Canberra WH657, Why Was It Broken Up?

…. Sadly beyond enthusiasts the public interest in spending money on that is always less than what is needed….

On this train of thought one of my biggest personal gripes is that very few funding bodies will actually provide meaningful grants for the most basic of amenities – waste treatment. Not every site has the opportunity to connect to mains sewage and approved alternatives are costly.

A couple of Landfill Tax related grant providers will fund such projects, but the 10 mile rule can be restrictive. Recent investigations have shown that one such body will at the present time only fund projects like village halls with a high community involvement, while another doesn’t support museum projects.

Regards HMS Plymouth – the maritime museum at Liverpool was within sight of her. With a massive tourist catchment there was every chance that she could have been preseved successfully. But it wasn’t to be.

Sadly beyond enthusiasts the public interest in spending money on that is always less than what is needed…

I visited Chatham Historic Dockyard a couple of weeks ago.

I was told by one of the staff that they had spent ten million pounds on a new ‘interactive experience’ centre and upgrading the ticket-selling and shop area. There was an unmanned computerised laser-scanning ticket-barrier (that nobody could work and that just provided a choke-point and formed a queue of angry visitors); I don’t know how anybody thought that a three-year-old (with their own individual bar-coded ticket) was supposed to work this on their own because parents either had to go through first or send their children through on their own! Never mind the seventy-five year old visitor; have the designers of these things never been to a museum in their lives?

At least the disabled visitor hadn’t been completely forgotten; there was a nice long ramp up into the entrance from ground-level…..and then a lift back down to the same ground-level once you’d got your ticket. Honestly, you couldn’t make it up!

And where did I park my car? In a (former) covered slipway that could have held under-cover THREE frigates the size of HMS Plymouth, side-by-side…

…it was enough to make you weep!

I take your points but it’s not the public we have to worry about; huge sums of public money are already being spent on national museums but in my opinion they are being very badly spent.

The more I see of the ‘redevelopment’ of museums, the fewer exhibits they seem to contain; eventually we’ll just have big empty spaces where we can stand looking at our smart-phones…

…if I wanted to do that, why do I need the ‘museum’ at all?

In my view it is a national disgrace that the Falklands veteran frigate HMS Plymouth that sat alongside that U-Boat went to the breaker’s yard only this year! She was the last (surface) warship in Britain that fought in the Falklands.

XM607 should really be saved…..but I doubt it will be.

Problem is preserving HMS Plymouth presents exactly the same problems that preserving Aircraft like XM607 does, in an ideal world the ship needs lifting out of the water or placing in a suitable dry dock. Following that the resources need to be found to keep the hull painted and maintained. Sadly beyond enthusiasts the public interest in spending money on that is always less than what is needed. Even maintaining the IWM owned HMS Belfast is a costly and ongoing struggle with many a subtle compromise to keep her from rotting away, she is lucky that they can afford a fulltime staff of nine technicians plus funding to get in experts for routine maintenance and repairs. At sometime she will need to be dry docked again, for her 71 and 82 dock periods there were yards in London that could do that. In 1999 they had to tow her to Portsmouth and they even looked at using European yards. HMS Plymouth could never of hoped for that kind of funding, a sad loss.