Kew’s website has the following to say on the recent decision to move the Herbarium to a business park near Reading (TVSP=Thames Valley Science Park):

“Our Trustees have confirmed their recommendation to relocate Kew’s herbarium collection to TVSP and to progress to the next phase of design and planning for a new facility. Construction of a new herbarium is conditional upon resolving several outstanding issues and securing funding. 

This marks the start of an exciting new chapter for Kew; we strongly believe it will further our critical conservation work, tackling the twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate change. 

It will also offer the unique opportunity to create a world-leading collections research hub at TVSP with the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, and the University of Reading, which will have new facilities adjacent at the site.”

The start of an exciting new chapter for Kew? Hardly. It is more like the start of a new chapter in some dystopian novel. We are reminded of Orwell’s 1984, in which the all-powerful regime’s slogans were: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” The analogues in this case would be: “Making the Herbarium less accessible will further our taxonomic and conservation work. A new building with an increased overall carbon footprint will help tackle climate change. Siting the Herbarium away from institutions in London such as the British Museum and the Natural History Museum but next to some storage facilities of these same institutions will create a research hub.” It is quite literally unbelievable. In a word: Orwellian.

How much the Kew leadership and the Trustees really care about the Herbarium is evident from the state of neglect they have allowed parts of the Herbarium building complex to fall into. A recent piece in the Private Eye (Christmas Edition 13 Dec. 2023) drew attention to this sorry reality.

Some choice quotes:

“One of the current buildings used to house plant specimens has been suffering leaks in recent years. The issue has been caused by heavy rainfall and blocked guttering that allowed water to seep inside, soaking carpets and raising humidity. After a leak in April the humidity level reached 99 percent.

The curators made repeated calls for maintenance help, but it took until October for the issue to be addressed. Alas, the damage had been done. Six months of high humidity had led to mould growth on stacks of specimens. More than l,000 specimens are thought to be affected by mould that will degrade their DNA and hamper research by taxonomists, quite apart from being a health risk.

Ironically, this damage did not occur in one of the historic herbarium buildings that managers say are at risk of fire and flood—one of their principal arguments for moving the herbarium. The leak happened in one of the more modem herbarium buildings, the Quadrangle, which has a flat roof. The historic wings have had no issues with high humidity as they were expertly designed with pitched roofs.”

One of the Kew leadership’s and the Trustees’ official arguments for the move of the Herbarium to a new building near Reading is that the latter would supposedly offer better climate control. What we see in the existing building complex on the Kew site is the opposite: it’s the most modern additions that cause the greatest problems with damp, one of the worst enemies of herbarium specimens. Of the older, historic, parts of the existing Herbarium building it can be said, in a positive way: “They don’t build them like this anymore.” There is little reason to assume that a new building would be an improvement, and quite some evidence to fear that it would be worse. Past performance often enables reliable predictions.