'Hands off our museum!' - 6,000 sign petition to save 'beautiful' Abbey House Museum

The campaign to save the iconic Abbey House Musuem from closure in Kirkstall is ramping up as thousands join the fight.

Leeds City Council proposed the closure of the Abbey House Museum in December, claiming it would save £160,000 a year, to the anger of many locals. A campaign launched by Stuart Long, urging the council not to close the museum, has attracted more than 6,000 signatures.

Stuart himself lives in Kirkstall and says the museum is very important to the people of the town and is loved by residents. He said: "The Abbey House Museum is an absolute delight. It's an absolutely beautiful heritage site in the middle of Kirkstall that's been there since the Abbey was formed back in the Cistercian times."

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The museum inside the Abbey House opened in 1927. Its ground floor is dedicated to recreations of Victorian streets, lined with shops and containing real artifacts from the time. There are also galleries upstairs showcasing exhibitions.

Stuart added: "The Victorian streets downstairs are the biggest delight in history. Can you imagine being a child and actually walking into something and seeing it actually happen? I know we have virtual reality these days and kids can experience bits of it on a computer, but to actually physically walk into a Victorian street and touch the things and actually experience it for yourself, play on the little machines and that sort of thing.

"It is a beautiful gem of a museum that literally needs to remain, because, you can probably see the passion here, it energises children when they go in the building and it reminds adults when they go back with the children that it is a beautiful place to be."

Children from across Kirkstall, and from further afield, have often made school trips to the site, and generations of locals have made use of the museum since its opening. Parents and grandparents who visited as children themselves often get to see their own children or grandchildren visit just as they once did.

However, Leeds City Council, as with other councils across Yorkshire and the rest of the country, has said it needs to find ways to save money. A public consultation, which ended on January 23, said the council was facing its most significant financial challenge ever.

The local authority added that funding costs "had not kept pace with rising costs and huge increases in demand for our services". In addition, visitor numbers at the museum had dropped. The council said: "We’ve already cut costs where we can – for example, through a freeze where possible on recruitment and non-essential spend. But this isn’t enough. We estimate we’ll need to make around £106m of savings next year, nearly one fifth of our net budget.

"The budget proposals we’re presenting therefore include service and staffing reductions, fee increases and new charges, building closures and sales, and reduced hours of operation. None of these proposals have been put forward lightly but we have a legal duty to set a balanced budget and so need to make some difficult decisions to make the best use of the resources we have."

However, Stuart argues the amount the council would save from the closure of the museum would make very little difference to its overall budget. He argued: "It's miniscule, it's tiny, it's barely sweat off the brow of an executive councillor's department budget.

"It's not something that they need to stress about. To be fair, they have announced as well that they are looking at selling the Lord Mayor's number plate for £500,000, half a million pound. Well, if you can get £500,000 for a number plate, then look a bit further in your budgets and I'm sure you can probably find some other little thing that's on a desk somewhere that could be sold for a couple million quid."

With a number of councils closing historic assets to save money, and selling them on to generate funds, Stuart worries this is part of a larger trend which is putting local history at risk. He said: "You can Google something, or you can got to the British Museum, which will never ever go thank God, but you need something local that you can walk into.

"Put it this way, they explain that Kirkstall is a deprived area, and that people are on the bread line with the cost of living, but yet, if you close the museum, you're going to make them commute two miles or three miles into town or further along, five miles out towards Roundhay or places like that, just to see a different museum."

With so many people signing the petition, it seems clear that many people feel that the museum must stay open. As Stuart puts it: "We don't want you to touch our museum".