The queering of the Science Museum

Have you been to the Science Museum lately? It can’t have always been this bad, surely?

Sadly, the nearly 200-year-old museum in central London is gaining a reputation for being more than a little bit rubbish. This month, it hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons, when it emerged that one of its self-guided tours, called ‘Seeing Things Queerly’, makes the curious claim that Lego bricks could be ‘heteronormative’. The tour, which has been running since 2022, claims that ‘gendered’ language around Lego pieces reinforces gender binaries and heterosexuality as the norm in society.

In its literature, the tour explains: ‘Like other connectors and fasteners, Lego bricks are often described in a gendered way. The top of the brick with sticking out pins is male, the bottom of the brick with holes to receive the pins is female, and the process of the two sides being put together is called mating.’ As such, according to the Science Museum, this ‘illustrates how heteronormativity (the idea that heterosexuality and the male / female gender binary are the norm and everything that falls outside is unusual) shapes the way we speak about science, technology and the world in general’.

This is a bit of a stretch, to say the least. Who has honestly ever heard Lego bricks described in this way? Terms like ‘mating’, ‘male’ and ‘female’ are surely only used by adult enthusiasts, not by Lego’s target audience of children (or even by Lego itself). And what even is the point of a tour themed to LGBT identity politics in a museum that is supposedly dedicated to science and empirical thought, rather than social issues?

Sadly, if you have visited the Science Museum recently you will not have been surprised at all by the Lego story. The museum has gone massively downhill in recent years. During my last visit in December, I was truly shocked at just how drab it had become. There is nothing visually or intellectually compelling about its permanent collection, which is seemingly a series of disparate objects plonked together. There is no real storytelling to link them or engage visitors.

I did at first wonder if this might just be down to unimaginative curation. Then, while walking through the museum’s exhibition about 18th-century clockmaking, my suspicions were aroused that something else was going on. These immaculately preserved timepieces are beautiful and intricate, wonders of the Enlightenment era that produced them. But the blurbs accompanying the displays make repeated references to colonialism and slavery in the period – hardly relevant to an exhibition about clocks made by artisan craftsmen.

Another striking thing about the Science Museum is how absent the great men of science – like Newton, Darwin and Turing – are. Though many of the objects associated with their scientific discoveries are well represented, the eccentric and interesting lives of these fascinating men are almost wholly absent. Is this perhaps because of a reluctance to tell the story of ‘dead white men’ and their place in scientific history?

I got the same feeling with many of the objects in the museum preserved from the Industrial Revolution, another incredible period of human progress. They are presented with almost no story, beyond their mechanistic purpose. They are completely robbed of all humanness and larger context. Is this because of the now fashionable view among zealous climate activists like Greta Thunberg that the fossil-fueled Industrial Revolution is something Britain should be ashamed of? The Science Museum has been attacked in the past for accepting sponsorships from oil and gas companies, and so may be extra touchy about the subject.

Strikingly, there is nothing at all in the museum about the wonder of scientific discovery or the types of curious, open personalities who made these great leaps forward. It is almost as if the collection of lathes, rockets, microscopes and antique computers had sprung from nowhere with no human effort at all.

I left the museum thinking about the groundbreaking 1980 television series, Cosmos, presented by the late physicist, Carl Sagan. It was an incredibly inventive and accessible piece of documentary filmmaking, which communicated some of the most complex concepts in maths and physics to a wide audience. It was artistic and poetic, too. Sagan understood how human the scientific method is and how easily it lends itself to a good story. He can almost certainly claim to have inspired a whole generation about the beauty and wonder of science.

The Science Museum, meanwhile, could not be further from inspiring anyone. It has managed to replace the incredible story of scientific discovery in Britain with lame exhibitions on colonialism and ‘heteronormativity’. It is a depressing reminder of how wokeness hollows out everything it touches.

Candice Holdsworth is a writer. Visit her website here.