Does the Museum of Brexit actually exist?

It then redirected donations of famous politicians’ lawnmowers to Southport’s 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 “David Heathcoat-Amory MP’s team of cool cats from the Convention on the Future of Europe in 2002” – a real treat for its 633 followers.

Which rather poses the question: is the Museum of Brexit still an actual thing or just an art project to needle one-time Remainers?

First conceived in 2017 as a permanent tribute to the “struggle for the United Kingdom’s independence”, 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.

That same year it was announced the museum had been awarded charitable status, although its most recent filings with the Charity Commission – for the year ending March 2024 – suggest it may struggle to buy much in the way of bricks and mortar. Its total income was £3,877, with a total expenditure of £7,862. The Museum of Brexit did not respond to a request for comment or interview for this article.

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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.

Back in 2018 the museum’s founding fathers told the Times that it would be open “within about three years”, although by the following year one of the founders, Lee Rotherham, was complaining that it had been delayed due to “rogue MPs and anarcho-legal activists”. 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: “Charity sets up ‘Museum of Brexit’ showing Britain’s journey out of the EU”, ran the headline, a mere seven years after it had first been announced.

And there the tale runs dry. It is still – or at least was, when the website was last updated – taking donations of Brexit-related ephemera, provided you’re in the capital or Black Country. “We 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,” it says. (It did not receive significant media coverage.) “However, these have now been collapsed into the two central storage sites – one in Vauxhall in Central London and the other in West Bromwich.”

Its Facebook page hasn’t 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.

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 Citroën C1? Perhaps we will never know.

Meanwhile, why not check out Southport’s National Lawnmower Museum this summer? It took delivery of the UK’s oldest Flymo just this very week, which will be displayed alongside lawnmowers owned by King Charles, Brian May, Paul O’Grady and Alan Titchmarsh. That’s got to be better than some dusty old Ukip placards and one of Peter Lilley’s suits.