| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Proposed closure of Wandsworth Museum | |
| Posted by: | Cedric Peachey | |
| Date/Time: | 11/03/07 14:15:00 |
| Roland, According to paper 07-168, the Museum staff is equivalent to 9.92 full-time employed although there are some vacancies. The number of staff at the Museum is directly linked to the range and quality of services it provides and it is worth pointing out the following: 1. The team includes two trained education officers who organise and run classes in the Museum and outreach activities. 2. The steady growth of the collection over the years and its success in attracting donations from residents and loans from other museums requires not just expertise but a considerable degree of administration to assess, document and catalogue new items. Last year, an average of 50 new artefacts were added to the collection each month, with a large number being politely declined. If you remove this capability, the collection will cease to evolve and develop. 3. Planning and mounting temporary and community exhibitions requires a lot of backroom work and there is a workshop with specialist equipment at the Museum for constructing displays, printing images and text, wiring, lighting and protecting the results. The team includes a mix of full-time and part-time staff who have the necessary skills and training to do this. Again, once this capability is lost, the scope to explore and effectively present the many facets, threads and themes covered by the Museum's collection will cease. 4. The Museum, like most facilities run by the Council, has an ever-increasing reporting burden. The demands for statistics continue to grow in number and complexity and are driven as much by central government as by the Council's own requirements. While no one would deny that there is scope to reduce the number of staff at the Museum and perhaps use more volunteers (the Museum already has the services of two volunteers) and possibly make other cuts and savings, I should point out that a couple of years ago the Museum was obliged to save money by reducing its opening hours. Since then, the Museum has been closed on Saturday mornings. Despite this, the Museum has continued to attract more visitors than ever. The nub of the issue here is not how few people could "run" a Museum but what sort of Museum do you want? If it is to be anything more than a passive, unchanging, dusty repository of artefacts, you have to have the skills and staff that can make positive use of the collection and engage with the public through the creative presentation of different aspects of the collection, whether through exhibitions or family events or school visits or outreach programmes to the elderly, the disabled and the hospitalised. It is the breadth and depth of Wandsworth Museum's services to the community that singled it out and won it Accreditation last year. This award will be immediately withdrawn under Cllr Grimston's plans as he plans to reverse all the work it currently does. One statistic for Wandsworth that has come my way is that the majority of borrowers of books at libraries spend less than five minutes in the library. The thousands of visitors who come to collect orange bags and pick up Freedom Passes certainly spend even less time. To argue as he does that you can count heads in libraries and claim that each will enjoy a "cultural experience" under his plans is like saying that everyone who passes a theatre poster advertising Macbeth will have gained some sort of appreciation of Shakespeare. My main problem with any discussion with Cllr Grimston is that, with the greatest of respect, it seems he really does not know what he is talking about. He has already retracted his initial quite baseless criticism of the Museum. At the same time, he declared that static displays are old hat and that digital access is the way forward and referred to the Kensington Museums. He clearly is not aware of the V&A's plans to spend several millions to increase its space for static displays. When Cllr Grimston gave an interview on Radio London back in January, he was asked what was his favourite item in the Museum. Janet Smith of the Wandsworth Historical Society had been on just before and talked about the Wandle Industries. Cllr Grimston simply paraphrased what she had said and avoided naming an object. In a set of questions posted on this thread a month ago, I enquired when Cllr Grimston last visited the Museum for any reasonable length of time and how often has he been to the Museum in the last 12 months? I received no answer. To the best of everyone’s knowledge, Cllr Grimston’s only recent visit to the Museum took place the afternoon before the ELOSC Meeting on 6th February. It lasted less than 20 minutes and he made no attempt to speak to the staff about the Museum’s collection, their work and the services they provided. I am sure that Cllr Grimston would have been invited to exhibition openings and as the new Cabinet Member for Leisure & Amenity Services from May 2006 I would expect him to have visited the Museum to talk to the Curator to understand the facility and its services for which he was now responsible. As far as I can determine, Cllr Grimston never undertook any of these quite obvious actions. If I am wrong and have misrepresented him, I would be pleased if he would promptly put us right. What I find striking is that Cllr Grimston works in an industry where the use of experts is commonplace. The Museums Libraries Archives Council has immense, wide-ranging expertise in the use of, the interraction between and the essential differences between museums and libraries. Senior representatives of the MLA met with Cllr Grimston in January but it seems their comments and advice were ignored. Why is Cllr Grimston so set on dismissing expert advice where it concerns the interests of Wandsworth residents and their culture and heritage? I'm afraid the same lack of understanding extends to many Councillors. Several have sought to portray the Museum as a luxury used by middle-class residents and an imposition on the lower paid and disadvantaged. Figures published by the Council itself confirm that 20% of visitors to the Museum come from black and ethnic minorities. The results of a research study carried out a few years ago showed that Wandsworth Museum's visitors are predominantly from the less well off socio-economic classes: AB: 22% C1: 23% C2: 20% DE: 35% These results confirm that Wandsworth Museum attracted a far higher proportion of socio-economic class DE than the national average. The same study highlighted that the Museum's visitors included 17% with no formal educational qualifications and 22% with only GCSE O Levels. Those Councillors who minimise the relevance, contribution and educational value of the Museum to the less well-off, the deprived and the disadvantaged in our community have got it completely and spectacularly wrong. Given such fundamental gaps in Cllr Grimston's knowledge and understanding, it is difficult to see how there can be a meeting of minds with the thousands of residents who do appreciate the Museum, who value what it does and who therefore know why his proposed “museumlets” marooned in libraries with no coherent central collection to refer to and no over-arching curatorial support would be an irredeemable failure. |