Crab Museum — Attraction in Thanet

I didn't know Murray Bookchin until now but will absolutely be doing my reading. His quote speaks exactly to where my lived experience, personal reading, and the clever folks at the Crab Museum, are leading me. I truly feel it is increasingly important as a society that we reject any notion of certainty of what is and move towards a place where we understand that life is constantly changing and that the best way of dealing with that is not by trying to pin labels on things we don't understand but by trying to look inside ourselves and see where we can bring more peace, compassion, creativity and love into our own lives and experiences. I hope this can act as a riposte to the inherited thought patterns that our societes have framed around each of us (I'm thinking race, nation, gender, religion, class, etc etc etc), at times in order to help us make sense of the world but all too often used as ways to press down on us and keep us small, as well as to create othering and division. By employing play, creativity, fun, oneness, education, equality and any other nice word you can think of the Crab Museum shows us how each one of us can do this in our own small or big way. A truly special and important place.

As a slight aside, on a psychedelic experience I had once I got deep into the idea of museums and felt that by putting important, often sacred items behind glass for personal satisfaction and / or financial gain museums were symptomatic of our capitalist malaise which steals from some and appears as a salve to others while really only depriving all people from lived experience for the benefit of a precious few. I even had an idea of creating a 'loveum' (still looking for a better name if you have one!) where people would donate items with a personal story that they wanted to share and visitors would be trusted to come and play (ideally through physically touching and interacting) with the items to learn about them in a truly authentic way.

The Crab Museum is the only museum I have visited since that moment and to me is a model of what museums can and should be - free for all, places of fun and creativity but also places that allow critical thought and invite you to leave with a slightly different idea of the world than you entered with.

Truly thank you guys for creating such a brilliant and...

A cracking & quirky free to enter mini museum on the fairly niche topic of crabs, featuring some neat crab exhibits. Sadly it's only one room! Half of the place is a gift shop selling crab merch. I'd have hoped for at least several rooms housing far more physical exhibits. Maybe even a tank with live crabs. A coconut crab model or shell would be a cool addition to their collection — start building up a collection guys!

It's a “meme” museum wrapped in a sheen of political signalling, whether politics should be left out of a crab museum or if politics and crabs are inextricably linked together is up for debate. Alas, it's not the most serious or diligent documentation of crabs, but certainly there's no shortage of good humour put into this project. The displays could be more orderly and clearer to read with more visual interest.

I think the museum is underselling how interesting crabs can be. I think they could quite easily have a lot more to say on the subject if they wanted to or were able to. How are crabs caught and eaten in different places? What types of crabs exist around the globe? What were crabs like hundreds of millions of years ago? Where can one go crab fishing in Margate? Is overfishing a problem? Does human activity affect crab populations and if so, how? But maybe the lack of space or funds is a limiting...

Honestly, I was disappointed. The 'Museam' consists of two rooms, 1 is half giftshop and other half a few displays talking about crabs. The other room was just some written displays about anti-capitalism, colonialism and climate stuff. (Photos from the second room). Very little to do with crabs....

The person at the counter in the gift shop area had a little digital microscope and was nice and informative talking about crab growth and evolutionary information whilst showing some zoomed in images of parts of the creature. I was almost thinking of donating some money just for the little chat and demonstration, and then I notice the Palestinian flags behind them, so it was a no from me. This is not the venue for middle east land disputes , it's suppose to be crabs.

The displays and presentations where ok, if by displays we mean 90% of the displays being wooden wall plaques with text on it and some cute crab designs.

I was half expecting to see more crabs and learn about them. Instead what I got was an biased ideological messaging using crabs as the springboard. Quite a let down.

Suggestion wise to the venue, I would say drop the unnecessary politicisation, have more actual crab displays, have a few aquarium tanks with some little crustacean friends so people and children can...