| Topic: | Wandsworth Museum Campaign Group Bulletin #3: Points for Councillors | |
| Posted by: | Cedric Peachey | |
| Date/Time: | 25/03/07 20:53:00 |
| Alternative plans for the Museum • The Council failed to consider any alternative plans for the Museum, such as reduced staffing, introducing a Friends of the Museum scheme or establishing income-generating activities such as a coffee shop, before announcing complete closure. • The Council claims closure of the Museum is urgent, and must happen in September, but there appear to be no obvious grounds for urgency. • It remains unclear what will happen to the exhibits when the Museum closes. A large number of key exhibits are on loan and in the absence of a properly curated central collection will almost certainly be taken back by their lenders. Other artefacts are unsuitable for display in libraries as proposed by the Council, being too valuable, too fragile or too large. • As a result, the Council’s proposals to create “museumlets” will inevitably be restricted to a much smaller choice of artefacts and what is available for eventual display will be a fragmented shadow of the Museum’s present collection. The Council’s finances • The level of the government grant to the Council for 2007/08 has been known since January 2006, so there was plenty of time for planning and consultation. • There has not been a £5 million cut in real terms in the government grant, as claimed; the figure would make sense only if the Government was solely responsible for dealing with the effects of inflation in Wandsworth. • Insofar as there is a financial problem in 2007/08, it results from a large unexplained increase in the Council’s contributions to reserves (from £1.8m in 2006/07 to £6.0m in 2007/08). • The Council Leader indicated on 31 January that a 3.8% increase in Council tax for 2007-08 would be enough to cover the Council’s spending without closing the Museum or Battersea Arts Centre, and the planned increase is now 4.9%. • There is no serious squeeze on the Council’s finances until 2009/10, and even that is subject to many assumptions. • The Museum is only about 0.2% of the Council’s General Revenue Budget; closure would save the average Band D council tax payer a mere £3.45 or so per year. • Many aspects of the Council’s proposals have not been properly costed, e.g. heritage displays in libraries, storage or disposal of Museum exhibits, converting the Court House to a library. In addition, some of the costs associated with the Museum, such as the £40k for building maintenance, as well as the cross-charges levied by the Council will not cease when the Museum is closed. It is evident that the claimed savings are therefore considerably exaggerated. New town-centre library • Detailed plans should have been drawn up first so as to determine whether conversion of the Court House was feasible before the Council started taking decisions. • Even now (25th March) there are no detailed plans and the Council does not know if English Heritage will allow the necessary changes to a listed building. • The Council has acknowledged that a library in the Court House will require more staff than one in a more suitable building and will therefore cost more to run. • Even with the proposed extension, the new library will be small (533 square metres compared with 1000 square metres at Putney). • Including the proposed extension, the new town centre library will be 35% smaller than the two neighbourhood libraries it is supposed to replace. The Council nonetheless insists that it will attract 100,000 more users than the two purpose-designed libraries it will replace. • Estimates of usage of the proposed library depend entirely on analogy with town-centre libraries elsewhere in the Borough which have much better train and bus access. Heritage displays in libraries • No funding has been allocated for the proposed heritage displays in libraries, and no adequate staffing (see below under Proposed Heritage Service). • Displays in libraries will be old-fashioned displays in glass cases, without any of the interactive exhibits which are so popular at the Museum. • Far from being an innovative idea, the proposal to move artefacts into libraries turns the clock back 20 years to when the Museum collection first started in Putney Library. The constraints of operating in a library environment were soon evident as the collection evolved and grew which is why the collection moved to the Court House. • Once the current Museum staff and Local History Service staff are made redundant, the Council will have virtually no in-house expertise to interpret the exhibits or to evaluate new artefacts that might become available. • Libraries with their bright lighting and high heating levels will be unsuitable for many of the Museum’s more fragile artefacts which are currently displayed in special areas of controlled light, temperature and humidity. Proposed Heritage Service • The Local History Service currently struggles with two staff, whereas the planned two ‘Heritage Officers’ are supposed to run the Local History Service, organise exhibitions in libraries, visit schools, create a heritage website and supervise the storage of Museum exhibits. Such an overloaded programme linked to such limited resources is bound to result in vastly degraded coverage of the Borough’s history and heritage. • Wandsworth Local History Service is already suffering from a long period of inadequate staffing, and only about 5% of the collection is catalogued. Education and outreach • Neither the Museum’s education work nor its outreach work were taken into account in the Council’s proposals. The Council paper on the Museum’s closure merely mentions the education work once. • There is some talk of transferring the Museum’s education officers to the Council’s education budget, but without a Museum it is hard to see what they would do. Other points • The Council’s proposals take no account of the forthcoming redevelopment of the Young’s Brewery site and the potential for combining the existing Museum with the historic brewery buildings and equipment to create a real cultural centre. The Council’s proposal is therefore entirely short-term in its vision and its priorities and is completely at odds with its own published Cultural Strategy for the Borough. • The Council’s plan to evict the De Morgan Foundation makes it likely that that collection will leave the Borough. • The Council’s contention that ‘only’ 30,000 people a year visit the Museum compared with much larger numbers visiting the Borough’s libraries is not a valid comparison, since libraries and museums serve completely different purposes. It is worth noting that the Council, in sharp contrast, has praised the Pump House for its success in attracting only 25,000 visitors (a figure which apparently includes wedding parties). • The Council’s plans for Tooting Library are unlikely to receive Lottery funding if the Council is closing libraries (West Hill and Alvering) and selling the sites to make capital gains. • Research carried out at the Museum in previous years has confirmed that the Museum serves all sectors of the community and attracts a significantly higher proportion of visitors from the more deprived socio-economic groups than the national average. Its work with schools also covers the entire Borough, with schools from Balham and Tooting being well represented in the classes run by the Museum. The Council’s contention that the Museum serves an elite minority is not borne out by the facts. |