Brexit on display at the Museum of Failure

The Museum of Brexit, the long-in-gestation tourist attraction celebrating Britain’s departure from the EU, is still no closer to opening its doors despite the permanent tribute to the “struggle for the United Kingdom’s independence” first being announced in 2017.

But Brexit is finally about to be marked in a UK exhibition – albeit it in the Museum of Failure, a travelling show dedicated entirely to missteps and aborted ambitions, where it will sit aside such notable British flops as the Titanic, Sinclair C5, the NHS’s national IT programme, Amstrad and The Body Shop.

Its founder, Dr Samuel West, told the Guardian: “I want to reframe failure and show it is a universal and necessary part of innovation and learning. The museum’s message is that we need to take bold meaningful risks to solve the largest problems of our times, environmental, social, economical.

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“If we continue to glorify success and stigmatise failure we will not be able to experiment with and explore the solutions that we need.” Perhaps Keir Starmer should give it a visit when it reaches its yet-to-be-confirmed British location next year?

It follows memorabilia from anti-Brexit protests featured in The Changing Ireland Galleries at the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin, with objects from County Louth featuring prominently. These include protest placards used at the official Border Communities Against Brexit demonstration at Carrickcarnon, on the Dundalk/Newry border, in January 2019, during which a mock eight-foot wall and army watchtower were built to make “a stand against Brexit, against borders, against division”.

Meanwhile, the official Museum of Brexit continues its sterling work. Its most recent filings with the Charity Commission, for the year ending March 2025, showed a total income for the year of £35,136 and expenditure of £8,205.

Its official website’s list of supporters still include the former chancellor Nigel Lawson and the businessman and economist John Mills, neither of whom is presumably much involved on a day-to-day basis, having died in April 2023 and April 2025 respectively.