The group fighting to save the Grade II listed home of Swindon’s Museum and Art Gallery says a recommendation to councillors that it stay closed and be sold off is deeply flawed, inaccurate and misleading.
The paper, in which Swindon Borough Council officers are asking members of the decision-making Cabinet not to reopen Apsley House on Bath Road, recommends that the council’s own Civic Offices be used to house some of the renowned art collection, with the conference centre at Lydiard as a possible home for some of the museum artefacts. The Cabinet will meet on Wednesday 8th September to consider the paper.
It argues that Apsley House, which the council has owned since 1930, is now in such poor condition that the council should not carry out essential repairs, but should move the collections out and try to sell the building in its current state. Although the council approved a capital budget of £400,000 for improvements to Apsley House two years ago, those improvements were never made and the money remains unspent. Now officers argue that carrying out work for it to reopen would be prohibitively expensive, although the paper offers no evidence in terms of costed surveys.
Instead, it proposes using the £400,000 to make changes at the Civic Offices to house the art collection. This figure is hugely at odds with the council’s own Options Appraisal for the museum and art gallery, carried out in 2019, which estimated that moving the collections to the Civic Offices would actually cost £1.86m.
Now Save our Museum and Art Gallery (SoMAG) has written to the lead member for culture, heritage, leisure and the town centre, Councillor Robert Jandy, highlighting the inaccuracies and the inconsistencies, and urging the Cabinet members to refuse to make a decision on 8th September. Instead, it hopes Cabinet will task officers with providing hard evidence, rather than assumptions and rough estimates that are so wide of the council’s own options appraisal.
Linda Kasmaty of SoMAG said, “We have worked very closely with Councillor Jandy to try to re-open Apsley House until a space can be found that can do justice to our wonderful art and museum collections, but on reading the Cabinet paper we were shocked to find that none of the reassurances he gave us have been kept.
“We don’t blame Councillor Jandy for this – we know he has been requesting surveys from his officers for weeks, to understand the real costs of re-opening Apsley House, and he wanted to give us the chance to commission our own survey, too. But now this paper has been rushed out and will go before Cabinet on Wednesday
“Thanks to an FOI request, we are now aware that the Grade II listed building which the council owns and has failed to maintain has been knowingly left to deteriorate. This negligence means that the heating has now been condemned, the roof is letting in water, and the collections have been exposed to damp. This, in itself, is a disgrace.
“The building is planned to be sold off at a discounted price, in a dilapidated state, into the private sector, putting it at great risk of being bought speculatively by a developer and left to rot, alongside buildings like the Corn Exchange (Locarno), Mechanics Institute and the Oasis.”
SoMAG is also frustrated that, despite numerous requests by SoMAG and Councillor Jandy, Swindon Borough Council has failed to say whether it applied for a government grant of up to £5m. This fund, called the MEND grant, could have paid for all of the repairs and accessibility improvements to Apsley and supported other Swindon heritage buildings.
“Instead, Cabinet are being pressured to approve a rushed plan that has no detail, no timescales and no evidence-based costings to move the collections into the Civic Offices,” said Linda Kasmaty.
“Given that in 2019 that the options study stated that would cost £1.86m, it’s just completely unrealistic. In reality, that will never be funded, and our wonderful collections will have to stay in storage, despite the public reassurances of Cllr Jandy that this would never happen as it would be ‘disastrous’.
“We believe that Councillor Jandy wants to do the right thing. However, he and his Cabinet colleagues have been provided with misleading recommendations, and we hope as elected members they will stand up for democracy in Swindon, refuse to make a knee-jerk decision on Wednesday, and tell the officers to go back to the drawing board and provide them with the accurate and up-to-date information they need.”
SoMAG will be protesting outside Swindon Museum and Art Gallery, Apsley House, Bath Road SN1 4BA at 11am tomorrow, Saturday 4th September.
