Britain's museums: more naff than woke?

‘Do you like to dance?’

naff (adj.)

(British, Ireland, Commonwealth, colloquial, Polari) Bad; tasteless, poorly thought out, not workable

A strong memory from my salad days, long before actually acquiring a job in the Heritage Sector, is of eagerly shooting up to the Imperial War Museum after my A-Levels to scope out its shiny new renovation. It sticks in my mind like bitumen only because of how swiftly my enthusiasm crossed into disappointment, and how this mood lingered long after I had departed. It was a novel disappointment in the same way you feel a special kind of gutted after viewing a long-anticipated adaptation of a treasured childhood book, only for it to have been soundly butchered by film industry-committee. The extensive and vivid displays — which I could reliably recall from a combination of school and grandparent-chauffeured trips — had been transformed into something dilute, disparate and, well, naff.

‘This is clever’, I remember imagining the curator responsible saying. ‘This’ll get the people thinking.’ Military uniforms and cabinets replaced with batteries of screens offering sub-Biff-and-Chip-level analysis. Star objects suspended simply for the sake of their impact. (Stick the Harrier in the atrium, yeah? Brill.) The computer to look up your family’s history during the wars — gone. References to the Crimea, to Malaya, to the Boer Wars — conspicuously absent. The vandalism had gone further than simply shifting clutter; it was as if Harry Enfield’s Modern Wank had come in and declared that detail itself was surplus to requirement, with entire sections that had previously stood proud now relegated to a few bits and pieces plonked randomly about. Style had not only beaten substance: it had abolished it. My spirits were low returning home on the Bakerloo line.

Since that 2014 refresh, the Imperial War Museum has resurfaced several times in various brouhahas, a dastardly woke heel to a hitherto Melvyn Bragg-ified Great British Public. Whether it is via ending their Remembrance Sunday service by inviting an iconic youth club up on stage to lyrically DESTROY Winston Churchill, or punting out Lord Ashcroft’s collection of Victoria Crosses to free up gallery space for ‘contemporary issues’ (i.e., asylum rigmarole and the tribulations of the Global Majority), the museum continues to invite controversy as to its ideological remit (though the Holocaust continues to get a decent look in at least).

What is salient about all this, of course, is that the Imperial War Museum’s antics are hardly extraordinary. In 2026, this is now a well-worn and predictable schtick, particular to not just museums but across the cultural landscape in the UK. It is the ‘this’ll get the people thinking’ vs. ‘the people might learn something’ dynamic that you are liable to encounter when visiting virtually any heritage site. Consider the case at the centre of a tooth-pulling exercise I found myself engaged in a couple of years ago with an ACME-brand Oxbridge Social Historian over a black cavalier that prominently featured on Newark Castle’s Civil War display board as one example of many. To get a fuller idea of how far the ideology setting the pace at the Imperial War Museum has penetrated the sector at large, one only needs to take a quick shufti at the Campaigns page for the Museum Association. This is the oldest professional outfit of its kind, in the UK it is the most prominent, and in terms of priorities the highlights are decolonisation, racism (anti), and climate justice.

And while the debate over the Elgin Marbles continues in reliably circuitous mode (for now), it is worth remembering that those museums not restricted by acts of parliament as to ‘returning’ objects have in recent years very much begun to do so in earnest (as with the Horniman and the Benin Bronzes, and Manchester Museum and their Aboriginal artefacts). This trend is liable to continue, not diminish, and I could go on littering examples of the progenitors of this stuff and the endless industry talking heads willing to defend them until I am literally blue in the face.

The ‘Long March’ is then by this point doing a few victory laps, but the purpose of this article is not to relitigate the story of Woke Going Bonkers, progressive capture, or the metastasising ideology of the Blob down and through British public life. We can instead settle for going through a few examples of contemporary museum naffness and what they are characterised by.

Last month, you could have slipped past the impressive selection of Rodin sculptures at the Victoria and Albert and hit the Design and Disability exhibition. In brief, it consisted of a jumbled series of rooms featuring leftist activist screeds and assorted ephemera, admittedly with a few interesting tidbits here and there. Far be it from me to demand Rational Detachment In All Things when curation is obviously a process inherently coloured, but there was a seamless assumption built into the interpretation that there could not possibly exist an impartial tone with which to discuss the subject matter at hand (let alone the actual presence of that tone in and amongst the displays).

This went beyond the exhibition seeking to ‘highlight disability’ to focus on ‘the radical’ as a theme. That a disabled person might be able to conceive of themselves as making a contribution to a design discipline as a self-contained process without being automatically drafted into an intersectional struggle for equity was absent as a very concept. Given that (obviously) plenty of disabled people don’t conceive of themselves as bioessentialist opt-out activists, I could see the potential for head-scratching on the part of the visitors in attendance.

And herein lies the crux. Unless already both familiar and simpatico with the progressive argot that defined the exhibition, the effect is one of straightforward bemusement. In no time at all from admitting, the impression of a cod-struggle-session taking precedence over the display of the educational or technical becomes fully realised, which is simply not all that compelling even to an ideologically sympathetic audience (I was visiting with my woke friend, The Marquis of J’accuse). The result is mere naffness for all.

In the example above, fair warning was admittedly available via the exhibition copy, livery, and advertising. It was very possible to deduce what you were getting yourself into simply from these elements, leaving you free to ponder more interesting questions, such as why it was commissioned in the first place. Far more insidious are those cases when permanent galleries, the exhibition spaces in museums that change significantly and officially at most every ten years, and which the public is often familiar and deeply fond of, are subject to periodic ‘refreshes’.

An egregious example of this in recent times would be the Flight gallery at the Science Museum. Say a prayer for the Science Museum: it is not the wonderworld you remember from your school trips. Make the mistake of visiting at Half-Term as I did, and you will find yourself in an enormous creche of dimly-lit displays and ticked-off family outings.

Having fought my way to the third floor nonetheless, I was soon struck with an unease that something about the place was ‘off’. The ME-163 and Kestrel were still there, but there was something subtler that irked me. Resorting to searching through Flickr on my phone for old photos of the gallery, it became clear that much of the technical and historical information adorning the space had been replaced with a series of diversity-friendly fact-boxes, social history at its most woolly, adding nothing to the picture that the gallery as a whole painted except for various interludes no more involved than ‘This Pilot Was Trans’, etc. That is obviously not to say any room to feature these individuals should indelibly be off the cards, but the degree to which a gallery which had functioned for decades as a specific space with integrated displays could be rendered significantly more naff by arbitrary meddling astounded me. Now, it is the Flight gallery still, with some newfangled backwards quirks. However, as far as anyone visiting for the first time might know, it is just the Flight gallery. Contemplate how much this sort of thing is likely occurring in permanent galleries across the country, and a sense of cultural endangerment emerges.

Of vital importance to note for both temporary and permanent exhibitions, either where created or refreshed with woke credo, is how straightforwardly worse they are in telling you anything. It cannot be emphasised enough that your average curator is not a mad far-leftist in the style of Eric Hobsbawm, desiring to wear down your reactionary defences with endless factoids regarding the price of grain in Central Europe in 1821 until you crack and swear allegiance to the CPGB, but rather someone who sees the brief to convert a display into something more ‘accessible’ and decides this means making sure there aren’t any words used in the labelling that exceed three syllables. They are Zack Polanski. They want to be nice to people.

I only exaggerate marginally. Following its multi-million pound renovation in 2022, The Burrell Collection in Glasgow elected to do away with adorning its objects with any information at all. It instead asks the visitor, ‘Do you like to dance?’ (for a Tang Dynasty earthenware figure), or ventriloquises a Bodhisattva to quite literally say ‘trans rights are human rights’. This is why I use the phrase ‘naff’ as a catch-all for these trends. What is so remarkable about this stuff is that it is neither combative, nor especially proselytising, nor even destructive in an interesting way. It’s just rubbish. Even the beefier racial-grievance stuff often slips into absurdity: Royal Museums Greenwich (confidently) describing Queen Charlotte as black and the like. Perhaps you might find yourself getting more aerated on behalf of school trips, given the dereliction of duty at hand — but is the curriculum the students find themselves with when they get back off the coach really so radically different?

'Figure of Guanyin', as displayed in The Burrell Collection (left); and a real gallery label in The Burrell Collection (right).

The exhibition at the V&A articulated no woven-vision of disability emancipation; the Flight gallery at the Science Museum merely and with glib aplomb drops box-check diversity copy in the shadow of a better version of itself. It would be equally erroneous to interpret the meagre efforts of the curators of The Burrell Collection as an example of compelling and genuinely dangerous far-left ideologising, as no doubt the average Telegraph columnist would be tempted. All three cases are both woke and naff, and the wokeness should not be ignored (in part because it informs the naffness), but if we were forced to pick between the two adjectives, the latter is probably more apposite. It’s just a waste of time, money and space for everyone, woke and anti-woke alike.

In my experience, the people who work in museums are, by and large, acquiescent to this stuff, to the extent that I have sat in on meetings with curators and had them casually announce their frustration with having not ‘done decolonisation’ to older galleries before they had been built. When it comes to permanent galleries, in the large museums you can almost see an ‘archaeology’ to the way the sector has gone. From the detailed but charmingly eccentric quirks of the ’90s, to the New Labour Woah-Bonkers introduction of touch-screens and aggressive use of colour, to the sedate, content-light, decontextualised naffness of the present day. The post-Floyd and post-COVID era forms a particularly strong demarcation belt across this lineage.

By way of caveat, I would like to make it clear that I do not view these trends of naffness as in any way totalising. They are mere observations I have made, observations I share with various other commentators and visitors. Of course, Britain is still home to many well-curated and enthralling museums, attractions, and galleries, and any insight I can offer is either as a fellow member of the public visiting or within the confines of what is very much just me day job, guv. The criticism offered comes from a place of sincere respect for the middlebrow in public life, and I do not use that term as any kind of pejorative. Museums should be a place where people come to show a bit of initiative in viewing and understanding the astounding. The opposite of the current naffness is not universal transformation into The School of Athens for Britain’s museums. Rather, it is somehow loosening the ideological fetters that grip the sector so tightly, fetters which somehow have so many multifaceted keyholes at so many levels, to create dignified places of public education and genuine wonder. Whoever can figure out the successful formula for getting out of this bind will have likely solved plenty of the country’s other problems at the same time.

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This article was written by Leman Walters, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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