Sun sets on UK’s only museum on British Empire

UK's only museum dedicated to the glories of the British Empire has closed down because of public antipathy towards the country’s colonial past.

UK's only museum dedicated to the glories of the British Empire has closed down because of public antipathy towards the country’s colonial past.

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The British Empire and Commonwealth Museum has been forced to sell its premises in Bristol and give up its collections because of the public's dislike towards the nations’s colonial past.

Sir Neil Cossons, chairman of the museum's board of trustees, blamed the demise on ‘post-imperial angst’. “I think the time has not yet arrived for the proper story of Empire and Commonwealth to be told,” he said. Although attitudes to Empire were improving, he said it was still an "unfashionable subject" and "more healing of time" was required.

The museum opened in Bristol in 2002 but shut in 2008.