Dear Editor,
On June 28th Herefordshire councillors are going to be deciding the future of our County Museum and Art Gallery. Let’s hope they finally see the value of the county’s Museum Service and its wonderful collections, both to our tourist economy, our sense of place and identity, our communities’ health and well-being, our local creative industries, our new university, and our schools and other learning groups. However, going by past behaviour, this is going to require a last minute total change of heart on their part.
Herefordshire has an amazing history and heritage, the Museum Service has a brilliant collection and so much potential and it is about time we saw some imagination and ambition on the part of those who make the decisions and set the agenda. It is obvious that there are people out there such as the Herefordshire Museum Service Support Group who have the desire to create a county museum that we can all be proud of and which many others parts of the UK already have, despite the ‘age of austerity’ for public services. The councillors should be asking themselves how they can work with others to enable the HMSSG plans to be realised, rather than going for the easy option of cutting services or offering the museum out to tender for a few paltry short term gains that probably won’t even be realized.
It was bad enough to lose the Market House Heritage Centre (in the birthplace of tourism! You can now visit Ross, have a great time, admire the view and leave completely ignorant of the town’s fascinating history) but to see our county museum handed over to some anonymous unaccountable ‘service delivery’ company would be a real tragedy.
Meanwhile, our MP could do his bit by persuading the Treasury that cutting local government funding in order to enable a cut in corporation tax is not a long term economic strategy for success or the recipe for the kind of society the majority of us would like to create and inhabit.
Jonathan Gammond
(One of the original Market House Heritage Centre team, 1996-2000)
Wrexham