Britain’s long and often spectacular history of mismanaged inventions, doomed projects and ill-fated ideas is finally getting its own cultural institution.
Next spring, the internationally touring Museum of Failure will open in the UK, celebrating everything from grand design disasters to corporate overreach – all viewed through the lens of learning rather than ridicule.
Its founder, Dr Samuel West, believes the UK is the exhibition’s natural home. Having toured the museum across Europe, the US and Asia, he says Britain’s dark humour and affection for the underdog make it uniquely receptive to the idea of openly examining failure.
“I’ve always wanted to bring it back home,” West said. “The British sense of humour totally gets this – that sarcastic, black awareness that things can just go horribly wrong.”
The Museum of Failure is dedicated entirely to innovation that didn’t work out. Its collection spans failed gadgets, abandoned technologies, commercial disasters and cultural misjudgements, highlighting the messy reality behind progress. Visitors are encouraged to laugh, but also to reflect on the risks that underpin any attempt to do something new.
UK-born exhibits will feature prominently. Among them are the Titanic, the Sinclair C5, the NHS’s abandoned national IT programme, Dyson’s Zone headphones, Amstrad’s e-mailer, The Body Shop – and Brexit. Together, they chart a uniquely British talent for ambition, confidence and, at times, catastrophic execution.
Innovation strategist Ben Strutt, who runs workshops on turning failure into strategic advantage, said the exhibition has the potential to shift attitudes by showing how common failure really is.
“Visitors will see that even the biggest brands in the world fail,” he said. “They’ll also see how some failures later enable success – like the Apple Newton paving the way for the iPhone, or Google Glass shaping today’s augmented reality wearables – and how sometimes better products lose out to worse ones, like Betamax versus VHS.”
West is keen to stress that the museum is not about mockery. Instead, it aims to normalise failure as a necessary ingredient of innovation – something he believes is still widely stigmatised, despite Silicon Valley rhetoric about “failing forward”.
“I want to reframe failure as universal,” he said. “If we only glorify success and punish failure, we stop taking the meaningful risks needed to solve the biggest problems of our time – environmental, social and economic.”
Psychologist Fiona Murden, who has written extensively about resilience and failure, believes the museum could be particularly powerful for younger visitors, helping them rethink risk and creativity. However, she also cautions against oversimplifying the message.
“There’s a danger in celebrating failure too much,” she said. “If it’s framed as always enlightening or cool, it can invalidate the very real stress, loss and consequences people experience when things go wrong.”
West agrees that failure is not experienced equally. He recalls being challenged after a talk by a woman in Ivory Coast who pointed out that, unlike entrepreneurs in wealthy countries, failure for her could plunge an entire family into poverty.
“She was right,” he said. “Failure is cultural, economic and political. If you’re a migrant worker or running a business with no safety net, failure isn’t a learning exercise – it’s existential.”
That cultural contrast has shaped how the museum is received globally. In China, visitors reportedly enjoyed laughing at failed western products. In risk-averse South Korea, some were baffled by what they perceived as a celebration of failure. In the US, the exhibition was treated largely as a joke, folded neatly into the narrative that failure always leads to success.
Britain, West suspects, will be different.
“There’s an instinctive understanding here,” he said. “A recognition that some failures don’t lead anywhere, that things can be painful, pointless and absurd – and still worth examining.”
The final UK venue has yet to be confirmed, but when it opens, the Museum of Failure looks set to strike a chord in a country that has long mastered the art of getting things wrong with remarkable confidence.
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The Museum of Failure is coming to the UK – and Britain’s flops are centre stage