UK tank museum becomes cult hit with tourists and more popular than Paris hotspot

Bovington Tank Museum has become an online star

A small museum has become a global sensation and a Youtube breakout star, beating out the iconic Louvre museum in Paris.

Tucked away in rural Dorset, Bovington Tank Museum might not seem like the most obvious destination to become a counter-cultural star. And yet the armour vehicle emporium has wracked up more views on its Youtube channel than the Louvre in Paris and the Met in New York.

Videos such as ‘the evolution of the armoured personnel carrier’, ‘Powering Victory: How tank engines went from 105 to 1200bhp’ and ‘Knock Out: The Evolution of Tank Ammunition’, the channel has won more than 100 million views.

The success of the channel has led museum worker Chris Copson to regularly be recognised in the streets, despite the sizeable majority of Bovington’s audience coming from the US.

Nik Wyness, the museum’s head of marketing, told the BBC that their mission has always been “to tell the story of the tank and the people that served in them”. The museum’s social media channels have helped them do this in a way few would’ve thought possible not too long ago.

As the museum’s popularity has grown, they’ve teamed up with comedian and military enthusiast Al Murray and historian James Holland to create videos, helping them on the way to 555,000 subscribers.

Chris Copson, education officer at the museum, feels he is an unlikely YouTube star – yet some of his videos have attracted about two million views.

Like many such institutions, the tank museum’s future looked under threat during the Covid pandemic, when it had to shut its doors. It managed to survive in part thanks to the large online community it had built up.

When staff at the museum first produced videos, they weren’t hugely popular. Their first big hit came in 2015 with a series called Tank Chats, which saw a military historian named David Fletcher discuss the vehicle’s history.

Today the museum has hired a team of 10 people whose sole job is to work on Youtube videos. Now a quarter of its revenue is made online.

The museum officially opening to the public in 1947, having long been a training centre for tanks and becoming the UK’s main armoured vehicle hub in 1916. Today it is home to 300 tanks ranging from the very first ‘real tank’ built, the Little Willie, right through to machinery used in Afghanistan this side of the century.

The museum also features a Challenger 2 tank – two of which were sent earlier this year to fight in Ukraine in the war against Russia. Currently the British Army possesses around 400 Challenger 2s, each of them weighing the same as 80 Mini Coopers. The Tank Museum also has a game zone that was launched in 2021, and funded by the video game World of Tanks.

Visitor experience general manager Rosanna Dean said: “The Tank Museum is voted the number 1 Dorset visitor attraction on TripAdvisor and we had a brilliant summer welcoming visitors from all over the world.

“In the Centenary Year of The Tank Museum, we continue to offer an unparalleled visitor experience by improving the facilities and offering new activities for the whole family.”