Let's back the bid - to showcase our town's amazing heritage

By Staff Reporter - 2 October 2017

Opinion and FeaturesHeritage

The Swindon Heritage Magazine Column with Graham Carter

Heritage is reaching a critical stage in Swindon.

We recently announced that after this year we will cease publishing our magazine, Swindon Heritage, which is the only one of its kind in Britain.

However, while the magazine is enjoying rising sales, the commitment of publishing it has become too much while the attitudes of those who make the decisions about our heritage and some of those we pay to look after it for us remain unchanged.

It is also disappointing to find that the magazine did not seem to have a role in the bid for a new museum and art gallery.

Nobody has ever actually asked us for our opinion about this project, but Link readers may be interested in how the editor of Swindon Heritage sees an issue that continues to divide opinions in the town.

The project's most obvious problem has been lack of engagement with the public, which even the trust set up to manage the project admitted was a failing when it staged an event  at New College in the spring, following the surprise resignation of the project’s director, Hadrian Ellory-van Dekker.

Trustees seemed at a loss to know how to address this, although the appointment of Rod Hebden-Leeder as Hadrian’s replacement has gone some way to achieving it.

Rod knows heritage and Swindon, and because he is also passionate about it, he was an excellent choice.

The problem with Rod is: there is only one of him. He is rather like a substitute brought on in the hope that he will somehow turn things around in the closing stages of the match, but it’s asking a lot.

Engagement with the public should have started years ago, but instead the project has had all the hallmarks of the way Swindon Borough Council approaches heritage, which is to come up with its own plan and - if we are lucky - eventually turn to the public and say: “Here’s what we are going to do; you do like it, don’t you?”

That is asking for negative responses, and no way to get the public on your side.

Neither has it helped that the trust painted itself into a corner by presenting the project as an art gallery first and a museum as a poor second.

As it stands, it’s still not clear, even to me, what there is in the museum collection for the public to get excited about or to spend so much money on, apart from a mummy and a stuffed crocodile.

But possibly the biggest problem with the project is that it has stood in splendid isolation until now.

What should be the flagship of a heritage strategy addressing various issues in Swindon - from the festering decay of the Mechanics’ Institute to a vandal’s charter for turning the Health Hydro into flats - has, instead, always seemed to suggest the rest of Swindon’s heritage is somehow unconnected or even irrelevant.

We can’t turn back the clock and undo mistakes, but we can learn from them, and it’s not too late for the project to be a catalyst for something bigger.

Indeed, if ever Swindon’s heritage needed a holy grail it is now, so it’s time for all of us to put our misgivings about the project behind us and unite behind it.

When it comes to deciding whether it is a deserving cause, the need for a new museum should be judged not on how good or bad the bid for it has been presented, but rather how rich our heritage is and how proud it makes us.

We should know. In the five years that we have been publishing Swindon Heritage, no other town or city thought their heritage was worth making so much of a song and dance about.

So let’s get behind the bid - because if Swindon’s magnificent heritage doesn’t deserve a proper showcase, whose does?

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