The cultural desertification of Barnet continues - the case of MoDA

Well, I hope I'm wrong, but it looks as though another cultural asset in Barnet - OK, just inside Enfield's borders, but only just - is going to be lost.

Middlesex University is closing its Cat Hill campus and, you won't be surprised to hear, selling it to property developers. Cat Hill courses, students and staff are squashing into the Hendon campus from September 2011.

Everyone at Hendon will have to budge up tighter again in coming years, since the university plans to close its Trent Park campus in due course. (The property developers will have a field day there: they could build a whole new town on that site...) I understand things are already tight at Hendon, with the library full to bursting, and students struggling to find accommodation in the Hendon area.

Meanwhile, the closure of Cat Hill means that the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (MoDA) which was based there has had to find a new home as well. It is being accommodated at Beaufort Park, Colindale. Surprise, surprise, the collection will no longer have a gallery open to the public or capable of accommodating school visits. People will have to make an appointment if they want to see the collection.

MoDA's blog seeks to make this move sound like a good thing, but somehow fails. These stories about some of the exhibits being packed up for transporting to the Geffrye Museum and other museums which will be their home from now on strike a poignant note. Let's face it, Barnet and environs appear to have lost another museum.

P.S. There is still time to join the campaign to save Barnet Museum. Keep checking the Barnet Museum website for the latest developments.

Robert Rams' negative externalities, Or: Barnet, the dirty man of north London

As I visited one of my favourite parks the other day, Golders Hill Park, I reflected again on the words of Councillor Robert Rams of this borough as he proposed to cut funding to the Arts Depot, Barnet Museum and Church Farmhouse Museum:

“We have to bear in mind that Barnet remains part of one of the world’s great cultural capitals and we’re fortunate to have a rich variety of arts provision, much of it free, just half an hour or so away on the Tube."

At the time what struck me about this statement was only the philistinism: he doesn't much care about keeping art and cultural activities in Barnet, in any case, he doesn't see it as part of the council's job to promote arts and culture in the borough.

But as I sat on the lush, springy turf of Golders Hill Park, licking an ice cream and wondering what to visit first, the flower gardens, the butterfly house or the zoo, a second aspect of this statement struck me, more egregious than the first.

Golders Hill Park is one of the nicest parks in London and the citizens of Barnet are extremely lucky to have it on their doorstep. The point to note, though, is that it belongs to and is maintained by the Corporation of London. The wonderful Hampstead Heath, which Barnet citizens can and do use, is not owned or maintained by Barnet either. If you want a lively night out you go to Camden or into the West End. Etc. Who picks up the tab? Someone else. Not just someone else: in part, the ordinary residents of other boroughs.

Other boroughs mow the lawns, empty the bins, let out the refreshment stands, and, in the case of Camden on a Monday morning, clean up after a weekend of debauchery. Barnet gets all this for free.

I recently did a political science degree, and one of the concepts we were taught is "negative externalities". This is when one political authority does something that costs, but they don't have to pay, by accidents of geography, or so on. So if there is a nuclear accident in Ukraine, countries downwind get some of the fallout - but that's not Ukraine's problem (it has enough problems of its own). Less dramatically, when the customers from burger restaurants leave the wrappings in the streets, that's not the burger restaurants' problem - until the council makes a regulation that they must provide bins outside their shop. (Regulation is often the answer to negative externality problems.)

So we, I'm ashamed to say, residents of Barnet are negative externalities, when we go out of the borough for our entertainment which must be provided at their expense by other authorities, local or central.

Robert Rams' casual philistinism was worse than I had at first thought. There is another negative aspect to his statement, of course, that it is just plain stupid. The more amenities that close in Barnet the fewer people want to live or spend their money here, the more of a shithole it becomes, etc.

P.S. I picked up a copy of the North London Arts Guide in the library yesterday. It covers Barnet, Enfield and Haringey. Church Farmhouse Museum, listed there, is now closed, thanks to Barnet council, in the first place, Robert Rams, cutting its grant. Barnet Museum faces an uncertain future, thanks to Barnet council, in the first place, Robert Rams. Barnet's contribution to the culture of north London is dwindling, thanks to Barnet council, in the first place, Robert Rams. Haringey and Enfield councils, think on!

UPDATE: Another Barnet blogger put me onto this film about arts in north London: the only amenity mentioned in Barnet is the Arts Depot - which, of course, had its grant from Barnet council cut recently.

P.P.S. And that's without mentioning Brent Cross or Pinkham Way!

Save our museums!

I've just returned from a protest at Church Farmhouse Museum, Hendon. It opened and closed its doors to the public for the last time today - at least, in the capacity of a free museum for Barnet residents and visitors.

Still, I say, save our museums!

It's not just about Church Farmhouse Museum. It's about the whole idea of having publicly funded archives and historical educational materials.

Barnet council is going to go through the motions of some negotiations with people who want to set up a trust and run CFM on volunteer labour. Hendon and District Archaeological Society might be interested in taking it on. All these schemes will come up against the fact that Barnet council wants to close the museums, yes, to save the small sum it costs the council to run them, but, mainly, in order to flog off the buildings, or let them out at commercial rents.

Barnet Museum volunteers are still in the thick of their fight to keep Barnet Museum in the building it is in, and propose to pay the council a peppercorn rent. We should throw our weight behind their campaign.

Barnet council's Tory group have little regard for history, and they don't believe residents have the capacity to appreciate it. In short, they take us to be philistines like them. We can, we must prove them wrong!

There are some more pictures here.

Next Saturday... at long last

With all that's being thrown at us by the current government, socialists and trade unionists despaired that it took the TUC so long to organise, well, anything in response.

Finally a day was set for a demonstration... 26 March. Too late! many of us cried, too little too late. That's as maybe now. The fact is that the TUC's "March for the alternative (jobs, growth, justice)" is finally upon us. Let's make it a good one.

Here's Barnet Unison's advice on where Barnet folks can meet up to march as a block - if they like:

Public Services...Don’t wait until they’re gone to defend them!

Trade Union members, friends, work colleagues, families, community groups and residents from Barnet are going to march together as a community.

Join us on Saturday 26th March 2011 and say NO to unfair and unnecessary spending cuts!

Meeting places in Barnet:

Finchley Central Tube Station: 9-9:15am (sharp)

Brent Cross Tube station: 9-9:15am (sharp)

Final rendezvous is outside the Savoy Hotel*, Strand, London, WC2R 0EU from 9:30am till 11am, nearest Tube Leicester Square.

March starts from 11am at the Embankment and marches to Hyde Park for a rally from 1.30pm.

* = Scene of Peasants Revolt 1381.

For a more modern take on the peasants revolt by the volunteers campaigning to save Barnet Museum, see here.

Civilisation

My cheeks are burning, I am a shy person but I behaved uncharacteristically badly on Monday evening, heckling the Barnet council cabinet meeting.

It was just intolerable sitting there spectating, while the Tory cabinet droned and intoned their way through 600pp worth of business, all of it bad news. £54.4 million cuts which, she tells us, it pains council leader Lynne Hillan to inflict on us - but she and her cabinet still manage to find justifications and excuses for every last measure.

So putting up charges for social services - cutting social services - is repackaged as 'fairer charging'; abolishing the youth service is 'freeing up volunteers from bureaucracy so that they can get more involved in providing positive activities... for the young people of Barnet'; and so on.

There were many different groups there representing people using services which are suffering direct cuts or rises in charges. They included a large and lively contingent of children, parents and staff from the schools that are having their crossing patrols cut; and the residents who are being forced to pay much more for having the temerity to live in a Controlled Parking Zone and own a car - or be visited by someone in a car, such as a volunteer befriender coming to check on an elderly person, perhaps.

At the end of the evening, I think, Yvonne Hossack, the lawyer for many sheltered housing residents in Barnet, was planning to serve papers on the council legally challenging Barnet's second attempt to remove the sheltered housing wardens.

I left the meeting quite late on as Daniel Thomas, Cabinet member for Resources and Performance, was toiling through his preamble to the budget plans proper, on why the cuts are necessary. On my way out I toyed with the idea of smoking a cigarette in the ladies' loo to trigger the fire alarm and thus, potentially, delay the fateful decision to another day - but I don't smoke. The Cabinet was going to pass its cuts budget.

That isn't the end of the story. The budget will be ratified at the council meeting on Tuesday 1 March. Anti-cuts protesters will have a lobby outside Hendon Town Hall from 6pm.

I am already ideologically opposed to Barnet's Tories, but, above and beyond that, seeing them in action always reveals one or two purely distasteful moments. The first tonight was when Andrew Harper detailed how £1 million saving would be achieved by charging more disabled Barnet residents for the social services they need to lead decent lives. Basically, taking £1 million away from vulnerable people. The second was the way the cabinet ganged up to grill Gillian Gear, who is the archivist at Barnet Museum and has volunteered there for 30 years.

Dr Gear is the sort of person that, two or three years ago, Tory councillors would have liked to shake hands with, maybe, posing for a snap in the local paper, while they extolled the virtues of volunteering and keeping open a valued cultural feature of a successful suburb.

Tonight, the political demands of the time have changed, and so they set out to humiliate and belittle Dr Gear. How many hours is the museum open? asked Brian Coleman, in a tone that implied that the volunteers who run the museum were not giving a very good service (actually, it is quite likely that the council just wants to sell the building). Why, asked Andrew Harper, trying to be hard-nosed but just making himself look deeply unpleasant, should all Barnet residents pay to keep the museum open?

Why, Mr Harper? Well, because we are a civilised people who value knowing something of our history, where we came from. I didn't always behave in a very civilised fashion yesterday evening, but I do understand that a country that closes its museums is a civilisation in decay. Barnet's Tories don't seem to have clocked that.

More information: Barnet Museum, currently battling for its life; and Church Farmhouse Museum, similiarly imperilled.

P.S. It's only right to acknowledge that the staff of the council's governance and democracy department did a great job preparing for this meeting and working to keep it on track. Sorry we were such a pain.

Arts and museum cuts - a suitable response?

On the day the bankers stuck two fingers up to the nation there was a good post on the Guardian culture blog about Barnet council locking Arts Depot protesters out of the North London Business Park on Monday.

Journalist Charlotte Higgins contrasts the dismal fate of the arts in Barnet and the UK with the feteing of Damien Hirst's latest abomination:

a human baby skull cast in platinum and encrusted with 8,128 pavé-set perfect diamonds, 7,105 natural fancy pink diamonds and 1,023 white diamonds.

Meanwhile, back on planet hoi polloi, Higgins tells us that as well as potentially losing its £194,000 Barnet council funding, the Arts Depot could lose grants worth £130,000 from London Councils. Arts Depot director Nigel Cutting is reported saying:

"If [the cut] goes through, Barnet will be one of the largest councils in the country to spend nothing on the arts. A local authority area with twice the population of Oxford at least deserves a degree of arts provision."

View the consultation document that outlines the Arts Depot cut here. You have until 17 January to let Barnet know what you think of it via the survey.

The consultation on the proposal, effectively, to close Barnet Museum and Church Farmhouse Museum is also running till 17 January. Access it here. Again there is a survey to complete.

Arts Depot flashmob this Monday - tweet that, Barnet!

The way they go on about the joys of social media, you would think that the Tory administration at Barnet council had invented Facebook. In fact, as most residents know to their cost, most Barnet Tories would have trouble tying their own shoelaces.

The Arts Depot, whose grant the council is threatening to cut, leaving the only professional arts venue in Barnet with 11% less funding, are hoisting Barnet Tories with their own petard (historical term, which someone at Barnet or Church Farmhouse Museums could explain to us). They have organised a flash mob at North London Business Park, where the council has most of its offices, this coming Monday 10 January.

I thought a flash mob was supposed to be a surprise event, sprung on the unwary, but never mind. It's such a schlepp to NLBP you do need to give people plenty of notice to get there. Just so long as they don't expect council leader Lynne Hillan to stick around to see it. Here are some more details:

Sssshhhh - FLASHMOB on Monday!

Monday 10 January, 4.30pm, meet outside Building 4 entrance at North London Business Park N11 1NP. Help artsdepot respond to the proposed cut of all core funding with effect from April with a silent vigil. You don’t need to bring anything with you but YOU. Any questions on Monday, call 07952 048574.

Museum brings Christmas past to life... for the last time?

In the spirit of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, Barnet council is proudly advertising the festive programme at the Church Farmhouse Museum in Hendon. Good, people should go - it's a lovely building with interesting exhibitions, a fine view down Greyhound Hill, and that little corner is a reminder of what Hendon and other hamlets looked like in centuries past.

What the press release doesn't tell you is that the Museum will close if the council's cuts budget goes through. So it is, possibly, for the last time that the Church Farmhouse Museum "brings Christmas past to life". What a cruel - and avoidable - irony.

Barnet council press release here. Church Farmhouse Museum website here.
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Current programme (from the website):

THE PHOENIX CINEMA: 100 YEARS

(2 October 2010- 3 January 2011)

The Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley is arguably the oldest surviving purpose-built cinema in London. This exhibition celebrates the Phoenix’s centenary, placing it in the context of the history of cinemas in Barnet and Haringey boroughs, and using material from its own archives and from the Cinema Museum.

Children visiting the exhibition are invited to create their own ideas of what the cinema of the future might look like, either in drawings or in Lego models.

The exhibition is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, Film London and the UK Film Council’s Digital Archive Fund, supported by the National Lottery.

THE RESTORATION AND THE REGICIDES

(9 October 2010- 9 January 2011)

Church Farm is celebrating its 350th anniversary, as it was built in 1660, the year of the restoration of Charles II. This exhibition looks at the trial and brutal executions in 1660 of many of those who signed the death warrant of Charles I in 1649. This is the first time that the exhibition, which is on loan from the Cromwell Museum at Huntingdon, has been shown in London.

The Moving Toyshop

Church Farm’s continuing exhibition of 20th Century toys and games is based on the extensive private collections of Friends of the Museum Irene & Mark Cornelius and Brenda Faris. It will feature new displays of teddy bears, dolls and dolls’ houses this Summer, and there is now a Teddy Bear Trail for children to follow through the Museum’s Victorian kitchen, laundry room and dining room.

As well as toys and games for the very young to play with, the exhibition now gives an opportunity for older children to make their own models out of Lego or Lott’s Bricks. (Lott’s Bricks were made nearby in Bushey, Hertfordshire, and were one of the most popular construction toys of the 1930s.)