The Museum of Neoliberalism Is Being Bulldozed to Make Way for Luxury Flats

Often after a successful revolution, regimes will draw attention to their underpinning ideology and – if not always honestly – the means by which it was imposed. That hasn’t been the case in the United Kingdom, where the prevailing creed of neoliberalism is often dismissed by political commentators as a leftwing buzzword and never used approvingly by those we might consider its proponents.

Consequently, the Museum of Neoliberalism is – or was, it closed its doors earlier this month – a small, independent venture curated by satirical artist Darren Cullen (who goes by the nom de plume Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives) and art historian Gavin Grindon. The building that until recently housed the museum, an unassuming shopping centre in Lewisham, southeast London, is about to be bulldozed in October to make way for a luxury tower block – a fitting end to the almost five-year-old project.

“The previous owners wanted to turn it into an Asda, but they didn’t,”, says Cullen. “I ended up being here for nine years when I expected two. It’s not too bad, but that’s contemporary London – being kicked out to make way for luxury flats feels almost like a performance piece.”

The Museum of Margaret Thatcher.

I ask how the Museum came into being in 2019. “David Cameron announced government support for a Thatcher Museum and Library in 2013. I thought, ‘That’s going to be an awful institution’”, so I thought about doing my own, which would cover everything, especially the victims of Thatcherism.

“In 2019, The World Transformed [a youth-focused Labour conference fringe festival] asked if I’d like to do a smaller version, talking about [Thatcher’s] ideology. Gavin and I installed the Museum of Neoliberalism at the festival” – it included a map showing the spread of the doctrine from Pinochet’s Chile to the US and UK, a display about the privatisation of the British Rail network, and Cullen’s model of an Amazon fulfilment centre.

“People asked what would happen next,” says Cullen. I realised I could use the shop front on my studio, which I’d had since 2015, and had opened as War Gallery. The museum opened in November 2019 – all I needed to do was make a sign.” It worked: “As a museum, we got more walk-ins than when it was a gallery – everyone knew it was a public space, where you’re not expected to buy anything. Some said I should charge, but I wanted to reward people’s curiosity with a free exhibition.”

The London museum was not much bigger than in its temporary space at The World Transformed, with the most notable addition being a section of the wall of Grenfell Tower, which Cullen reconstructed. The main change was in the way Cullen described the museum’s content to visitors. “‘Neoliberalism’ felt a bit jargony, and got applied to everything,” says Cullen, talking about how the museum focuses on the imposition of free market economics, through privatisation and deregulation.

Cullen adds that from the outset in 2019, he wanted to expand the scope of the museum beyond the UK. “Most people know what Thatcherism is. We wanted to link it to South America and elsewhere, [where neoliberalism] gets introduced to countries as a set of tailored policies, sold as ‘reform’ or whatever. When the shock doctrine [of free market economics that the west laid out for countries whose socialist governments had collapsed, or been overthrown, a term coined by Canadian political commentator Naomi Klein] turns what should have been a victory over communism into chaos, it’s explained as being ‘just Russian oligarchs’ or whatever, rather than the likely social consequences of the ideology.”

The museum serves as a reminder that, far from being a commonsense way of doing politics, neoliberalism was imposed – through dictatorship, the destruction of alternatives and the relentless manufacture of consent. It opens with a map, charting Pinochet’s experimentation with neoliberalism in Chile before Thatcher and Reagan introduced it to the UK and US, and its capture of social democratic parties across Europe. Underneath the map are Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton’s autobiographies alongside a book about Attila the Hun – a joke to leaven the “history-heavy stuff”, says Cullen – as well as images of the prime ministers that followed Thatcher, and of thinktanks such as the Heritage Foundation who held sway over them.

Esso for kids.

Moving on, Darren shows me a set of Scouts UK activity badges that have, over the last two decades, been sponsored by major corporations, carrying their logos in a cynical form of advertising to children. “I was searching eBay for anything to do with Serco because I thought they’d have some ‘interesting’ merchandise”, he says. “But I found these instead.” Cullen shows me an Esso forestry badge, one with a wind turbine stitched above the British Gas logo, and one for acting with a little picture of Shrek, as well as a photography badge with a camera and a Kodak logo. “In a larger museum, I’d tie this in with an exhibit about the deregulation of children’s advertising in the 1980s in the US and UK, [when] you got all these toys with cartoons attached, like He-Man and Transformers.”

In another vitrine is an assortment of seemingly miscellaneous objects – hand sanitisier, a padlock, and a light bulb – alongside labels displaying how much these items typically cost government institutions to procure under private finance initiative (PFI) contracts. It cites £20 for the sanitiser (“although that’s probably Covid pricing”, says Cullen, £242 for a lock, and £333 to replace a light bulb, with staff not allowed to buy such items themselves. “The debt created by PFI is about four times bigger than the debt used to justify austerity,” says Cullen.

Extremely interesting is the list of previously state-owned, now privatised companies, starting with the holiday firms Thomas Cook and Lunn Poly in the early 1970s, before Thatcher became Conservative leader. There are some surprises – I had no idea Jaguar had been state-owned, for example – amidst the more familiar displays: another vitrine focuses on the disastrous rail sell-off, used largely to subsidise other countries’ nationalised networks, including a Hornby-style model, made by Cullen, of “Richard Branson’s Tax Haven Island”.

More bleakly, the recreation of an Amazon fulfilment centre is complete with a real bottle of urine from an employee who couldn’t take a toilet break. Nearby is Cullen’s reconstruction of a wall of Grenfell Tower, complete with flammable cladding.

“I bought Celotex insulation – I couldn’t buy the actual stuff they used because it’s been made illegal, but this is the same thickness and looks identical. I had this idea to show the inside of the wall – it illustrates deregulation in a way that’s real, you can see it’s like having compacted petrol on the side of your house.

“The fire brigade across the road have been in – a few of them were on-site and talk about how carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide came off it.”

A new space.

I asked Cullen what the museum would do if it had more space. “It needs a section about the British establishment’s reaction to Corbyn’s Labour,” he replies. “At its heart, neoliberalism is anti-democratic, removing economic control from the political sphere – you can see it in Rachel Reeves endlessly going on about her fiscal rules.

“The historical function of the Starmer government is to make sure nothing like Corbynism can ever happen again. They’re the white blood cells of the British state.”

With the demolition fast approaching, Cullen is determined that the museum won’t be gone for good. “We still want to do the Thatcher Museum as well, maybe in Liverpool,” he told me.

“This was a trial, to see if anyone would travel to southeast London for a museum on economic theory. It’s been viable here with me covering the space and running the gift shop, but a bigger project would have staffing costs. There’s a foundation here, though.”

I agree, but who might host or fund a larger and more permanent museum remains to be seen. My suspicion is that a new space will be difficult to come by barring any significant change to the current political orthodoxy – but Cullen and I both know the chance to do this was sadly missed in 2019, and may not come again.

For now, the museum is in storage, most likely for six months or more, until it finds another, temporary home – a victim of the ideology it condemns.