ARTS
Changes, charges and cuts
Felicity Owen on the problems and pressures facing the British Museum The British Museum (BM) is one of this country's glories. It leads the world in presenting the history of civilisation and, with admission free, attracts over 6 million people a year, an international record for museums. At £5.50 per visitor, cost effec- tiveness is bettered only by the National Gallery, where European paintings, which complement the BM's holdings of art and artefacts from many cultures, draw atten- dances above 4 million.
Yet politicians of all parties whose cur- rent catchword is education accept the Government's intention to cut the BM's annual grant in real terms, and only urgent action will prevent the accumulation of a deficit nearing £25 million by the millenni- um.
The situation will be exacerbated by the departure of the British Library from the magnificent round Reading Room built into the centre quadrangle of Sir Robert Smirke's original temple-like edifice. This move to the long-delayed St Pancras build- ing will be completed by 2000 with the loss to the BM of annual contributions of £3.7 million, for which the recent Budget pro- poses a compensating grant of only £2 mil- lion for the year 2000-2001, making a total of £34.184 million. Nothing is allowed towards the capital cost of clearing and enabling works estimated at well over £5 million.
Financial problems on this scale would daunt most institutions but the BM, which over nearly 250 years has built its reputa- tion for conserving and enhancing knowl- edge of its world-wide collections, is set to take advantage of the Library's removal and convert the space surrounding the Reading Room into an extension of the present inadequate Front Hall. The Great Court Scheme, Sir Nor- man Foster's imaginative plan to install a translu- cent roof over the entire two-acre quadrangle, will enable the Museum to provide facilities for a new century worthy of its sta- tus.
These will include a first-floor and, hopefully, first-class restaurant, and at basement level a Centre for Education where audi- toria and information technology rooms will be matched by activity and lunch areas for school par- ties. On the main level, the former Reading Room will house the BM's own spe- cialist reference library with half the space given over to a fully equipped Information Centre funded by the Annenberg Foundation. Outside the Reading Room perimeter, circulation will be easier and new African galleries, spon- sored by the Sainsbury family, will house the ethnographic collections which will return from the then redundant Museum of Mankind building in Piccadilly. Another change is the acquisition, by a complicated arrangement with a development company, of the former Royal Mail sorting office in Museum Street to serve as a Study Centre partly for archeological and anthropologi- cal material, a contribution from the Cloth- workers' Foundation helping also to create a World Textile Centre.
Given such an exciting prospect and the Prime Minister's pride (recently expressed at the Lord Mayor's banquet) in the increased 'quality of our life and culture', a memorable farewell handout from the pre- sent Government might be envisaged. Instead, a rather miserly £30 million for the Great Court Scheme is pledged from Mil- lennium Funds on condition that the work is finished in 2000. The fund-raising BM The British Museum: world leader Development Trust, itself an expensive unit, is within sight of matching this sum from private sources, but the final cost could rise to £100 million allowing for inflation. lithe Heritage Lottery Fund paid towards the Centres of Education and Information there still would remain a desperate need for benefactions of an equal sum for the scheme to be completed in one economical operation starting in March 1998.
The 25 trustees of the BM and their director, Dr Robert Anderson, have react- ed late to the problems ahead, and the recent report commissioned from Andrew Edwards, a former Treasury official, demands fast and unpleasant decisions. Although the BM's prestige has never been higher, money and foresight have been short, leaving management systems out of date and the building well maintained only when compared to the post-war years when buckets caught the leaks. The main excep- tions are spaces such as the Japanese, Hel- lenistic, Mexican and Oriental Antiquities galleries where presentation has been transformed by sponsorship which will become more vital.
The report strongly recommends the appointment of a project manager for the Great Court Scheme and a finance direc- tor. Less welcome to curatorial staff is the suggestion of a flatter management struc- ture giving more power to service depart- ments with the senior keeper representing others of this cloth in the top team of eight. At present 12 curatorial departments led by exceptional scholars are separate fief- doms, 20 to 50 strong, reporting to the director. It is each department's reputation in its own field that produces sponsorship for a myriad items from exhibitions and publications (often in collaboration with a foreign museum) to mod- ern equipment.
Apart from Prints and Drawings, which is consid- ered lean enough and holds the national collec- tion of works on paper, curatorial departments are facing proposed staff cuts of 20 per cent. These threaten the continuity of world-class scholarship, service in the Students' Rooms and loans to other museums world wide. There will be fewer exhibi- tions and less participation in international confer- ences and in the relatively unsung archeological research.
The current Mysteries of Ancient China (sponsored by the Times) is a good example of an exhibition made pos- sible because leading European scholars are held in great respect by their Chinese coun- terparts, whose museums have contributed extraordinary new discoveries, an `Imagi- nary Bird' in bronze from the 5th century BC for one being memorable. There is a queue to pay £5 admission, but it is a differ- ent story at the BM's unwelcoming north entrance in Montague Place. The hand- some extension, designed by John James Burnet, the architect of Selfridges, houses the Oriental Antiquities permanent gal- leries, parts of which are often closed because of warder numbers being run down in preparation for cuts of 25 per cent. The lift is out of order and at 4th-floor level only the brave and the cognoscenti venture through a closed and darkened shop to be illuminated by drawings by Bot- ticelli, Michelangelo and Raphael, to name only a few of the Malcolm Collection's masterpieces from the Department of Prints and Drawings whose exhibition runs until 5 January.
Until the Great Court Scheme unites both buildings, many splendid exhibitions, including those of Japanese prints on the top floor, will continue in an oasis of peace, but the lack of viewers is partly due to the limited resources of the Press Office. The BM is too accustomed to let objects speak for themselves, something the colossal Pharaonic statues do so well that French teachers with school parties are known to go shopping, leaving their contingent to create mayhem in the main Egyptian gal- leries. Here the prospect of CCTV partly taking the place of warders is dreadful.
The BM badly needs a new marketing strategy, but first the trustees must grasp the nettle of admission charges. Set at £5 or £6 with concessions to junior, senior and other deserving Britons, season ticket hold- ers and with some hours free, charges are estimated to produce over £8 million a year for the BM, a figure that includes VAT which becomes recoverable on all building costs. A 50-60 per cent drop in the number of visitors is anticipated — in terms of con- gestion much to be desired — and the 60 per cent who come from abroad will pay the lion's share. But the principle of open access to a national educational institution is at stake and the director is against charg- ing.
Other staff whose careers may be on the line are naturally more ambivalent. The income from charges would alleviate cuts, enabling curatorial and scientific depart- ments to continue their service to many disciplines which rely on the BM's unique collections, and the Education Department to meet more of the ever increasing demands from British schools. It would also allow some overdue updating of equip- ment and a sum for modest acquisitions. Most important, morale, shaken by the present uncertainties, would rise to the chal- lenge of making the BM worth paying for.
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