Council cuts put crafts museum under threat

A SMALL museum in the Midlands that attracts 25,000 visitors a year is threatened with closure after losing pounds 104,000 of funding in council cuts.

Bewdley Museum in Hereford and Worcester, located in a former butcher's slaughter-house a street away from where the former prime minister Stanley Baldwin was born in 1867, will not be opening for business as usual in March.

After 20 successful seasons it is due to lose 11 of its 13 staff as Wyre Forest District Council - under threat of government charge-capping - seeks to trim pounds 2.25m from its budget. A total of pounds 806,000 will be cut from leisure.

Jane Arthur, of the West Midlands Museum Service, believes the drastic reduction in staff will make Bewdley 'inoperable'.

The museum's curator, Charles Fogg, said yesterday: 'The place is being mothballed. You might as well put a padlock on the door.'

The museum, due for an award for its education service, now stands to lose its registration with the Museums and Galleries Commission, and with it up to pounds 6,000 a year in grants. The chairman of the council's leisure services committee, Mike Kelly, said: 'This is not something we wanted to do. It's causing staff a terrific amount of pain. We went through every service with a fine-tooth comb.'

He hopes the Bewdley museum - where craftsmen demonstrated rope-making, brass founding and the firing of clay pipes - now left with a budget of pounds 178,000, can reopen for the peak tourism period between June and September.