The See Monster installation in Weston-Super-Mare closes on Monday and has been sold for scrap.
Launched as a festival of ‘creativity’ by Theresa May (former Prime Minister) and championed by Boris Johnson (former village idiot), ‘Unboxed: Creativity in the UK’ was heralded as the Festival of Brexit by Jacob Rees-Mogg (former tax payer). Costing about £120 million, ten projects were supported across the UK.
Did anyone know these were happening?
The project “Green Space Dark Skies” invited people to gather outside at dusk at various locations. It did also collect a lot of meaningless statistics such as metrics responding to “In this experience, green space was important to my identity”, “this experience in the natural landscape helps me connect to myself”.
Hmm.
The PoliNations event Transformed the centre of Birmingham into a “Garden of magical proportions! Giant fabricated trees sit amongst thousands of plants and flowers co-planted by the city’s residents, whilst the garden hosts a spectacular free events programme celebrating colour, beauty and natural diversity”. The pictures look very nice, but if the Facebook posts are anything to go by, not many people saw it but a lot of people posting that they wished they’d known it was on. Most pictures got no response, but a few got a handful of positive comments.
So most of Birmingham blinked and missed it.
The See Monster installation on the beach at Weston-Super-Mare certainly made an impression. A retired oil rig dragged up on the beach, covered in twinkly lights and planted with trees. Oh and they had a waterfall coming from it. Apparently it was designed to “inspire global conversations about reuse, renewables and the great British weather”. The firework displays put on from it certainly did provoke discussions about environmental impact – especially pointless impact.
The installation was cunningly scheduled to miss most of the summer season in order to minimise the number of people who could visit and go round it.
The Festival of Brexit was expected to attract 66 million people to its live events. It actually attracted 2.8 million visitors. The online/viewing figures were boosted by 6 million because one of the events got a short segment on the TV programme Country File. 6 million is the show’s typical audience.
So just like Brexit, a bit of a shambles that was sold on promises but ultimately failed to deliver. The See Monster is to be broken up for scrap, how well will this analogy compare to Brexit?