Compare and contrast these two stories. In Lancashire, five museums will close on 31 March because the county council needs to cut its museums budget from £1.3m to less than £100,000 so that it can maintain at least a skeletal version of statutory, essential services such as rubbish collection.
Two of the museums, including the last steam-powered weaving mill in Britain, have been designated as sites of national importance. Another five Lancashire museums have had their council funding withdrawn and been left to look after themselves – their future is uncertain.
#Forty of the county’s 74 libraries are also to be culled. Other parts of England, particularly in the north, are of course familiar with similar closures and cutbacks, but in Lancashire they amount to a cultural disembowelment.
First they came for the mills, you might say, and then for the libraries, and then for the museums that the mills had become.
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