Tat Britain: Museum gift shops are naff – but necessary

Exit through the gift shop. Pick up a postcard, a magnet, a novelty eggcup in the shape of Queen Elizabeth I. Treat yourself to a replica Rosetta Stone, a Babylonian bookend, a build-your-own Leonardo trebuchet. Tuck your little one up at night with a cuddly Anubis the dog.

Nicholas Coleridge, chairman of the Victoria & Albert Museum, has put the tat among the pigeons by telling the Cheltenham Literature Festival that the V&A shop is more successful than the BM’s. ‘The British Museum shop,’ said Coleridge at an event to promote his memoir The Glossy Years (available in all good gift shops), ‘increasingly sells teddy bears wearing police helmets, while the V&A shop sells the most beautiful jewellery and incredibly lovely William Morris drying up towels — very, very popular things.’ Last year, the tills of the V&A’s main shop rang up £7.3 million worth of calendars, Christmas cards and Frida Kahlo floral headdresses.

Meanwhile, the British Museum is a grand bazaar of Viking chess sets, plastic gladiator helmets and Horse Guards’ bearskin booties. Keep those tiny tootsies toasty. The exquisites at the V&A may scoff, but aged seven I’d have sacrificed my own mummy for an Egyptian hieroglyphs stencil set.

Besides, South Kensington isn’t without sin. For every Morris tea towel there’s a pair of Mary Quant lurex tights and a ‘Three Graces’ iron-on patch showing the comely bottoms of three G-stringed ladies. Which is stretching Morris’s ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful’ beyond its usual limits.

When it comes to museum gift shops, they’re all as naff as each other. The National Gallery shop is awash with parakeet salt and pepper shakers, cockatoo carafes, toucan necklaces, spitting snake bottle openers, aubergine dipping bowls and other quasi-Tahitian titbits to tempt you on your way out of the Gauguin Portraits show.