Just back from the High Street protest where around 30 people protested to save the Tower.

Great support from the Winchester public - in just over 2 hours we managed to get over 600 people to sign the petition to ask Winchester City Council to urgently consider additional funding for

3 of the younger protestors took to the streets to sing Moira Merryweather's Tower Arts Rap.

County and City Councillors from all parties turned out to join the protestors. The two main prospective parliamentary candidates also joined forces

Why you should protest about the proposed dismantling of the Tower Arts Centre?

• This is a highly successful Art Centre that is regularly sold out. To get a feel for all the great things it does - go to http://www.towerarts.co.uk/key-client.html.


• It operates on the lowest subsidy of any of the Hampshire Art Centres. The £90k subsidy equates to 80p for each district resident.


• Any funding that Kings' School receives will be used for educational purposes. They will not fund any of the existing community use.


• Winchester is already very poorly served in terms of public spending on the performing arts - removing the subsidy to the Tower Arts will exascerbate this problem (see article dated 29th September for more analysis).


• An independent consultant has confirmed that the Discovery Centre will not be able to put on the vast majority of the evening performances currently shown at the Tower (this contradicts one of the key assumptions within the original proposal).


• There are a number of options

I thought it was worth reflecting on what has happened over the last four months - so a sort of potted history:

June

On the 17th June, a story was leaked to the press about a proposal by Hampshire County Council to transfer the Tower Arts Centre to Kings School on 1st January 2008.

Despite very little time to react some of the Tower Arts users presented a deputation to Margaret Snaith

Just come back from the second meeting of the User Groups. This time we met with Caroline Fenton the consultant to give our views. There was around 20 people attending and we were supported by Martin Tod - the prospective parliamentary candidate for the Lib Dems. All of the Users expressed there views about why the Tower is such a valuable asset - the message certainly got home loud and clear!

A lot of different ideas were discussed concerning different approaches that could be taken to funding, the different partnerships that could be looked into and the different ideas on increasing revenue.

The consensus amongst the users was:

• that the time available within the consultation is too short to properly explore these options;


• the users felt that the narrow terms of reference given to Caroline would restrict her ability to explore the wider context of art in Winchester and Hampshire

Our preferred option for the meeting is 1st November - I will pass this onto Nicola Horsey