"Thank you for your email to the Director. The press coverage is misleading, because the Trustees of the V&A have not yet made a decision. One option is to close the building, but others would include a different mix of activities in the building. The Theatre Museum has had no success in raising the capital money for redevelopment of its current premises (which it rents, not owns) and the feedback from potential public and private donors is that the funds needed to transform the Theatre Museum's building in Covent Garden would not repay the investment given the limitations of the building. Given the serious limitations of the building we are looking at the feasibility of achieving greater appreciation of the collections without continuing with the building. If we had no Covent Garden building we would be looking at: 1. having a permanent display about the collections at the main building in South Kensington 2. running education programmes in our new Education Centre 3. large and smaller scale exhibitions at the main museum building 4. more touring exhibitions (in the UK and abroad) 5. more partnerships with major theatre organisations in the UK 6. Much greater investment in digitising the collection and providing web access and education material. Visits to the Theatre Museum website have been growing rapidly. It is worth remembering that the displays at Covent Garden represent a very tiny fraction of the collections. The core study collection moved in 2005 to Blythe House (our storage and research centre in west london) where it was united with the reserve collection - This move has been very successful and the study room there provides much better access. Interestingly, most of the emails we have had so far are mainly concerned about the preservation of the archives and we are also very concerned to increase access (eg. through extended opening hours at Blythe House and greater web access to the collections). Ian Blatchford Deputy Director" Suzi _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list h-costume@mail.indra.com http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
I received the following from the Deputy Director of the V and A
regarding the Theatre Museum.
