduates than high salaries and generous bonuses, he said.

In an attempt to appeal to an even wider selection of young men and women, the Army began an online campaign last month called Start Thinking Soldier, which challenges users to embark on internet missions such as what to do when faced with an enemy bomb factory in the desert.

Azamena Iwubare, 16, a student, visited the army showroom in Hackney to have a go on one of the computer terminals, where users pretend to be a soldier hunting Taleban insurgents. “I came in today because I wanted to find out more about the army cadets and how I can join the Army and be able to defend this country,” he said.

Not everyone is convinced. A small group of student activists disrupted a recruitment fair at University of Sheffield last week, taking fliers from three stalls, including one for the Armed Forces and two others run by companies that sell military hardware, before being hustled away.

“We don’t feel the Armed Forces are honest in the way they recruit,” said one activist, a 23-year-old post-graduate studying politics.

He accused them of glossing over how a recruit might be sent to die in Afghanistan — an allegation that the military rejects. The activist said that he would rather be on the dole than become a soldier. “I’d never join. There will always be other options,” he said.

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