The Vagina Museum reopens in Bethnal Green this week
(Picture: )When it was announced back in 2017 that the world’s first ever bricks and mortar Vagina Museum would, um, open in London, it made headlines the world over. Founded by Florence Schechter, it began as a pop-up and then secured a permanent home in Camden Market two years later. Over 120,000 visitors flocked to the site in its first six months, and the small but mighty museum weathered the pandemic. But then landlords declined to renew its lease – the premises given instead to a clothes shop – and the Vagina Museum found itself homeless and at real risk of permanent closure.
But – hurrah! – fast forward a handful of menstrual cycles, and the Vagina Museum is back with a new site, three times the size of its original, in Bethnal Green. Opening this week (March 19), the world’s only museum dedicated to the gynaecological anatomy has a swish new spot in a creative hub called ENTER. Run by immersive theatre company Exit Productions under a property guardianship, the building will also house a co-working space, a café, an escape room and several rehearsal spaces. It’s a haven for adventurous creatives – on the day I’m there, Joe Ball, one half of Exit Productions, has just secured a commission for the wall of the café. In dialogue with the Guerrilla Girls’ iconic work pointing out that 85 per cent of nudes in galleries are of women, non-male artists will paint “male butts” on the wall.
The Vagina Museum occupies the bottom floor, and Schechter is busy with preparations for its opening when I arrive to explore the new space. She’s installing Periods: A Brief History, an exhibition exploring the persistent taboos around being on the blob and the varying provisions over the years. It’s highly interactive: visitors are invited to write their suggestions about the future of menstruation, and draw their own menstrual cave drawings (don’t worry, there are pens for this).
Ahead of opening day, a new sign has been painted outside the entrance to give a visitors a warm welcome. In response to feedback that visitors would like to see a broader overview of the topic, there’s now a permanent exhibition called From A to V (here you’ll find the vaginally bleached knickers which went viral on the museum’s Twitter earlier this year). Next door is the Community Gallery, which Schechter and the team are trying to get funding for so they can host - they hope - four exhibitions a year from the local community. There’s also a large learning and events space for school visits and pop-ups.
The fact that the new premises are part of a property guardianship (a scheme where vacant premises are offered on a flexible basis in order to protect them from squatting or disrepair) means that this won’t be the Vagina Museum’s permanent home. “We could be kicked out tomorrow, and we’ll have to do it all over again,” Schechter tells me. “But when you run a grassroots organisation, that doesn’t have a huge amount of funding from anywhere and doesn’t have big patrons or massive celebrity supporters, you kind of just make do as part of it.”
Despite the museum’s global success and popularity, landlords seem to have what can only be described as fear of the fanny. Three or four times, Schechter says, they came close to securing a new space only to have the door closed again. “We had this one place where it was just an empty building near Liverpool Street, and it was unsellable. And I remember meeting the estate manager, and they absolutely loved the idea. We were talking to designers, trying to get stuff started. We were just waiting for them to jump through the paperwork. And then they just turned around like, actually… no. We think that somebody higher up found out about it and were like, we can’t associate ourselves with them.”
Prior to finding the site in Bethnal Green, the situation was serious. It was “a real possibility” that the Vagina Museum would shut down. “The trustees sat down and looked at our finances and were like: this is how long we can go before we decide we have to just fold. Thankfully, we had a little bit in savings so we were able to go for a few months while we were looking for a new place.”
Almost entirely funded through donations, membership schemes and its shop, the most public money the museum has ever received was £10,000 from Camden Council after the pandemic. It now hopes to prove itself to the risk-averse funding system, which puts a burden on applicants to prove their track records – hence why the museum’s first space was only made possible by a crowdfunder.
Building relationships with potential funders will allow the museum to realise its bigger ambitions. Schechter sees endless possibilities: she’d love to do an exhibition on activism and body activism in the near future, but also wants to explore the vagina from an arts and culture perspective as well as through science and history. But the ultimate goal – in five to ten years, hopefully – is to secure funding to build a permanent museum.
The taboos haven’t vanished since Schechter started the museum, “but the ‘smashing the taboos’ narrative is a lot stronger and mainstream and acceptable,” she thinks. “I feel like if I had started the Vagina Museum even just a few years earlier, it would have been very much like, ‘ew, why are you doing this? That’s so weird and gross’.”
Landlords and – how could we forget them – internet trolls aside, the museum enjoys a uniquely positive relationship with its visitors. Feedback cards are 80-85 per cent positive, says Schechter – “museums in general, if they get 50 per cent positive feedback, they’re like, ‘wow, amazing’.”
Schechter’s list of who turns up is vast: women in their 20s and 30s who had no idea about the internal clitoris, people dragging round their boyfriends saying “read this!”, teenagers regarding it as a safe place for learning rather than having to resort to turning to porn for research, older women who say they wish it had existed when they were younger, single dads who want to teach their kids about periods. “It’s just so positive. And it’s beautiful. It’s my favourite thing.” People, it seems, really do want to come.
