Wemustfinda cureforourawful ‘edifice complex’
UNLIKE POLITICIANS and communal leaders, but in common with Jonathan Freedland’s BBC Radio 4 Programme, people in the heritage business take ‘‘The Long View’’. So when I read Lord Young’s opinion in the JC (Nov 6, 2015) that the London Jewish Museum was in the wrong place, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. After more than 20 years in Camden Town and an expansion and capital redevelopment project to the tune of £10 million, of which £4.2 million was provided by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the new chairman of trustees has reached the same conclusion that I did way back in the early 1990s — before the museum even moved there. I have great difficulty in resisting the knee-jerk: “I told you so!”
Like so much in Anglo-Jewry, the move to Camden was, as far as I can ascertain, more accidental than planned. The late and generous benefactor Raymond Burton owned a couple of listed Georgian town-houses a few minutes’ walk from Camden Town Underground Station. The property bubble had burst (1988) and he offered them to the Jewish Museum. Since 1932, the museum had been crammed into an upper floor of what was then nicknamed ‘‘Wobegone House’’.
The collective London headquarters of Anglo-Jewry and the popular Adler Hall at Woburn House in Tavistock Square, WC1, had been the big building project of an earlier generation of communal funding fathers. In the 1990s, it was sold for a reported £1.4 million, well below the £4 million reputedly offered to the United Synagogue for this prime, city-centre location. The University of London got a real M’tsiah (bargain)! There followed the dispersal of Britain’s Jewish community institutions and, for most of them, exile from a prestigious address in the West End of London befitting a national organisation.
Recently, David Herman weighed in with an excellent piece entitled What’s wrong with our museums and how to fix it, ( JC, Feb 5). He made the point that the success of Jewish museums around the world depends largely upon their location. They need to be at the centre of great cities where they can attract sufficient visitor footfall.
Back in 1996, I wrote the same thing: you only have to think of Amsterdam, Venice and Prague. But I took my argument beyond Herman’s and stand by it today: the key to a successful Jewish museum is not only its situation in a central location but also its location inside or besides a building of outstanding architectural and historical interest: in short, a landmark, historic synagogue. Moreover, I agree with him that tourists need a cluster of historic sites in order to be lured into a ‘‘must-see’’ neighbourhood.
Conceptually, Manchester got it right way ahead of the capital. Over 100 years after its opening in 1874, in 1984 the Spanish & Portuguese Synagogue became the home of the Manchester Jewish Museum (MJM). MJM is situated in the middle of the Mancunian equivalent of the Jewish East End: Cheetham. Every summer, the museum runs regular heritage trails around the other surviving sites of Jewish interest in the neighbourhood, all of which, it must be said, are now Sites At Risk.
Manchester’s Jewish Museum is a model conservation project. After three attempts, last year it finally landed a big HLF capital development grant potentially worth over £3 million. This is well deserved. MJM has attracted 20,000 visitors annually, the majority being young people on school trips. The restored synagogue itself has been and will remain its chief exhibit.
It was not as if the opportunity did not exist back in the 1990s to move London’s Jewish museum to a historic synagogue. On the contrary, at that time, several large Victorian synagogues, including the likes of New West End (now Grade I) and Hampstead (now Grade II*), were facing closure due to perceived ‘‘redundancy’’, while East London Synagogue (Grade II) in Stepney Green had already been sold off. That building was shockingly vandalised, arsoned and flooded before finally turning in a profit for the lucky developers who eventually acquired it and converted it into flats in 1997. Indeed, each of the 25 flats carved out of the main building was marketed for over £260,000 — roughly the same sum for which the United Synagogue had sold the whole site 10 years earlier, in 1987.
East London was the reason that I first became engaged in Jewish heritage conservation all those years ago. My first letter to the JC on the subject of heritage (Dec 18, 1987) was headed: Time for some imagination in the East End. When I suggested the Jewish Museum could easily relocate to East London Synagogue, so convenient for the then developing ‘‘Old Jewish East End’’ heritage trails that now dominate the cultural tourism market, the response was: How could we move to such an insalubrious, dangerous and drug-infested neighbourhood as the East End. The museum moved to Camden instead!
It has taken more than a generation for the tide of opinion to come around to my way of thinking. Camden did not develop into the Jewish ‘‘hub’’ that some had predicted in the 1990s. On the contrary, since then, JFS has suburbanised further out to Kenton. Moreover, an extravagant (£50 million) newbuild Jewish community centre has gone up in the Finchley Road.
This is essentially an expression of the ‘‘edifice complex’’ prevalent in Anglo-Jewry. JW3 has yet to prove its long-term worth, even as a facil-
Tourists need a cluster of historical sites to be lured into an area