THE ESSEX FIELD CLUB
HEADQUARTERS:
THE PASSMORE ED WARDS MUSE UM,
ROMFORD ROAD, STRATFORD,
LONDON, E15 4LZ
NEWSLETTER NO. 10 April 1994
THE FUTURE OF THE FIELD CLUB'S COLLECTIONS
As members will be aware from Newsletter No 8, your Field Club Council has been
frantically exploring ways to safeguard the club's collections and library in the wake of
the financial crisis being experienced by the London Borough of Newham.
As incoming president, the problem was obviously going to fall on my shoulders, and so
as many of you will now be aware, 1 made the suggestion that we take the radical step of
attempting to retrieve our collections and seek to build a new museum repository
especially to house them, and to house the rapidly growing collections of our increasingly
active club recorders. The big national museums are no longer interested in taking over
local collections, - they too have their financial problems -, we need however to safeguard
our Essex collections as vouchers that can be checked in the future and so that future
generations can see just what the flora and fauna of our county was like in the past.
We have been having detailed discussions with the London Borough of Newham and the
Superintendent of Epping Forest, and are currently exploring the possibility of a venue
for the new museum, somewhere in the Epping area. Several of us have also been
assessing the size and nature of the EFC collections, and working out how big a building
we will need to house them and just how much it will cost to build, run and insure.
Detailed costings and plans have also been obtained of the new automated, and
airconditioned museum repository, constructed recently by the British Entomological &
Natural History Society at Dinton Pastures near Reading.
If all goes well, we hope to have a modern fully airconditioned Field Club museum back
in Essex in the not too distant future. In addition to housing our collections, we plan to
have a working area facility where members can study the collections, and for example
use microscopes, and enter information onto a computer database.
Assuming we find a suitable site, we estimate that £120,000 will be required to complete
the construction and equipping of the new building. While we are reasonably confident
that this money could be raised as a series of interest free loans, with some of it in the
form of grants, we shall need a sum of this order of magnitude to pay for the building in
the long term, and additional funds as an endowment to cover the running costs.
Though this sounds a lot of money it is little more than the value of the average Essex
house. If just one of our members, without a family to leave their house to, were to leave
it to the club, it would pay for this new building and we would be only too delighted to
have the name of that person emblazoned on a brass plaque over the entrance!
Ken Adams, President