| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Proposed closure of Wandsworth Museum | |
| Posted by: | Valerie Bott | |
| Date/Time: | 12/01/07 13:00:00 |
| Cllr Grimston is writing so much here, and with such a scattergun approach, that he cannot be much of a team-player with the rest of the borough council - which remains noticeably silent as to what the actual proposals are, the costs and the implications. I was always a bit worried about the implications of cabinet government in local authorities. . . this man appears to be making his own decisions about future policy while abruptly dismissing the views of those who care about the loss of the Museum in his spare time on this site. The result is that the decision and the secretive approach to making it appear to be entirely his personal responsiblity. There is plenty of evidence in Cllr Grimston's posts that the decision is being made without proper understanding of either how the "value" of the Museum should be judged or what would actually be lost. For example, he uses levels of use of other facilties to confirm its "failure" when museums are far more than facilities where numbers through the door are the primary indicator of effectiveness. Use of libraries and sports centres also follows different patterns from that of museums, so the comparison is foolish. The Museum's core role is preserving the community's collective memory - and judging that role in terms of numbers is not enough. Further, the visitor numbers do not reveal the range of outreach work the museum service has been engaged in - its small team has an enviable record in working with all sorts of community groups, engaging their interest and understanding, sharing existing collections, assembling memories and objects for future generations. There is no logic in closing the Museum to save money (and the cost of closure will be high) if he can now find the funding to create a new library. If limited funds are available for some changes, then one would expect the council to have carried out an options appraisal which assessed whether it was more important to keep the Museum going (as there is only one) or to remodel the borough-wide library service. In such an appraisal process, opportunities for external funding, income generation and other ways of operating ought to be taken into account as well. His lack of respect for 20 years of recording and preserving that community history, confirmed by the suggestion that three disused cemetery chapels might be an appopriate home for the collections, is insulting to all who have donated objects over the years. (Disused chapels have none of the internal environmental management systems in which the council invested to enable the Museum to protect the collections). Over the next few years Wandsworth Museum ought to be playing a significant role in the redevelopment of the town centre, working with the community which is going to go through a difficult period of major change, with the developers to advise how to preserve key components of the old brewery, recording the changes, acting as a home for the finds from major excavations which should precede development and providing a much-needed cultural facility which will help attract businesses and give new residents new "roots". That role could attract valuable funds from the developers to match grants from other bodies like the lottery distributors and charitable foundations to enhance, move or expand the Museum - surely Wandsworth Council does not want to pass up the opportunity of raising such investment at no cost to itself? |