Britain’s long and often spectacular history of failed inventions, doomed projects and ill-fated ideas is finally getting its own cultural institution.
Opening in the UK next spring, the internationally touring Museum of Failure celebrates everything from major design disasters to corporate overreach – all viewed from the perspective of learning rather than ridicule.
Its founder, Dr. Samuel West, believes that Britain is the exhibition’s natural home. After touring the museum across Europe, the US and Asia, he says Britain’s dark humor and affection for the underdog make the country particularly receptive to the idea of openly confronting failure.
“I always wanted to take it home,” West said. “The British sense of humor understands this completely – this sarcastic, black awareness that things can just go horribly wrong.”
The Museum of Failure is exclusively dedicated to innovations that didn’t work out. Encompassing failed gadgets, abandoned technologies, commercial disasters and cultural misjudgments, the collection highlights the messy reality behind progress. Visitors are encouraged to laugh, but also to think about the risks that underlie any attempt to do something new.
British-born exhibits will feature prominently. These include the Titanic, the Sinclair C5, the abandoned NHS national IT programme, Dyson’s Zone headphones, Amstrad’s emailer, The Body Shop – and Brexit. Together they represent a uniquely British talent for ambition, confidence and sometimes disastrous execution.
Innovation strategist Ben Strutt, who runs workshops on turning failure into strategic advantage, said the exhibition had the potential to change attitudes by showing how common failure actually was.
“Visitors will see that even the biggest brands in the world fail,” he said. “You’ll also see how some failures later lead to success – like the Apple Newton, which paved the way for the iPhone, or Google Glass, which shaped today’s augmented reality wearables – and how sometimes better products lose out to worse ones, like Betamax to VHS.”
West wants to emphasize that the museum is not about ridicule. Instead, it aims to normalize failure as a necessary part of innovation — something he says is still widely stigmatized, despite Silicon Valley’s rhetoric of “failure forward.”
“I want to reframe failure as universal,” he said. “If we only glorify successes and punish failures, 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 beneficial for younger visitors by helping them rethink risk and creativity. However, she also warns against oversimplifying the message.
“There is a danger in celebrating failure too much,” she said. “When presented as always insightful or cool, it can invalidate the very real stress, loss and consequences that people experience when things go wrong.”
West agrees that failures are not experienced equally. He remembers 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 without a safety net, failure isn’t a learning exercise – it’s existential.”
This cultural contrast has shaped the way the museum is perceived worldwide. Visitors to China reportedly enjoyed laughing at failed Western products. In risk-averse South Korea, some were taken aback by what they perceived as a celebration of failure. In the US, the exhibition was largely treated as a joke, cleverly embedded in the narrative that failure always leads to success.
The West suspects Britain will be different.
“There is an instinctive understanding here,” he said. “A recognition that some failures lead to nothing, that things can be painful, pointless and absurd – and still worth examining.”
The final UK venue has not yet been decided, but when it opens, the Museum of Failure is likely to strike a chord in a country that has long mastered the art of doing things wrong with remarkable confidence.
