The anti-capitalist tourist attraction played with the perceived factual authority of a museum
~ Gavin Grindon ~
After five years as Lewisham’s premier anti-capitalist tourist attraction, the Museum of Neoliberalism closed its doors for the final time on 15th Sept, as the building is being sold to a developer.
The museum’s two curators, artist Darren Cullen and myself, an artist and academic, met at Banksy’s Dismaland in Weston-Super-Mare in 2015, where we were both exhibiting. We struck on the idea of creating a Margaret Thatcher Museum. The then-prime minister David Cameron had recently announced funding for an official Thatcher Centre. We planned to open ours on the same day as theirs, but telling a rather different story of her life and effect upon the world.
The museum finally opened in a new form, as The Museum of Neoliberalism in 2019, in Old Steine Gardens, Brighton, as part of the events surrounding the Corbyn-led Labour Party conference in the city. Not long afterwards, the museum moved to a shopfront in Leegate Shopping Centre in South London, where it has remained until this September, when the building’s owners decided to sell up.
The small museum offers a basic introduction to the history and ideas of neoliberalism – the always unnamed, usually unknown, and often misunderstood set of ideas which have dominated and shaped our lives.
The museum opens with a short history of the formation of neoliberal economic ideas, from think tanks to policy, in a display borrowing the tropes of a 1970s crime movie – the 1970s were, after all, a period known for cults, serial killers, and the capitalist class becoming organised to defend its interests.
Many visitors were also taken with the diorama of an Amazon warehouse. In front of a brightly lit scene of slowly moving tiny conveyor belts of packages, visitors could examine an authentic bottle of Amazon employee urine (workers penalised for taking toilet breaks have spoken of urinating in bottles as the move around picking packages).
Visitors could also take a close look at a (now old fashioned) Motorola WT-4000 terminal, a hand-scanner worn around the wrist by warehouse workers. The display lists the next object you must collect, directs your route and gives you a strict time limit to get there. If you do not work fast enough, a manager can contact you through the device.
Other exhibits included some shocking and bizarre real life anti-union posters, and a replica cross-section of the Grenfell wall and its cladding.
Formally, the museum played with the perceived factual authority of a museum, and with visitors’ faith in ‘capitalist realism’ – the stories it tells are real, but there are also satirical displays which are typical of Cullen’s work. Some visitors have had trouble telling which are which – particularly the displays of Scout badges sponsored by various corporations such as Esso (forestry badge), the British Army (mechanics badge), E.on (conservation badge), Hot Wheels toys (creativity badge) and Shrek the Musical (theatre badge). Those are all real.
In 2021, the real world got in on the satire when a food bank opened next door. A-board welcome signs for each venue stood side by side on the pavement. Meanwhile, the fire station across the street closed down, damaged by flooding from a poorly-maintained Thames Water main.
For now, neoliberalism has outlived the museum of neoliberalism, but we hope to reopen again in a new (and maybe expanded) future location, possibly outside London. If you know of an ideal spot, please do let us know!
