The town of Hendon in the London borough of Barnet is the kind of suburb most people pass by on the M1 without giving a second glance.
But amid the drab postwar office blocks sits a historical gem; a redbrick farmhouse dating from the 1600s that recalls the village Hendon once was, before it was swallowed by urban sprawl.
Until March last year, the Grade-II* listed building was the Church Farmhouse Museum, a small but well-loved council-run museum with 8,000 visitors a year.
Along with displays of local history objects and antique toys, the museum was home to a rare archive of photographs documenting the Spanish civil war, once rescued from a skip in the borough.
Now the collection has been boxed up indefinitely and the building itself lies “empty and mouldering”, according to the museum’s former curator Gerrard Roots, after the Tory-run Barnet council severed all funding and initiated a fire sale of the borough’s public property.
The neighbouring Barnet Museum is also under threat, granted a reprieve until now because the council has not yet established legal ownership of the building. Both properties are likely to prove difficult to sell because of their protected status, says Roots.
With public funding cuts across the UK, the fate of Church Farmhouse Museum is a cautionary tale of the speed and ruthlessness with which a popular institution can be discarded – and the underhand tactics that may be employed along the way.
“The government cuts were just an excuse,” says Roots, who worked at the museum for over 30 years before being forced into early retirement. “The council wanted to shut the museum long before the coalition announced its cuts – it wasn’t sudden desperation.
“The closure was announced in late 2010,” he continues. “There was a so-called public consultation over six weeks, timed carefully to include Christmas and New Year, so no one was aware of it; 99.9% of respondents said keep the museum open and the council completely ignored them.”
In spite of the “appalling rush” of the consultation, says Roots, a petition against closure managed to attract more than 1,000 signatures. Volunteer groups put forward bids to take over the museum, which would have cost about £25,000 a year to run without paid staff.
“Barnet council pretended to entertain that idea but they had no intention of following through,” says Roots. “They just did it to silence protest. It was the only public consultation not to be published on their website.
“The leader of council said the collection was ‘worthless’ – the museum was just for a ‘rarefied clique’ of people,” Roots continues. “On that day, I looked around at our visitors and counted asylum seekers, elderly Jewish couples, Asian families and groups of schoolchildren. There was no clique.”
Just a few weeks later, the museum shut its doors for good. “I still get people coming up to me saying it’s a disgrace,” says Roots. “It’s torn the heart out of the town.”
The destruction that Barnet council appears to be wreaking on the borough’s cultural services – several public libraries have also been axed – may be extreme, but Church Farmhouse Museum is far from the only institution to fall casualty to government funders trying to find savings.
This month, the Museums Association (MA) publishes its second annual survey into the impact of budget cuts to museums across the UK. Among the statistics gathered from 114 museum services and individual institutions, the survey shows that 22% of respondents have seen some part of their sites closed temporarily or permanently, with 11% reporting permanent closures of whole sites.
The majority of those are local authority and half have seen their budgets cuts by 25% or more.
Of course, like any other public-facing service, some museums are bound to fail through bad financial management, poor visitor amenities or lack of innovation and business acumen.
But success is no guarantee against closure either: well-run, well-liked institutions are also at risk of being seen as an unnecessary luxury by some public funders, who see little tangible impact from them compared with services such as education.
In spite of protests, museums such as the Livesey Museum in south London and the National Conservation Centre in Liverpool have shut since the recession.
Institutions that have closed permanently in the past 12 months include the Botanic Gardens Museum in Sefton; the Pumphouse Educational Museum in Southwark, south-east London; Stamford Museum in Lincolnshire; and the Etruria Industrial Museum in Stoke-on-Trent.
Many more are under threat, including Hoylake Lifeboat Museum, Wirral, which opened in 2011, and Wymondham Heritage Museum in Norfolk. The Red House Museum in Yorkshire and the London Fire Brigade Museum (see p27) have been temporarily reprieved after public outcries.
And with the bulk of this government’s austerity measures yet to take effect, the current rate of closures is unlikely to fall until at least the end of the 2010-15 spending review.
Malton Museum, a volunteer-run institution in Ryedale, Yorkshire, that houses Roman artefacts and local archaeological finds, was made homeless in February this year after the leaseholder of its building decided to charge a commercial rent, which the council said it couldn’t afford.
“The council had felt for some time that in terms of value for money, we were becoming more and more expensive,” says Maggie Shaw, a trustee and education officer at the museum. “We had been given three years to show some new vitality.”
Prior to its closure, Malton Museum found itself in the kind of catch-22 situation facing many smaller institutions, in which attempts to improve its services by applying for external funding fell short because of gaps in professional expertise – which were, naturally enough, impossible to fill without further investment.
The current financial year will be the last period that the museum gets any funding from the local authority, but the process of closing down has made some volunteers even more determined to preserve the facility in some shape or form.
“The actual closure and going through everything in the collection made us realise just how many unique objects we had,” says Shaw.
For its last exhibition, the museum ran a display of the town’s 50 favourite finds. “We had some things that had never been on display before,” says Shaw. “It attracted a lot of visitors – the visitor book was full of comments begging us not to close, but of course it was too late by then.”
With the collection now in storage, the volunteers are attempting to maintain a presence in the district, running open days in village halls and building up mobile handling boxes to bring the collection out into the community.
Like many other closed museums, volunteers are exploring an online legacy and have applied for funding from North Yorkshire county council to create a new museum website with digital displays.
“We want to keep some sort of profile in the hope that someday we’ll have bricks and mortar again,” says Shaw.
As demonstrated by the valiant efforts of Malton volunteers to maintain public access to their collection, the question of what happens to objects after a museum closes down is becoming increasingly pertinent.
Although there are stringent ethical codes and standards of care in place for collections, there is surprisingly little official guidance available on what to do with objects from defunct museums.
Most closed museums, such as Church Farmhouse Museum, attempt to return donated and loaned items to their owners where possible, or find new homes for them in other museums, but in many cases, objects are destined to simply gather dust in permanent storage.
Others can be lost forever to their communities. Sefton Council recently came under fire for plans to break up the collection left over from the Botanic Gardens Museum, while in one infamous case, the entire collection of Chatterley Whitfield Mining Museum was sold off at auction in 1991 in order to repay creditors.
Although the process of closure may be fraught on both sides, it is still possible to reach a compromise that saves the collection for the public.
Last year, Lincolnshire County Council announced the closure of the local museum in Stamford, but allocated some funding to exhibit items from its collection in a specially designed space, called Discover Stamford, within the town’s library.
“We knew we couldn’t recreate the museum but it gave us an opportunity to create something new,” says Tracey Crawley, district manager for culture at the council.
“The space highlights key aspects of the town’s history. The idea is to inspire people to go and look more closely at the medieval streets, because we knew people didn’t came to Stamford for the museum itself, they came for the town.”
The new exhibition has been very successful so far, says Crawley, attracting over 17,000 visitors since it opened at the end of January, which is more than the annual total to visit the museum in its final year.
“It’s been an opportunity to renew interest in our local collections and archives,” says Crawley. “The museum has also benefited from longer opening hours because the library stays open until 6pm or 7pm at night. It’s all about compromise and maximising the use of the building.”
But for some, such compromise was never on the table. “You need to be constantly vigilant,” says Roots of Church Farmhouse Museum. “The moment there’s any sort of inkling of closure, campaign as hard as possible and as fast as possible. Don’t trust the council – get your retaliation in first.
“It all happened so fast to us,” he adds. “Three hundred and fifty years of history gone in the blink of an eye.”
Geraldine Kendall is a freelance journalist
The London Fire Brigade Museum (LFBM) may have tripled its visitor numbers since 2005, but it faced closure last year when the conservative chairman of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, which runs the museum, decided to cut its £80,000 annual budget to make savings. A massive public campaign led to a rethink on its future.
“The closure mobilised us to get going,” says Tony Sweeney of the Friends of the LFBM. “We contacted the Evening Standard, set up a Facebook page and attracted over 1,500 signatures on a petition.
It was really useful to be in the public eye. Social media was the big thing for making people aware of it.
“We generated a feeling that the proposal was unpopular – and politicians just want to keep the voters happy.”
The situation is still fluid, but trustees are hopeful that they can transfer ownership of the collection over to the Greater London Authority and find new funders. “We won a battle to preserve it, but that was only round one,” says Sweeney.
Closed
Urbis, Manchester
Urbis, which was built as a showcase for city life, closed in 2010. The National Football Museum has taken over the building and opens its doors in July
Closed
National Conservation Centre, Liverpool
Weeks after National Museums Liverpool received a 15% budget cut, it closed the National Conservation Centre in December 2010
Closed
Church Farmhouse Museum, London
Until it shut last March, Church Farmhouse Museum in Barnet was a popular council-run institution. Its closure was rushed through with scant regard to what local people wanted
Closed
Livesey Museum, London
This children’s museum closed in 2008 after Southwark Council withdrew funding
Under threat
Barnet Museum, London
The museum has a stay of execution only because Barnet Council has not yet established who has legal ownership of the building
Closed
Stamford Museum, Lincolnshire
Lincolnshire County Council has condensed aspects of Stamford Museum, which it closed in 2011, into Discover Stamford, an exhibit that now lives in part of the town’s library
But amid the drab postwar office blocks sits a historical gem; a redbrick farmhouse dating from the 1600s that recalls the village Hendon once was, before it was swallowed by urban sprawl.
Until March last year, the Grade-II* listed building was the Church Farmhouse Museum, a small but well-loved council-run museum with 8,000 visitors a year.
Along with displays of local history objects and antique toys, the museum was home to a rare archive of photographs documenting the Spanish civil war, once rescued from a skip in the borough.
Now the collection has been boxed up indefinitely and the building itself lies “empty and mouldering”, according to the museum’s former curator Gerrard Roots, after the Tory-run Barnet council severed all funding and initiated a fire sale of the borough’s public property.
The neighbouring Barnet Museum is also under threat, granted a reprieve until now because the council has not yet established legal ownership of the building. Both properties are likely to prove difficult to sell because of their protected status, says Roots.
With public funding cuts across the UK, the fate of Church Farmhouse Museum is a cautionary tale of the speed and ruthlessness with which a popular institution can be discarded – and the underhand tactics that may be employed along the way.
“The government cuts were just an excuse,” says Roots, who worked at the museum for over 30 years before being forced into early retirement. “The council wanted to shut the museum long before the coalition announced its cuts – it wasn’t sudden desperation.
“The closure was announced in late 2010,” he continues. “There was a so-called public consultation over six weeks, timed carefully to include Christmas and New Year, so no one was aware of it; 99.9% of respondents said keep the museum open and the council completely ignored them.”
In spite of the “appalling rush” of the consultation, says Roots, a petition against closure managed to attract more than 1,000 signatures. Volunteer groups put forward bids to take over the museum, which would have cost about £25,000 a year to run without paid staff.
“Barnet council pretended to entertain that idea but they had no intention of following through,” says Roots. “They just did it to silence protest. It was the only public consultation not to be published on their website.
“The leader of council said the collection was ‘worthless’ – the museum was just for a ‘rarefied clique’ of people,” Roots continues. “On that day, I looked around at our visitors and counted asylum seekers, elderly Jewish couples, Asian families and groups of schoolchildren. There was no clique.”
Just a few weeks later, the museum shut its doors for good. “I still get people coming up to me saying it’s a disgrace,” says Roots. “It’s torn the heart out of the town.”
The destruction that Barnet council appears to be wreaking on the borough’s cultural services – several public libraries have also been axed – may be extreme, but Church Farmhouse Museum is far from the only institution to fall casualty to government funders trying to find savings.
This month, the Museums Association (MA) publishes its second annual survey into the impact of budget cuts to museums across the UK. Among the statistics gathered from 114 museum services and individual institutions, the survey shows that 22% of respondents have seen some part of their sites closed temporarily or permanently, with 11% reporting permanent closures of whole sites.
The majority of those are local authority and half have seen their budgets cuts by 25% or more.
Of course, like any other public-facing service, some museums are bound to fail through bad financial management, poor visitor amenities or lack of innovation and business acumen.
But success is no guarantee against closure either: well-run, well-liked institutions are also at risk of being seen as an unnecessary luxury by some public funders, who see little tangible impact from them compared with services such as education.
In spite of protests, museums such as the Livesey Museum in south London and the National Conservation Centre in Liverpool have shut since the recession.
Institutions that have closed permanently in the past 12 months include the Botanic Gardens Museum in Sefton; the Pumphouse Educational Museum in Southwark, south-east London; Stamford Museum in Lincolnshire; and the Etruria Industrial Museum in Stoke-on-Trent.
Many more are under threat, including Hoylake Lifeboat Museum, Wirral, which opened in 2011, and Wymondham Heritage Museum in Norfolk. The Red House Museum in Yorkshire and the London Fire Brigade Museum (see p27) have been temporarily reprieved after public outcries.
And with the bulk of this government’s austerity measures yet to take effect, the current rate of closures is unlikely to fall until at least the end of the 2010-15 spending review.
Malton Museum, a volunteer-run institution in Ryedale, Yorkshire, that houses Roman artefacts and local archaeological finds, was made homeless in February this year after the leaseholder of its building decided to charge a commercial rent, which the council said it couldn’t afford.
“The council had felt for some time that in terms of value for money, we were becoming more and more expensive,” says Maggie Shaw, a trustee and education officer at the museum. “We had been given three years to show some new vitality.”
Prior to its closure, Malton Museum found itself in the kind of catch-22 situation facing many smaller institutions, in which attempts to improve its services by applying for external funding fell short because of gaps in professional expertise – which were, naturally enough, impossible to fill without further investment.
The current financial year will be the last period that the museum gets any funding from the local authority, but the process of closing down has made some volunteers even more determined to preserve the facility in some shape or form.
“The actual closure and going through everything in the collection made us realise just how many unique objects we had,” says Shaw.
For its last exhibition, the museum ran a display of the town’s 50 favourite finds. “We had some things that had never been on display before,” says Shaw. “It attracted a lot of visitors – the visitor book was full of comments begging us not to close, but of course it was too late by then.”
With the collection now in storage, the volunteers are attempting to maintain a presence in the district, running open days in village halls and building up mobile handling boxes to bring the collection out into the community.
Like many other closed museums, volunteers are exploring an online legacy and have applied for funding from North Yorkshire county council to create a new museum website with digital displays.
“We want to keep some sort of profile in the hope that someday we’ll have bricks and mortar again,” says Shaw.
As demonstrated by the valiant efforts of Malton volunteers to maintain public access to their collection, the question of what happens to objects after a museum closes down is becoming increasingly pertinent.
Although there are stringent ethical codes and standards of care in place for collections, there is surprisingly little official guidance available on what to do with objects from defunct museums.
Most closed museums, such as Church Farmhouse Museum, attempt to return donated and loaned items to their owners where possible, or find new homes for them in other museums, but in many cases, objects are destined to simply gather dust in permanent storage.
Others can be lost forever to their communities. Sefton Council recently came under fire for plans to break up the collection left over from the Botanic Gardens Museum, while in one infamous case, the entire collection of Chatterley Whitfield Mining Museum was sold off at auction in 1991 in order to repay creditors.
Although the process of closure may be fraught on both sides, it is still possible to reach a compromise that saves the collection for the public.
Last year, Lincolnshire County Council announced the closure of the local museum in Stamford, but allocated some funding to exhibit items from its collection in a specially designed space, called Discover Stamford, within the town’s library.
“We knew we couldn’t recreate the museum but it gave us an opportunity to create something new,” says Tracey Crawley, district manager for culture at the council.
“The space highlights key aspects of the town’s history. The idea is to inspire people to go and look more closely at the medieval streets, because we knew people didn’t came to Stamford for the museum itself, they came for the town.”
The new exhibition has been very successful so far, says Crawley, attracting over 17,000 visitors since it opened at the end of January, which is more than the annual total to visit the museum in its final year.
“It’s been an opportunity to renew interest in our local collections and archives,” says Crawley. “The museum has also benefited from longer opening hours because the library stays open until 6pm or 7pm at night. It’s all about compromise and maximising the use of the building.”
But for some, such compromise was never on the table. “You need to be constantly vigilant,” says Roots of Church Farmhouse Museum. “The moment there’s any sort of inkling of closure, campaign as hard as possible and as fast as possible. Don’t trust the council – get your retaliation in first.
“It all happened so fast to us,” he adds. “Three hundred and fifty years of history gone in the blink of an eye.”
Geraldine Kendall is a freelance journalist
Ringing the alarm bells for the London Fire Brigade Museum
The London Fire Brigade Museum (LFBM) may have tripled its visitor numbers since 2005, but it faced closure last year when the conservative chairman of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, which runs the museum, decided to cut its £80,000 annual budget to make savings. A massive public campaign led to a rethink on its future.
“The closure mobilised us to get going,” says Tony Sweeney of the Friends of the LFBM. “We contacted the Evening Standard, set up a Facebook page and attracted over 1,500 signatures on a petition.
It was really useful to be in the public eye. Social media was the big thing for making people aware of it.
“We generated a feeling that the proposal was unpopular – and politicians just want to keep the voters happy.”
The situation is still fluid, but trustees are hopeful that they can transfer ownership of the collection over to the Greater London Authority and find new funders. “We won a battle to preserve it, but that was only round one,” says Sweeney.
Closed
Urbis, Manchester
Urbis, which was built as a showcase for city life, closed in 2010. The National Football Museum has taken over the building and opens its doors in July
Closed
National Conservation Centre, Liverpool
Weeks after National Museums Liverpool received a 15% budget cut, it closed the National Conservation Centre in December 2010
Closed
Church Farmhouse Museum, London
Until it shut last March, Church Farmhouse Museum in Barnet was a popular council-run institution. Its closure was rushed through with scant regard to what local people wanted
Closed
Livesey Museum, London
This children’s museum closed in 2008 after Southwark Council withdrew funding
Under threat
Barnet Museum, London
The museum has a stay of execution only because Barnet Council has not yet established who has legal ownership of the building
Closed
Stamford Museum, Lincolnshire
Lincolnshire County Council has condensed aspects of Stamford Museum, which it closed in 2011, into Discover Stamford, an exhibit that now lives in part of the town’s library
