Something has stirred in Brexitland these last few days. The X account of the Museum of Brexit, the long-in-gestation tourist attraction celebrating Britain\u2019s departure from the EU, started posting again after lying dormant for months.<\/p>\n
At the start of this week, having not posted since January, the museum announced that it had received a donated collection relating to the European Research Group, the collective of Tory rabble-rousers who made life a nightmare for a succession of Conservative leaders.<\/p>\n
It then redirected donations of famous politicians\u2019 lawnmowers to Southport\u2019s National Lawnmower Museum (an actual thing, unlike the Brexit museum), reposted a map of Pheasant Island, an uninhabited river island located in the Bidasoa river between France and Spain, and then finally posted a picture of \u201cDavid Heathcoat-Amory MP\u2019s team of cool cats from the Convention on the Future of Europe in 2002\u201d \u2013 a real treat for its 633 followers.<\/p>\n
Which rather poses the question: is the Museum of Brexit still an actual thing or just an art project to needle one-time Remainers?<\/p>\n
First conceived in 2017 as a permanent tribute to the \u201cstruggle for the United Kingdom\u2019s independence\u201d, the museum was the idea of Gawain Towler, a former Ukip and Reform spokesman, Lee Rotherham, a Vote Leave campaigner, and Alex Deane, a Grassroots Out campaign executive. In 2021 it announced its location had been narrowed down to Peterborough in Cambridgeshire, which saw a 61% leave vote, or Boston in Lincolnshire, where 76% of voters opted for Brexit. Nothing has been heard of either proposal since.<\/p>\n
That same year it was announced the museum had been awarded charitable status, although its most recent filings with the Charity Commission \u2013 for the year ending March 2024 \u2013 suggest it may struggle to buy much in the way of bricks and mortar. Its total income was \u00a33,877, with a total expenditure of \u00a37,862. The Museum of Brexit did not respond to a request for comment or interview for this article.<\/p>\n
Its official website does not seem to have been updated in two years, to the extent that its list of supporters include the former chancellor Nigel Lawson and the businessman and economist John Mills, neither of whom presumably is much involved on a day-to-day basis, having died in April 2023 and April 2025 respectively.<\/p>\n
Back in 2018 the museum\u2019s founding fathers told the\u00a0Times\u00a0that it would be open \u201cwithin about three years\u201d, although by the following year one of the founders, Lee Rotherham, was complaining that it had been delayed due to \u201crogue MPs and anarcho-legal activists\u201d. In 2021 a new fundraising drive was announced, while as recently as last year Rotherham was on GB News in effect announcing the museum as if it was the first time: \u201cCharity sets up \u2018Museum of Brexit\u2019 showing Britain\u2019s journey out of the EU\u201d, ran the headline, a mere seven years after it had first been announced.<\/p>\n
And there the tale runs dry. It is still \u2013 or at least was, when the website was last updated \u2013 taking donations of Brexit-related ephemera, provided you\u2019re in the capital or Black Country. \u201cWe originally set up 50 county drop off points around the country to make bulk drop offs easier, and this received significant media coverage at the time,\u201d it says. (It did not receive significant media coverage.) \u201cHowever, these have now been collapsed into the two central storage sites \u2013 one in Vauxhall in Central London and the other in West Bromwich.\u201d<\/p>\n
Its Facebook page hasn\u2019t been updated for a year, nor has its YouTube channel, which boasts 22 subscribers. Tragically, only 14 people have watched an interview with John Redwood on the glory of Brexit, and one of those was your correspondent.<\/p>\n
Will we ever see the Museum of Brexit? Was it ever likely? Or is it something that could only ever have succeeded in the fever dreams of a group of obsessed right wing ideologues who, having succeeded in bitterly dividing Britain and tearing its economic model apart for no good reason, now think you can successfully build and run a tourist attraction when your annual income is the cost of a second-hand Citro\u00ebn C1? Perhaps we will never know.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, why not check out Southport\u2019s National Lawnmower Museum this summer? It took delivery of the UK\u2019s oldest Flymo just this very week, which will be displayed alongside lawnmowers owned by King Charles, Brian May, Paul O\u2019Grady and Alan Titchmarsh. That\u2019s got to be better than some dusty old Ukip placards and one of Peter Lilley\u2019s suits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Something has stirred in Brexitland these last few days. The X account of the Museum of Brexit, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":270382,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[802,748,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-270381","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-brexit","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-european","13":"tag-european-union","14":"tag-great-britain","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114870811641227246","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270381\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/270382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}