Letter to the Adver -5/4/17

Gallery won’t work -- letter to Swindon Advertiser 5/4/17 HADRIAN Ellory-Van Dekker portrays a rosy picture in his article praising the development of the new museum and art gallery (SA 31 March). If only he had waited another day your readers might have thought it was an All Fools jape; after all who is he trying to convince when he writes “the construction of a new building will be a catalyst for regeneration and development for the town centre”? Many of us will have heard such statements before, including the infamous ‘if we build it the people will come’ a misquote from the film Field Of Dreams used by local council leaders when they sanctioned spending £15m on a car park as part of the Kimmerfield development, a venture described by Coun Garry Perkins in 2013 as an “investment in the future” adding “If we did not do this then Swindon would become an economic backwater.” In 2017 progress has been pitifully slow with very little private investment or activity. Mr Dekker refers to the construction of the Guggenheim Museum and invokes the so-called Bilbao effect, which was once viewed as a way for post-industrial cities in the 1990s and 2000s to replace their economic reliance on failing industry with tourism, and to reinvent themselves as destinations of high culture. This has long since ceased to be the case, and is now seen by many instead as an inelegant monument to hubris. The economic benefits which accrued to Bilbao came about as a result of some pretty impressive inward investment, not least from the funding they received from the EU when Spain became a member in 1986, which helped ease the pain of spending $85m for design and construction, subsidies towards a $12m annual budget, $50m for an acquisitions fund, and $20m to the Guggenheim for its name, curator services, and the use of parts of its collection. Mr Dekker has not shared any details with regard to the running costs associated with the new SMAG beyond the design and build of £22m. I am sure he has some idea of interest and running costs, which I am sure he would like to outline and allow the people to consider against the council leader’s aspiration of no charge entry, 90,000 visitors annually and a subsidy not exceeding that currently paid to the Old Town Museum? In the UK, Dundee is building a new V&A Museum of Design which is already £35m over budget and three years late in opening. Liverpool and Margate have the Tate Liverpool and the Turner Contemporary. Every city, it seems, wants to share in the Bilbao Guggenheim experience, but can they and what does it actually do for grass roots culture and the arts? The answer is a resounding ‘no’ to the first and a sad ‘nothing much’ to the latter, a point confirmed by some groups resident in Bilbao. As a Swindonian, I want the very best for our town but before we spend (not invest) £5m of Swindon Council taxpayers’ money and £15m of taxpayer money in a new museum and art gallery I refer to figures from the Museums Association which states that since 2015, nearly one in five regional museums has closed a part or branch of their museum to the public in the last year, or plans such a closure in the year to come. One in 10, meanwhile, expects to introduce entrance charges to cover reductions in local authority funding. Swindon Council does not consider itself to have a role in the provision of leisure facilities, or indeed of libraries, and yet it wants the public to believe they are passionate about the need for a flagship museum and art gallery - now what was it I said about a ‘monument to hubris’? DES MORGAN Caraway Drive Swindon