Rally to Protest Against the Closure of Canterbury's Roman Museum

There will be a mass rally outside the Roman Museum in Canterbury at noon in Saturday, February 13 to protest against the museum's closure. Organisers are hoping those in the academic and heritage worlds will unite to spread the world and fight the closure.

"We are calling for everyone who opposes the proposed cut to join us in a brief show of solidarity," says John Hammond, Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Kent and a non-executive director of Canterbury Archaeological Trust. "Access to the museum is very narrow and it only needs a couple of hundred people to jam this up totally. We don’t intend the disruption to last long – just enough to demonstrate to the council that people are prepared to stand up and be counted.

"The Roman Museum is unique. It is the only place where such a large in situ example of Roman archaeology can be viewed in Canterbury, along with numerous finds, which in many cases are national treasures. The importance of this museum to Canterbury cannot be overstated. On economic grounds alone it is a considerable tourist attraction. It was originally designed in the 1990s primarily as a venue for teaching school children about our Roman heritage and 19,000 of them – many French – visited it last year; many thousands of adult day-trippers also visited it, though council won’t release exact figures.

"The Roman Museum is very poorly marketed – with no signage pointing to its location – yet in a six-month period at the end of last year took £60,000 across the turnstiles."

Images

Put your Flickr photos of this object into the Heritage Key group, and tag them with event-8138, to see them here!