Your readers will by now possibly have received their copies of the latest issue of Croydon Council’s magazine, or should it be a propaganda sheet, Your Croydon.
Strange to say, this is largely devoted to self-congratulatory articles saying what a wonderful job the council is doing. It’s the things these magazines don’t tell you that are possibly more interesting and just as important.
The late Raymond Reisco, for example, dreamed of an Arts centre for Croydon, and donated 650 pieces of Chinese pottery to get such a thing started.
Croydon has disposed of or lost 420 of them! Where have they gone?
They tell me they sold 180 in 1970, although that sale seems to have had very little publicity. I’ve been reading local papers since as far back as the 1950’s and knew nothing about it. There isn’t even anything about it in the Council’s printed and published minutes for 1970.
Equally hushed up was the theft of 39 pieces, although exact details of the date and circumstances seem to be elusive.
In 1984 another 112 pieces were sold: at least on that occasion the sale was public knowledge and widely discussed.
But as there are at present just 230 pieces left (just over a third of what we started with) this leaves another 89 pieces unaccounted for: so far the council has said nothing about them!
As far as an Arts Centre is concerned, Croydon Council has in the last two or three years gone a long way to destroying the very promising one started in the 1990s as the Clocktower Centre at the Town Hall.
If it sells another 24 pieces from the Riesco Collection, as planned, it will earn pariah status in the world of the arts and culture.
The Arts Council England threatens to remove the Museum of Croydon from its list of accredited museums, which means our eligibility for external funding is diminished if not extinguished.
And the Heritage Lottery Fund seems likely to want back the money (getting on for a million pounds) it gave Croydon to establish the museum in the first place. And they talk about “safeguarding culture”!
What do they want to with the proposal sale money? They want to upgrade the fixtures and fittings, painting and decorating and so forth, at the Fairfield Halls. Things that should have been budgeted for and attended to as a matter of routine ever since the Halls opened in the 1960s.
Acquaintances told me the other day they expected, having paid £20 each for tickets, lighting to be in working order in the toilets! Why did the Council let the building set the building set into such a state in the first place?
Croydon Council has a fancy Latin motto, all to do with “striving for perfection”. If only. I feel inclined to compose an alternative motto incorporating whatever “whelk stall” is in Latin!
Paul W.Sowan Librarian Croydon Natural History& Scientific society
- Send your letters to: letters@croydonguardian.co.uk
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