The British Museum is a fantastic place. You get all the history you can eat for free, it’s in an amazing old building that you can walk round in shorts and a vest if you like, and if you take a date there you can clever them into bed by dropping some pre-prepared fact bombs.
I’m pretty sure The British Museum is my spiritual home, but recently I’ve been worried by a few things.
It’s not the flood of tourists who clog up the corridors like sardines. You can’t blame them for wanting to see the artifacts we raided from them, Indiana Jones style, during the years of Empire. Also, foreigners have to put up with the nightmare of ‘Brits abroad’, and given the choice between polite tourists quietly shuffling around display cases and boozed up Brits urinating over national monuments and fighting, I’d pick the polite tourists every time.
No, what’s bothering me is that you can’t seem to have a museum these days without a gift shop. You can’t have the treasure without the tat and I am worried that this infestation of tawdry shit has invaded my beloved British Museum. So, I went to find out how bad it was.
From the outset signs were bad. Outside the entrance to the Museum is a hot dog stand selling reconstituted pig anus sausages to unsuspecting tourists. Then moving inside the gates we also found a shabby drinks stand called Jude’s.
I suggested to Bob it could be a knowing reference to Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, but he said that was unlikely.
So the enemy was within the gates, but what about inside the building itself? We pushed on.
Probably the most famous and certainly the most significant artifact in the British Museum is the Rosetta Stone. For those who don’t know, the Rosetta Stone is a slab of rock discovered in 1799 by Napoleon’s occupying army in Egypt and later captured by the Brits in 1802 (Rule Britannia!) The text on the stone helped scholars to decode hieroglyphics, a previously unknown language, which in turn allowed other clever people to uncover the hidden secrets of ancient Egypt. Brilliant!
Here’s me standing near the Stone. It’s surrounded by interested tourists and glass so you can’t really get a good look, but that’s just supply and demand in practice.
Luckily, being a local I know there’s a replica just round the corner that you can get near and even touch! As you can see from this picture I was pretty excited about this. It was weird, and there was a lot of footage from this interaction that we couldn’t use.
But here’s the thing, seeing the Stone itself is a real experience. ‘Wow’, you think, ‘this actual stone is over 200o years old. It predates Jesus Christ, and it will continue to be studied and viewed long after I am dead. Amazing!’ What I don’t understand is how then this sense of wonder and amazement transform into the desire to own a miniature fridge magnet version of said stone?
A little confused, we went into the gift shop to see what was going on.
I guess the Rosetta Stone is the British Museum’s Miley Cyrus, it’s their cash cow, and this is reflected in the self space given to it in the gift shop. There are mugs, bags, miniatures, the list goes on and on. But if stones aren’t your thing, worry not…
There were some rather fetching ear rings.
A blue hippo backpack which, it turns out, was too small for me.
Then there was branded British Museum chocolate. So if you can’t digest all the history and bloody culture, then at least you can get this chocolate down you neck, can’t you fatty! (I’m thinking this sells particularly well with Americans)
What I didn’t expect to find in the gift shop was expensive stuff, but this was after all the British Museum. First we spotted these rather good ties (£30 each). The flamingo and palm tree one is straight off the set of Wham’s Club Tropicana video.
Then there were these traditional camel drivers jackets. Although I think I looked a bit like Lord Byron in it, I couldn’t really afford the £180 price tag.
Although there as actually some interesting stuff in the end, I do wonder where this ruthless monetization will end? Will there be British Museum branded flick knives, Embalmed Mummy Pez dispensers, or maybe Rosetta Stone toilet paper? That could be quite good actually, the tag line could be ‘touch history – with your ass!’
At the end of my visit I was confused. I guess you can’t expect 8 year old kids to trudge around a museum for 4 hours without the promise of gifts at the end of it.
In the end it probably comes down to dollar dollar bills, and I’d rather have museum + gifts than no museum at all. So if selling their soul a little bit helps keep the British Museum stay open and free, then I guess I must, begrudgingly, accept it and recognise that with every positive comes a negative.
