From Britain’s Lawnmower Museum to Vienna’s collection of terrible globes, niche museums have a bizarre appeal. These delightfully obscure attractions celebrate the most unexpected subjects – and they’re worth seeking out on your travels.
The relationship test at Britain’s Lawnmower Museum
In every lasting relationship, there is a moment when you just know it is just meant to be. For me, that was when I took the woman who is now my wife away for our first romantic weekend together.
On our last day in Liverpool, I sheepishly proposed a slight detour. “You know how made me go on the ferry across the Mersey just so you could sing Ferry Cross the Mersey on it?” I ventured.
“Well would you mind if we went home via Southport?” She went with it. Even when I told her why.
The gloriously impractical British Lawnmower Museum
In Southport, there is a prime example of the sort of attraction I have a not-so-minor obsession with. I’m enchanted by any museum where the subject matter is so bizarrely niche that commercial viability is surely an impossibility.
And of these charming institutions, the British Lawnmower Museum has to be in an elevated position on the pantheon. It is a gloriously cluttered labour of love, with lawnmowers and other gardening equipment crammed into every little hidey-hole.
Some are donated by celebrities – Joe Pasquale has handed over his strimmer, Brian May from Queen has thrown in a classic model – and you amble past them while a tape recording runs through the history of mowing lawns.
Why brilliantly pointless museums matter
This, of course, is something I have no interest in whatsoever. But the fact that it exists for the half-dozen people in the world who might be interested cheers me greatly.
Occasionally the fates combine to produce a ridiculously niche museum on a topic that does actually interest me. The Palais Mollard in Vienna, therefore, is one of my favourite places in the world: it contains two of them.
Vienna’s Globe Museum: Celebrating cartographic catastrophes
The Globe Museum is not something to cherish because it’s full of really good globes. It’s marvellous because it’s full of really bad, inaccurate globes made by well-meaning cartographers from previous centuries.
They didn’t have the satellite technology we have now, and large chunks of the globe hadn’t even been explored. The shape of Africa, therefore, is subjected to some tremendously flamboyant speculation.
Other landmasses are misplaced by several hundred miles, California‘s often depicted as an island and the gap where Australia should be offers a blank canvas for drawing whales and terrifying sea monsters.
The Esperanto Museum: Dreams of global linguistic unity
On the ground floor is the Esperanto Museum; a thrilling spectacle devoted to an entirely invented language that no nation in the world recognises as a mother tongue. Esperanto’s story is one of wide-eyed hope – its proponents genuinely believed it could go worldwide and usher in an era of global peace.
This didn’t come to pass. But on the plus side, there are few things more entertaining than learning grammatical suffixes of a useless language by playing a specially adapted Pacman game.
That’s something that the British Museum and the Louvre can’t compete with.
The quest for the world’s most boring museum
But such hi-jinks have instilled a sense of quest. I want to go to the oddest museums in the world (the Icelandic Phallological Museum has to be near the top of the list, with its marvellous collection of members from across the animal kingdom).
But I also want to find the least appealing museum in the world; one on a topic so incredibly dull that surely no sentient being would ever wish to go to it. It was this quest took me to a particularly anonymous suburb of Dortmund, for in Germany‘s industrial Ruhrgebeit heartland lies the Deutsche Arbeitsschutzausstellung.
Germany’s health and safety exhibition: The ultimate test
Roughly translated, this means the German Occupational Health and Safety Exhibition. What could possibly be more tedious than health and safety regulations rammed home with stereotypical German efficiency?
My excitement only increased as a portly man with a moustache officiously informed me that I’d not be able to take my bottle of water inside. It was fitting all the magnificently miserable mental images I’d conjured up when I first learned of the place’s existence.
When boring museums betray their own mission
But then it let me down. Wandering through, I was heartbroken to find that the German Occupational Health and Safety Exhibition is quite good.
There are buttons to press, helicopter cockpits to sit in, clunking great bits of machinery to play with and extraordinarily clever robots to admire. This wasn’t what I wanted.
I wanted explanations of fire drill strategies and details of mandatory rest breaks. I was enjoying myself and loathing every second of it.
Finding the Holy Grail of mundane exhibits
It was only at the end that I found the Holy Grail. An area of this flashy, high technology desecration of what should have been bar-setting awful museum was set aside for a display on how to lift a box properly.
The spirit of the inexplicably niche museums I love so much had finally been evoked.
