Vaginas, seashells and house building

By Kate Simon

It might be International Women’s Day today, but the most unusual attraction dedicated to the female sex, The Vagina Museum, pictured, has just had to shut its doors for want of a home.

Originally a pop-up museum that toured Britain, it then moved to a temporary space in Camden, London, before establishing a permanent exhibition in nearby Bethnal Green. The ‘world’s first bricks and mortar museum dedicated to the gynaecological anatomy’ has hosted exhibitions on everything from periods to gay parenting.

But to secure that venue, The Vagina Museum had to take a property guardianship, which has now ended. The fact that some 40,000 visitors have called by in just the past 10 months suggests this attraction shouldn’t be struggling to survive but for now it’s gone online. Iceland’s Penis Museum seems to have had a less frustrating time.

Celebrations of the female sex remain largely traditional in tone and mainly connected to royalty, politics and the arts. Mary Queen of Scots’ Visitor Centre in Jedburgh, Scotland, the Pankhurst Centre in Manchester, and Jane Austen’s House in Chawton, Hampshire, are a few renowned examples.

This week’s news that a Barbie has been created in the image of the space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock not only got me thinking about the under-representation of women in science but the dearth of tourism experiences that focus on women who have made their mark in the fields of science, technology, engineering and maths. (While Barbie may be the plastic face of sexism to many in my generation, Dr Aderin-Pocock welcomed her new status as a Barbie Role Model, saying: “I hope my doll will remind girls that when you reach for the stars, anything is possible.”)

Tourism, women and science can combine to great effect as evidenced by the Dorset coastline. It has built a strong national and international visitor profile as the Jurassic Coast largely thanks to Mary Anning, the 19th-century palaeontologist who combed for fossils here and transformed our thinking about the history of the Earth.

The subject of that favourite childhood tongue-twister ‘She sells seashells by the seashore’, Anning is rightly celebrated in her home town at Lyme Regis Museum, on local guided tours, and you can literally follow in her footsteps if you book a Fossil Hunting Walk.

But she’s a rare example. In the north-west, the Mid-Cheshire and Calder Valley railway lines’ visitor campaign Amazing Women By Rail ended some time ago but is still available to download at www.amazingwomenbyrail.org.uk. It’s a carbon-lite trail that traces the train routes, from Chester across the Cheshire Plain to Manchester, and Manchester to Leeds, Bradford and Blackburn, exploring the lives of notable women who lived near the lines along the way.

Elizabeth Gaskell, Emmeline Pankhurst and the Brontë Sisters are all rightly present, but so is Laura Annie Willson, the 20th Century engineer, trade unionist and suffragette. Willson helped shape the Halifax landscape with her construction work on housing estates, four of which still exist. Yet on the ground the only celebration of the first female member of the Federation of House Builders appears to be a display about her life in the town’s Calderdale Industrial Museum.

Such female pioneers deserve better, and their stories can enhance our travels around Britain.

Phil’s Beer Notes

There was a time when all beer was brewed by women, of course. But they were squeezed out by industrialisation when men decided they ought to take charge. Only in recent years has the brewster, as a female brewer is known, made a comeback.

And where else would you expect to find one than at Brewster’s Brewery in Grantham, Lincolnshire, where Sara Barton has been making great beers for a quarter of a century now. She brewed Decadence golden ale to celebrate the brewery’s 10th anniversary and it’s now its best selling cask beer.

Perhaps the most famous woman in brewing at the moment is Jaega Wise, thanks in part to her other job as presenter of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme. You can sample her beers at the Wild Card Brewery tap rooms (there are two) in Walthamstow, east London, including no fewer than three brewed specially for International Women’s Day – pale ales Main Hustle and 925, and a hazy IPA called Test Me.

Georgina Young is brewing director at St Austell in Cornwall and one of the most respected technicians in the business. Her Proper Job IPA is one of my favourite beers, but if you can find it, the 7.2% abv Big Job could be even better – it’s certainly bigger!

Queer Brewing was launched by Lily Waite in 2021 as a collaboration project, brewing beers with a host of other companies, and it now has its own range including a bright and modern wheat beer, Flowers. So if you’re giving someone something floral for International Women’s Day, make sure it’s this.

Photo © Vagina Museum