Edinburgh history museum to remain closed over funding gap

Campaigners have criticised the closure of the People's Story museum as an attempt to 'expunge' Edinburgh's working class history

A museum charting the working class history of Edinburgh is to remain closed in a bid to bridge a council budget gap.

The People’s Story will shut until at least April next year having already been shuttered for two months due to a lack of staffing.

Critics have accused City of Edinburgh Council of attempting to “expunge” the capital’s working roots.

But the local authority said there was “no silver bullet” to reopen the museum, which sits in the 16th-century Canongate Tolbooth.

Plans to close the facility were unveiled last month.

The council is projected to spend £26m over its budget this year and has frozen museum recruitment as a result.

The Queensferry Museum, which tells the story of life on the Firth of Forth, will also be closed permanently as part of the money-saving plans and will be accessible only on an “appointment” basis.

But residents, councillors, academics and trade unions hit out at the blueprint after it emerged those measures would save just £260,000 per year.

It represents about 1% of the savings needed for the council to balance their annual budget.

The city’s culture and communities convener, Val Walker, did not accept a recommendation to keep the People's Story closed through autumn and winter during a council meeting on Thursday.

Plans to charge visitors for entry as part of tentative re-opening proposals will not be considered until December.

“The administration wants the People’s Story to re-open,” Cllr Walker said, “but we recognise that there are challenges, hurdles to overcome. We cannot just re-open it tomorrow. There are not the staff to have every museum open.

“That is an absolute commitment from me that at the December committee meeting we will be looking at the ways in which we can re-open that museum – not in April but in December.”

Plans to save the museum will not be discussed until December

Old Town resident Jim Slaven, who is leading the campaign to save the museum, said the facility needed “love and investment,” describing plans for its closure as “social vandalism”.

“For working class people in this city, life is pretty difficult,” he said.

“People are pushed to the margins in every sense and the symbolism of having a working class history museum telling their story right in the centre of town is absolutely crucial, and to close it will be the final nail in the coffin.”

The council’s head of museums and galleries, Karl Chapman, admitted the interim closure “seems harsh” but said he wanted to “buy ourselves some time” to draw up alternative proposals.

“As officers it’s our responsibility to mitigate [the overspend],” he said. “On staffing at the moment, we just don’t have the numbers.”

The museum collection includes paraphernalia from social and political movements and realistic depictions of workshops, wartime kitchens and a jail cell.

Mr Chapman said it needed to remain as a “standalone museum”.

Former councillor and MP George Kerevan, who was part of the city’s first Labour administration which agreed to establish the People’s Story, said its closure risked “losing [Edinburgh’s] identity”.

He said: “I’m incandescently angry because it’s a trivial amount of money they are trying to save.

“It’s a huge budget the council has, to take £200k out of it, it’s not really about that, it’s about expunging the history of Edinburgh.”

Reporting by local democracy journalist Donald Turvill.