Pressure group SKIPP has called the Southend Council’s plans for a new museum ‘pure fantasy’ after an artist’s impression of the new building was released this week.
The museum, which would house the Saxon King excavated on Priory Crescent and simultaneously repair the cliff slip on the seafront, will cost around £35 million to complete.
Cllr Derek Jarvis, who is responsible for culture, has said that of that figure, the Council itself will contribute around £10 million. The rest, he told the Echo, could come from heritage lottery funding, donations, benefactors, and private investment. He pointed out that the new Tate St Ives gallery in Cornwall and the Sage Gateshead in Newcastle are both funded with both public and private money.
The SKIPP committee, however, is not convinced. In a statement, SKIPP said:
“Southend Borough Council has released pretty pictures of their never-never plans for the pie-in-the-sky ‘cliff slip’ museum. The figures just don’t stack up, the money is pure fantasy cash, and the time scale is dangerously long.
“£35million is a huge sum of money; however, this only covers the construction costs (at 2007 prices) and does not include the cost of shoring up the cliff slip.
“When the hidden costs are added in, the figure is well in excess of £50million.
“Where is this £50m odd coming from? At first we were told the Heritage Lottery Fund would cough up the money. Well they coughed and our Council caught a cold.
“Next they turned to the department of Culture only to once again have the door slammed in their face.
“Then most recently we were told Thames Gateway would fund the scheme. Now it seems they too have sent our desperate Council away with empty pockets.
“So now they are reduced to the forlorn hope that, in the worst economic situation for 65 years, a private investor will step up and fill their begging bowl.
“It is blatantly obvious that this ludicrously expensive pipe dream is never going to be funded.
“There is an alternative viable plan, which is cost effective and implementable within a reasonable time frame.
“SKIPP is proposing a museum and Saxon educational experience to be built on the Brownfield land in Priory Park currently occupied by an under used Council Works Depot, just seconds away from where the King lived, ruled, died and was buried, thereby maintaining the vital connection between the grave goods and their site of origin.
“This plan would have education at its heart, unlike the Council’s plan which has a purely commercial perspective.â€
The Priory Park proposal is farcical, the roads round the park could not cope, there is no parking, no public transport and the park would suffer having vast volumes of people traipsing through it to the museum.
Have Skipp actually looked at all the other aspects of the Cliffs museum?
Another thing what about the trees that would need to be cut down in Priory Park to accommodate their proposal would they protest against them being chopped down in-effect protesting against their own museum.
There are other Saxon villages around the UK so it would not be a unique experience there is also the issue of English Heritage approval.
Any major works within the Parks Dept compound would obliterate the scheduled ancient monument site which MUST NOT happen.