Snibston to close

I have spoken to a colleague there this morning and the plan for the collection will be made clear in due course. He did ask that folks give consideration to the people who will lose their jobs first and foremost and speculation about the exhibits will not be helpful for them.

 

Yep Tory led cuts as we'd expect - so what's next NRM, Shildon, Science Museum(s) - at the very least admission charges are on the Horizon if this shower get back in May . . .

The comment (not mine) on Facebook on this naff decision sums them (the Tory's) up - "they know the cost of everything, and the value of nowt"

No what I'm saying is IMHO the Tory party always take the easy option and cut everything in sight, this is part of their "political dogma" and expect more - £900K/year is a lot of money (if true) and it sounds although leadership has been lacking in the past - but you don't expect them to take the blame for mismanagement do you.

What I'm saying is 'heritage' is at risk with their actions, and this could easily be the tip of the iceberg.

 

I can't say I'd object massively to fares into NRM, I'm sure most of us make a contribution anyway, so if that's what's needed to keep things going them why not?

 

Less than a year's bonus for many bankers.

 

And less than a months pay for a premiership footballer, but so what? I agree that he degree of inequality in society is objectionable, but practical methods of reducing that inequality are hard to devise, simply overtaxing the extraordinarily rich (top bankers and footballers being about 0.1% of the population but 90% of the news about salaries) normally has the effect of stabbing those who are merely well off. I do think the inequality needs tackling, but I am not sure that demonising the bankers is going to help much, it just leads to yah boo politics .....Tories bad, Labour good type of thing. In reality things are more complicated. I'm not a banker, nor have any relatives or friends that are just for the record. Neither am I a Tory voter, but frankly had the Labour party won the last election they would have had to do much what this government has, or the money would have dried up, and I cant forgive them for having borrowed so heavily over their 17 years, or for the raid on our pensions (forward tax credits) or for selling all the gold so incompetently, or indeed the creation of 3000 new criminal offences (they cannot all be necessary). They also invented PPP on the Underground which has wasted a fortune and so on. And yes you could list many issues with this government, but actually the economy is growing at present. Personally I prefer governments that do as little as possible, that way they contain the damage they do......

OK I accept that my next comment is likely to be a bit controversial, but like flaman I don't think local authorities are very good at running this sort of operation on their own. As to the comment about the councillors knowing the cost everything and the value of nowt, that's easy to say when you don't have to make a choice between spending the money on a museum or protecting children, or a school refurb, or local care for the elderly, of which there are many more now and whose services are always under pressure from demand and higher expectation. Frankly it might be an easy choice to cut a museum, but what else are you going to do? Increase the council tax? If you add the 10p per household or whatever that would equate to for this centre, you'll quickly find that you need to add an awful lot more than that for all the other worthy (perhaps worthier) causes, and pretty soon you get to the cap on council tax rises. Who'd be a councillor?

My thoughts are with the staff this evening. Perhaps an alternative way can be found to keep the centre open, but the reality must be that a lot of people will be looking for something new to do. Good luck to them.

 

Sorry to read this. Have fond memories of the photo charter there with Robert Heath No.6 in'99-seemed to take forever to get on the boil as the fire would not draw, but eventually managed to raise steam just in time .

I just hope the mining heritage centre that remains has a secure future.

Jon

 

So what indeed; I wrote nothing that you seem to have imagined I did in your rant!

 

I have to agree,in some cases handling the museum over to a charitable trust may be the better option, what does the local council spend the £900,000 on? how much of it is needed to run the building?
In fact maybe government should do that with the rest of the museums they fund, hand them over to charitable organisations then they could attract sponsorship and other funding

 

I still have a photo from the night shoot on my desk, we had a lot of fun that weekend! Thank you again, all these years on.

 

You simply sparked a train of thought by partially sparked also by some of the other posts, and other things entirely unrelated. If it is a rant it wasn't directed at you particularly.

 

This later story......

http://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/S...es-cut-costs/story-12051059-detail/story.html

...adds some numbers. The annual number of visitors had dropped to 96,000 visitors, and was heading towards fewer still in 2014. It costs £7.95 for adults and £5.50 for children. If the cost of running it is £900,000 per year, that's a subsidy of about £10 per person. Note, these numbers aren't exactly clear from the reports.....that's local papers for you.

Either way, the centre was clearly lacking something, and you cannot expect a council to keep coughing up taxpayers money for a place that is failing to attract enough visitors.

 

However, you can turn a place around with some innovative thinking, marketing and event planning. Budgeting and business planning help of course! When I was there 1999-2001, we set up steam events, model events, regular curators' talks "Scone & Bygones" and the annual fireworks night attracted thousands alone on one evening.

 

Very true Anthony. I went a couple of times, once because I'd never been, and then again on a photo charter. I'm not likely to go again unless I'm passing or there's an event on, but looking through the What's On guide on the website, there's a lot of films and theatre productions, a monthly craft morning, but not much else. There appears to be nothing industrial/engineering related, which is a bit pathetic considering the location. I'm not going to make the effort to go to somewhere that hasn't changed since my last visit.

 

Hinckley News carries an article which suggests the supporters organisation proposed a different structure etc, but it was rejected partly at least because it relied on a 60% increase in visitor numbers. It doesn't say over what period this needs to happen to make the number work, but if that's the right number that would be no mean feat for any visitor attraction no matter what innovative events you were to hold.

 

I don't know this site enough to say whether this comment applies to Snibston or not, but surely the first question about any such attraction is whether it is in the right place and trying to do the right thing, then whether it is the right way of doing it if the answer to both of these is "yes".

The problem for Local Authorities with aiming to make a success of heritage locations is that they start from the viewpoint of local regeneration - perfectly laudable, but this can easily produce the wrong answer in the wrong place. They then may follow up by making the site too large to ever have much chance of being viable - from the figures above, and assuming that a museum type attraction has little marginal extra cost per additional visitor, the visitor numbers would probably need to be in excess of 1/4 million to cover the existing costs. How realistic would that ever have been? Museum buildings are expensive to run (light, heat, insurance, manpower, cleaning etc.) but clever design can mitigate those costs, as can not being too large (sense check needed that you can fit the required number of visitors in!)

All that said, once something has been created, even if there may have been a better basic concept, design or location, it is a different matter to say that it is going to be closed and demolished - and one does note to a wry smile that some of the land will be sold for housing! I wonder if the site may have been more likely to continue, perhaps under a new structure with an independent trust as operating tenant, if this option were not available?

I also wonder if the Council has done an "overall" business case? A factor of 6 x Turnover for spend in the wider community has been calculated for heritage railways, all of which drives local employment and business and gives a return to the Council through Council Tax and Business Rates - not, admittedly, perhaps more than 5% at most but the Council can't expect to save themselves this cost without taking an associated hit on the income line, even if it ends up being mitigated to some extent by Council Tax from those new houses! I sense all forms of UK Government never do this calculation (e.g. is that nice price for building a train/ship/plane in another country really cheaper once you take account of the loss of PAYE/NIC and other taxes on the wages and profits involved, and associated costs of unemployment not saved by building in the UK).

Steven

 

One senses that joined up thinking is never a strong point with local councils. There will be an obvious social cost to this closure (job losses, the loss of an amenity) and hidden losses (losses of local trade through loss of visitors, although I'm not sure that the multiplier appropriate for lines like the WSR and NYMR will still be relevant in this case), but Government bodies of all types ought to lead the way, and if buildings such as this have high running costs then an obvious secondary use for them is as technology demonstrators for low energy heating and lighting such as solar/wind power and heat pumps.

But of course, then they wouldn't be able to sell the land for housing, which is probably what this closure is mostly about.

 

Snibston isn't too far from me. It has always been a second-rate attraction because, from its inception it was underfunded although the staff have done marvels with what was available to them. Its location is in what has to recognised as a somewhat unfashionable area; Coalville will never be on the main tourist schedule and the limited local population has probably had its appetite for the museum exhausted. There are many more varied and better attractions nearby. Railway types have the Battlefield and the Great Central, Conkers is a great Kids' attraction and there are a wealth of Stately Homes in the area. I'm afraid that Snibston has never reached the threshold of true viability and now that times are hard for local government it looks as if it will fail.

 

Perhaps this may help answer your question. I see this discussion is going on in the Heritage Railways and Centres forum. Speaking as a heritage railway enthusiast with a preference for steam, I only visited Snibston once, on a Sunday afternoon in June 2012. In the main hall, 921 and the fireless loco were nicely presented to the public, but I found little else of interest railway-wise. Indeed the rest of the collection seemed a rather random assortment of exhibits compared with, say, the similarly sized Milestones at Basingstoke.

I had hoped that Snibston would turn out be a similar setup to Bristol – a general historical museum (M-Shed) allied to railway operation (Bristol Harbour Railway). However at Snibston there was no sign of the other 2 steam locos (presumably in the shed to which access was barred?), and no information displayed on when (if at all) either steam or diesel services operated. Not finding anyone who could enlighten me I left, making a mental note to revisit at some point when something was working, preferably steam.

Since then Snibston has remained on my radar. I have occasionally looked on the Snibston web site but never found any reference to workings. I also read both HR and SR magazines monthly, but again have never seen any mention of Snibston. Neither does it feature on this forum. So I’m sorry to sound harsh but it appears to me that either the place has no interest in heritage railways or it is incredibly poor at publicity. Either way, I have never revisited.