Late last summer in southeast London, passersby examined a window display that queried, “Siri, What is Neoliberalism?” This was accompanied by a collage that offered some hints: a copy of Teen Bo$$! magazine with the headline “How to Build Your Brand BY BEING YOU!,” a jagged newspaper clipping with the words “role in the future of sustainable finance,” a 2005 image of the Clintons beaming up at Donald Trump. Beneath, a quote from Alan Greenspan, the American Federal Reserve chair between 1987 and 2006, proclaimed: “It hardly makes any difference who will be the next president. The world is governed by market forces.” This window display, created by the Museum of Neoliberalism, is gone now precisely because of these market forces — in this case, plans to bulldoze the building to make room for luxury apartment towers.
The Museum of Neoliberalism — a small, unassuming space in the Leegate Shopping Centre — opened in 2019. The spot in Lewisham was its relatively more permanent home after it grew from humble beginnings as an installation as part of a left-leaning political conference in Brighton. The museum was curated by Gavin Grindon, an art historian who focuses on activist art, and Darren Cullen, a satirical artist and illustrator. Grindon and Cullen met in 2015 while working on Banksy’s “Dismaland” project in southwest England. Grindon curated “Cruel Designs” for the dystopian amusement park, an exhibition examining design for social control (including anti-homeless spikes, border fences, and rubber bullets). Cullen’s “Pocket Money Loans” — a payday loan shop for children that gives them an advance on their allowance “at just 5000% interest” — was also on display.
The pair clearly had similar interests in the (counter)cultural sphere, although expressed through varying modes: Grindon’s academic writing and popular curatorial work examined protest cultures and social movements. He was also a member of Liberate Tate, an art collective that pressured the Tate museums through performance interventions to drop their BP oil company sponsorship, which they did in 2016. Cullen, on the other hand, once thought he wanted to go into a career in advertising, but he soon became “steadily horrified” by its ethical implications and dedicated himself to making art about “the empty promises of consumerism.” Cullen has gained some notoriety for his outlook and as his website proudly notes, he was once referred to by a former Conservative politician as a “Britain hating anarchist who knows the value of nothing.”
Inspired by former prime minister David Cameron’s support for spending £15 million on a commemorative Margaret Thatcher museum in 2013, the friends set out to make their own version — imagining a Coney Island-style attraction where visitors would enter through the giant clownish mouth of the Iron Lady. While this clown mouth has sadly not been built (yet), when the two decided to work together on the project, “we said, what if it was a museum of neoliberalism? That’s basically a Margaret Thatcher museum anyway,” Grindon explained.
Before this iteration of the museum came to its grim, if apropos, conclusion, it was a social space. Grindon, straightforward and thoughtful, told me, “It ended up existing in that network of spaces like infoshops and DIY spaces, more, perhaps, than in the networks of ‘official’ small museums.” Put together in only a few months’ time and essentially on “zero budget,” the museum eventually found a home in the front section of Cullen’s art studio at Leegate. The (relatively) cheap rent and minimal staffing needs (Cullen worked in the back and chatted with visitors) meant the museum was free. As it was not developed in an “official” capacity, the space had a wide range of walk-in visitors of different political persuasions.
So, Siri, what is neoliberalism anyway? A prevalent and now-pejorative phrase. Former prime minister Margaret Thatcher is generally considered the primary culprit of propagating the British strain of neoliberal policies — or Thatcherism — that gained traction beginning in the 1970s. This decade is “known for cults, serial killers, and the capitalist class becoming organized to defend its interests,” museum signage observed. Developed in response to strong postwar labor movements and welfare states, neoliberalism became a prominent new strain of “classical liberalism” that advocated that the state’s principal role is to promote markets and enforce rules that emphasize competition.
Neoliberalism champions the free market, free trade, deregulation, privatization, anti-unionism, austerity, and centers “the city” as the heart of wealth and capital accumulation. “Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls,” Noam Chomsky wrote in the 1999 book Profit Over People. But even for Londoners who were already well acquainted with the dire consequences of this project, the museum offered a unique, and at times shocking, display of the seemingly disparate relics and artworks that exemplified neoliberalism’s widespread and lasting effects.
The exhibition began with a red string detective-style map connecting the doctrine’s best-known intellectual and political advocates: Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, American economist Milton Friedman, former U.S. presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, as well as former U.K. prime ministers like Tony Blair and Thatcher. Corporate-funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation in the U.S. and the U.K.’s Institute of Economic Affairs also played a crucial role in spreading the dominant idea that a government’s primary role is to facilitate market competition.
The outcome of this principle was illustrated by a glittering display of spinning objects called “The PFI Game” that explained how Private Finance Initiatives (PFI) were introduced to Britain’s National Health Service in the 1990s. Under PFI, companies build and maintain the U.K.’s public health system’s infrastructure, which is leased out by the state at an exorbitant cost. The objects on display included price labels that show the items’ inflated cost under PFI, like a reception bell that costs £184 or a £333 lightbulb. “The PFI debt is four times the size of the budget deficit used to justify austerity,” the exhibit signage read, highlighting a farcical state of affairs.
The museum also covered public transport privatization (including a “Standing Room Only Passengers” board game so you can experience underfunded public transit for fun, in your own home); greenwashing (“today’s superyacht owners are younger and more in tune with the climate change around us,” one displayed headline read); and mass corporate expansion with a display on Amazon that included a fulfillment center in miniature, a Motorola WT-4000 terminal from 2006 that was worn by workers that reads “Pick Faster,” and a bottle of urine from an employee who did not have a bathroom break.
Perhaps satire is the only lens to view an ideology that produces overwhelming cognitive dissonance.
The space tried to play with the authority of “the museum,” Grindon said, as it is not always evident which objects were “real.” There was a “Richard Branson Tax Haven Island” board game (not real), as well as a Delta Airlines poster that recommended buying a PlayStation instead of paying union dues (real). “A lot of Darren’s work is heavily satirical. He often puts things in the real world and then doesn’t admit they’re satirical,” said Grindon, adding that the Museum of Neoliberalism is really an “absurd proposition” in itself. When I told friends I was visiting, I was asked several times (jokingly or not), “Is it pro or anti?” Even the museum’s logo might not actually give this away at first glance — Grindon describes it as a “weird segmented globe” modeled after a “sinister ‘70s corporation.”
Perhaps satire is the only lens through which to view an ideology that produces overwhelming cognitive dissonance. Neoliberalism enables Shell Oil to partner with London’s Science Museum for an exhibition on the climate crisis, and Lyft to launch a “Shuttle” service that is ultimately an expensive version of a public city bus. It is within this context that the museum succeeds in demystifying and precisely chronicling the historical thread and concrete strategies of the project to its audience. It articulates the vast, continuing social symptoms of the disease and helps us to appreciate why the system we live under borders on the absurd. No wonder the city tore it down.
Indeed, the dark irony of the demolition was certainly not lost on the curators after the October eviction date was given on short notice earlier this year — satire and reality seemingly coincided. While it was emotional, Grindon and Cullen were ultimately not expecting this version of the museum to be open forever. Even so, it remained open until the last possible moment, with a closing party at the end of September rounding out the five-year stint. In a way, “this adds to the story and to the meaning of the museum. The paradox of the museum is that it’s about something that isn’t finished,” said Grindon, noting that for several years the museum had been next door to a foodbank.
Plans for the building’s immediate demolition stalled due to negotiations between the local council and the developers, Galliard Homes, according to one news outlet. While the plans were finally approved in early December, the Greenwich Wire reported Galliard’s architectural and technical director said that it had been difficult to “accommodate the level of ‘affordable’ housing demanded by the government.” (The Galliard Homes website boasts that the company “selects the capital’s best locations for new developments and constructs luxury apartments, penthouses, and townhouses that are outstanding property investments.”)
Not many other independent spaces are afforded the (minor) silver lining of conceptualizing their demolition as relevant to the concept of the space itself. While the case of the Museum of Neoliberalism is a nightmarish parable, it is only a small part of a much larger story of public and social spaces that are increasingly under attack in cities around the world.
Across London, the consequences of years of neoliberal policy are stark. Private equity, corporatization, and austerity have forced, among other things, the securitization of community spaces; the closure of more than half of the city’s queer clubs and bars between 2006 and 2022; decades of funding cuts to music, theater, and other cultural institutions; unthinkably expensive rent prices despite an estimated one million homes in England sitting empty. And they have generally made existing in London arduous for anyone but the ultra-wealthy. It must be noted that, while these policies are often associated with Tory rule, recently elected Labour prime minister Keir Starmer assured us — in the midst of a cost of living crisis — he would “do everything in [his] power to galvanize growth including getting rid of regulation that needlessly holds back investment.”
And this is no accident. As Ms. Thatcher succinctly put it, there is “no such thing as society.” If enough people are unencumbered by any social relation, it makes it much easier for the state to, for example, institute policies that allegedly make cities “safer” by eliminating “anti-social behavior” that may “tarnish” its image. A “pristine” city is what is needed in the context of procuring foreign investment opportunities.
There have been rumors circulating that neoliberalism’s nearly 50-year reign is finally coming to a close. A 2005 New York Times headline reads “Neoliberalism? It doesn’t exist.” Last year, the New Yorker charted the “Rise and Fall” of the doctrine, and many other think tanks and editorial outlets have recently questioned what a post-neoliberal society will look like. While I leave the specifics of this debate to the professionals, what seems clear is that even though the dogma has faced expanding condemnation, this does not mean the neoliberal logics so deeply ingrained in our cities and psyches will be undone quickly or without resistance. Part of what makes the neoliberal project so successful is the erasure of any spaces that could contest, resist, or illuminate its brutality, its forced social isolation, or its farcical outcomes: “a political program designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives,” according to the late anarchist thinker and activist David Graeber. The degradation of free, accessible public spaces for the sake of gentrified luxury living literally erases any trace of its consequences and facilitates the destruction of solidarity between groups of people. And not only does neoliberalism prevent (and criminalize) communalism and solidarity, but it insists, to its benefit, that it is much more convenient and efficient to be alone, adding items to your Amazon cart or unlocking your phone with your face so you can scroll TikTok.
And as for the Museum of Neoliberalism? Grindon said they may, ironically, have to think about applying for charity status in order to make the space a bit more financially viable the next time around. And “without a lottery win,” Cullen wrote on Instagram, the next incarnation of the space will most likely not be in London.
Unfortunately, the museum “doesn’t yet have a benefactor,” Grindon said with a laugh, “but we’re open to offers.”
Isobel van Hagen is a writer and researcher based in London. She is a PhD candidate studying anarcha-feminist practices and anti-capitalist movements.
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