B&NES Council leader describes his 'dream' for Bath to become leading city for fashion

The leader of Bath and North East Somerset Council has described his “dream” for Bath to become Europe’s leading city for fashion.

Addressing a scrutiny panel of Bath and North East Somerset Council on March 7, council leader Kevin Guy said: “It is the ambition of this administration and hopefully future administrations to transform Bath into a fashion centre, and it is a 15, 20, 30 year ambition and dream.”

He added that he wanted the city to “not just do it, but be the best at it.”

Describing his hopes, Mr Guy said: “We would be the best in Europe: creating a museum which would be the best in Europe, but also attracting the best fashion designers around Europe to be based in Bath as well connected to the universities.

“And that is a 15–20 year aspiration to transform Bath into a fashion centre, a centre for wellbeing, and not just a tourist centre.”

Currently, however, the city is without its famous fashion museum. The National Trust, which owns the Assembly Rooms where Bath Fashion Museum had been based for almost 60 years, exercised its break clause in the lease last year, with the museum having to leave at the end of October.

The council plans to move the museum into a new location at the Old Post Office at a cost of £37m, but the move has been set back years by the failure of the council’s bid for £20m from the Levelling Up Fund. At Thursday’s council cabinet meeting, councillors will discuss plans to let out the building out in the meantime to raise money for the museum’s move.

£2.4m of funding from the West of England has been secured for the project and other works to regenerate Bath’s Milsom Quarter, and the council recently appointed the V&A’s Sophie McKinlay as the museum’s new project leader.

The council is also planning to establish a new Fashion Collection Archive at Locksbrook as a specialist storage location for items not on display.

Robert Campbell, the council’s head of heritage services, told the scrutiny panel: “The new location, the Old Post Office is fundamentally transformational for the fashion museum. We all really liked it in its previous location; the Assembly Rooms is an amazing building.

“But the museum itself was of its time and very very constrained in the basement location. Having a new site to look at with multiple floors, multiple areas will mean we can completely transform the visitor experience — much more space for displaying more artefacts and introducing more modern interpretive techniques.”

But the former councillor Bob Goodman criticised the council’s handling of the fashion museum. Speaking at the start of the scrutiny panel meeting as a public speaker, he said: “The big question that has to be asked is: why was the lease allowed to come to an end without a permanent site being found? … You do not close a world renowned museum without nowhere to go.”

He added: “Why did the council give away Bathampton Meadows to the National Trust when they could have used that as a bargaining tool to keep the museum open?”

The controversial transfer of the parcel of countryside from council ownership to the National Trust was a manifesto pledge of the Liberal Democrats before the last council election in 2019. There had been long-contested plans to build a park and ride across the fields — finally dropped in 2017 — and the transfer was seen as a way to prevent future development of the fields.

Weston councillor Ruth Malloy asked if it could be arranged for the National Trust’s local managers to come before the scrutiny committee to discuss their plans for the Assembly Rooms, now that the fashion museum has left.

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