Sadly, the Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, chaired by Dame Amelia Fawcett, last week rubberstamped the Kew leadership’s plans to move the world-renowned herbarium collection (plant reference library) to a business park near Reading. While professing to do ‘due diligence’, the Trustees have ignored the opposition against this act of cultural and scientific vandalism by those more knowledgeable than they are; they have listened to but then casually dismissed the arguments presented to them by the science staff and have naively accepted the greatly exaggerated scare stories from the Director, Richard Deverell, ex BBC manager, about the perils the Herbarium supposedly faces in the existing building.

Science staff have been told that the alternatives they proposed to renovate and modify the existing building (which does need this) would not get planning permission from Richmond Council, but such permission has never been sought. At the same time, the Kew leadership have presented plans for a new ‘science quarter’ at the original Herbarium site that would involve far more radical changes, for which planning permission would suddenly not be an issue.

 In presentations to the Trustees, the Kew leadership submitted that it is essential to be able to employ the best scientists, but, so it was argued, these would only want to work at the Kew site in London because it is such an attractive location, rather than some out-of-the-way place. Apparently (and this may be the true motivation behind the move), the Herbarium and its staff must make way to accommodate these mythical ‘top talents’, who will then carry out research that could just as well be done at any university anywhere in the world. The Herbarium and other collections are what make Kew unique. Collections-based research is Kew’s niche in science. Moving the most important collection, the Herbarium, away from its historical environment in which it is perfectly integrated and to uproot it to a non-descript field near Reading, will undermine Kew’s greatest strength. In the long term this may be a death blow to Kew Gardens as a scientific institution, which could well end up as a glorified commercial theme park.

 The Trustees’ disappointing but not unexpected decision is by no means the end of the story. The irresponsible plans based on various fictions still need funding and the taxpayer is expected to foot the bill. We will now need to lobby the public and the government to prevent them from wasting money on this ill-conceived project. Apparently, some £200 million will be asked from Defra to build a new herbarium building near Reading. The alternative plan put forward by the Kew Herbarium scientists would only cost a small fraction of that enormous amount. Since the Trustees have utterly failed in their responsibility to carry out due diligence, it is now up to the government to do so.