CONsultants latest

Another post on what seems to be this weeks’s emerging theme: the city council’s sell-out of Bristol to corporate CONsultants from London because the authority’s superannuated senior officer clique who run everything apparently have no confidence in anyone here.

Next up for the CONsultant treatment is our new £25m money pit, the Museum of Bristol. This controversial new development on the site of the much-loved old Industrial Museum is being aggressively marketed and sold to a very cynical Bristolian public as a museum for and about the lives of the ordinary people of Bristol.

“This is a once in a generation opportunity to create a leading museum of city life,” Bristol City Council tell us.

And now that all the big money has arrived we learn that the designers for the exhibition displays for this highly specialised Bristol attraction have been appointed – in a fanfare of very limited publicity indeed – following, we’re assured, “a rigorous selection process”.

Brilliant news. Who’s doing the work then?

“Event, one of Europe’s leading design groups,” it says here.

Excellent. Sounds like a good choice. And where can I find these local museum designers then?

Er, in some fashionable offices by London Bridge, just a stones throw, from the Bristol’s public transport consultants Steer Davies Gleave’s Southwark office in fact!

Event – strapline: excellence | innovation | involvement – join the comically trendy London-based architects Lab in cashing in on our museum project whose “raw material,” the marketing assures us, “is Bristol itself, its people and its heritage.” But not its architects or designers evidently.

Meanwhile Event’s PR team gushes, “The aim of the project is to use the displays to both encapsulate the community’s voice and engage and create dialogue within the museum and beyond.”

No doubt this latest appointment will do wonders to help calm all those fears that have been expressed about us ending up with an identikit museum full of fashionable, hi-tech interactive crap …