Matt
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I think you hit the nail on the head when you say about how it’s just an art gallery that few people are expected to visit.
Most local people fall into a few camps who are unlikely to ever visit or add revenue to the place. The first lot being dead against Ty Pawb as they think it’s a huge waste of money for something no-one asked for & wish the money was spent on reducing cuts or on something more beneficial to local life. These people see it as a millstone around the council’s neck & actively want it to fail & verbally sabotage something within the local community just so the failure can bring about prospective regime change.
Then there are local people who will have heard of it, read about it in the local press but quite simply aren’t into art galleries or arts and crafts stuff. You could move the Louvre to Wrexham & they’d still not visit. They quite simply just don’t care.
Then there is a huge swathe of local people who don’t pay attention to local news & goings on & will never even have heard of it despite the extravagant launch. Lots of younger people (but not limited to that demographic.) They’ll have never stepped foot in the library or museum or even St Giles. Ty Pawb will quite simply just be off their radar & won’t make it through the filters.
This leaves a remaining local slice of the pie who like to try new things when they open up, maybe families looking for activities. Of this slice lots of people will visit on opening day/week, be underwhelmed & never visit again. Others will go, quite like it but only visit 1-2 times a year as unless you are an absolute raving arts buff, that’s more than enough for most people.
Then you have to look outside of the Wrexham fold for visitors/tourists and ask who is specifically coming to visit Wrexham town centre just to go to an art gallery? Hmm I think I’ll just travel a bit further up the road to Liverpool for the Tate and Walker galleries. I think a small number would be interested, perhaps a trickle but nothing signalling coachloads or car parks full of footfall.
So yes, call me a cynic but I think there is going to be an uphill struggle for market traders.
[quote quote=144632]The issue over longer hours is interesting- the target for the stalls as per the Arts Council funding was based on ‘Arts and Crafts’. Many of these traders are likely to be one person businesses – are they physically going to be able to trade for 64 hours- having staff will mean a cost that potentially will be too expensive.
Also, has anyone seen how many hours and days a week each stallholder has to stay open — if visitors are being attracted but only 50% of the stalls are open what kind of impression would that give to people being encouraged to make repeat visits.[/quote]
You raise some very good points.
Back in December Clr Jones made comments about who they were claiming they were touting would be taking up market stall space:
“Ty Pawb will also bring jobs to Wrexham. In terms of the market element, it will provide an opportunity for start-up businesses from university and college students to develop their skills.”
Now what 18-19 year olds from Coleg Cambria who still live at home with parents or 20-somethings up to their eyeballs in debt and still studying for a degree are they expecting to be able to acquire the start-up money through savings or go to the Bank manager with a fully fledged business plan with no previous commercial experience to get a loan. All to get a jumbo sized market stall where they propose to work 64 hours a week whilst in full time study?
Something tells me Clr Jones just wanted to get a good soundbite at the time but forgets that published stories stay on the internet for a long time and end up sounding ridiculous in retrospect.
I also query the job creation element of that claim if it’s the case that existing traders are just moving back in. No new jobs are being created and the markets are just getting thinned out again.
Old Hippodrome site up for auction on the 20th, wonder if anyone will buy it and put it to good use?
[quote quote=144468]Ty Pawb and its back passage approaches…[/quote]
Roll forward to opening day: One rather smelly and soiled councillor was heard to remark: “Now I did remember saying we should feature experimental art and not excremental…”
[quote quote=144449]
He’s obviously got under the skin of Labour in Wrexham. Reading these infantile posts i’ve come up with a brilliant idea, lets have a men only council with a minimum age of 75, you know like it used to be under Labour. Whatever you do, do NOT have young people from various trades on the council as this could upset the old boys club that used to exist.[/quote]You know when you get that 1 person who acts like they are above everyone else in a place and complain about how childish everything is. You wonder why they are even bothering to waste their time in that place. Perhaps you have somewhere more appropriate to go Dick? I hear Newsnight need some new audience members.
[quote quote=144443]Matthew, I find your lack of faith disturbing.
Top Managers are holding the Council together and with year on year cuts there are very few Top Managers left which would please you and everyone else who thinks they do not deserve perks.Do you not see the money that could be saved here? Sharing a CEO has worked for other Councils.
“Around 45 councils across England share a chief executive and senior management team in about 20 different partnerships. Most also share at least some services. These councils have already delivered savings of at least
£60 million through greater efficiencies and the other benefits of collaboration, with more savings planned.”Shared Management in local government[/quote]
Nice Star Wars Quote – of course Darth Vader was Top Management and I think his style of management was a little aggressive and out of control. Because the CEO at the time Emperor Palpatine was largely absent for vast portions of Darth’s Tenure over the Empire’s forces, by the time Palpatine bothered to turn up from whatever important business he had to complete elsewhere in the Galaxy, Vader had already lost 1 Death Star at untold cost to the Empire’s economy and was definitely massively behind schedule on the construction of the second, who knows what additional costs had been ran up before the Emperor came back in. At that point it had all gone drastically wrong, I mean seriously allowing a bunch of fully armed and armoured soldiers with attack cycles, lasers and AT-ST scout walkers, which was meant to be guarding a mission critical force-field generator, to be overran and defeated by effectively a bunch of primitive teddy bears with clubs and sling shots. I mean really? Then of course due to lack of discipline and presence of CEO Emperor, Top Management Vader ultimately wasn’t at his best game and a bitter succession planning dispute where the CEO attempted to replace his 2nd in command with their son led to the loss of both the CEO and Top Management and the ultimate collapse of the Empire.
All in all, you need a persistently present CEO in charge to deal with failings, a perception of things doing okay by just limping on with an ever-dwindling pool of top management might have built in failures that lead to catastrophic errors down the line. CEOs get paid “top whack” and “buck stops here” money so that they can take ultimate responsibility and make the overall judgement call on difficult decisions and add in crucial leadership where a team of top management, might try and drop/defer or pass the buck on by committee. They might cost £200k a year, but who knows where else is haemorrhaging money at the moment that is exceeding the savings made on £200k.
It’s beggar belief to believe that a series of Top Managerial people wouldn’t benefit from a performance boost by having someone overseeing everything – big picture. Otherwise, why do we have a Prime Minister and then individual cabinet ministers? Surely if things were that simple we’d just scrap the PM and then allow the ministers within each section to bang their heads together and thrash out the running of the country?
Leadership, Leadership, Leadership. If you look at why Apple became massively successful and into a global dominant position when Steve Jobs went back in charge of the company. You’ve got your design geniuses like Johnny Ive and other key people within Apple who made iPods/iPhones a success, but without the brutal and clinical decision making, drive and vision of someone like Jobs none of them would have been able to put it all together and deliver a world class product and then market it and distribute it and then turn that into billions and billons of annual global revenue. Likewise had they not tirelessly worked to find the right CEO to replace Jobs when he sadly fell ill and passed then the company would have quickly ended up in difficulties and fortunes dwindled.
Now, I don’t know sufficient detail about the whole Chief Executive share scheme, but my main concern here is that ultimately it would be viewed as a pathway to create a council merger between Wrexham/Flintshire etc… as previously proposed, which I am not sure is the best decision at present. Equally, how can you guarantee that they will not be too far spread with very complex and different issues within each county. What’s stopping Flintshire from monopolising their time and Wrexham becoming neglected? We need someone in charge who can focus on Wrexham and sort out Wrexham’s issues.
I think the situation we’re looking at here is called rudderless ship.
We cannot rely on a set of anonymous people called Top Management who really have no accountability at the moment. As they can just currently blame the lack of CEO on anything that goes balls up. I’m also concerned that their commitment will waver if someone removes their free parking, then we’d just be left with Middle Management running the show (amusing results of absolutely nothing achieved but the creation of 15 new sub-committees confirmed).
Also you need a Big Chief Executive to ensure all the monkeys in the pit (councillors) are kept in line & have their aims no matter how ridiculous turned into workable schemes. Also likely to operate as a consigliere to Clr Pritchard’s Leadership & would actually tell him & have sufficient rank to gain respect if he/she thought something was a bad idea. Whereas Top Management bods would likely just roll over and go ahead with anything.
[quote quote=144423]
There;s a window cleaner looking after youth service, a railway signal worker on environment, a hairdresser on childrens services, a mechanic on planning, and Biffa Bacon in overall control. All very worthy professions in their own right ( Biffa excepted) but do they really have the knowledge required?[/quote]Sounds like a good idea for a children’s TV series. What will the gang get up to next?
[quote quote=144415]
While you may not wish to patronise it, other people do wish to.
[/quote]Oh believe me votethecouncillorsout (vtco) definitely wants to patronise the arts hub.
[quote quote=144418]Whilst everyone has a right to an opinion, quite frankly “votethecouncilorsout” we get your opinion on Ty Pawb, you want it to fail. We get the message.
[/quote]
You know what I really look forward to the daily sardonic take on the Arts Hub developments. Farkwittery does too as they have signed up to the forums just to be part of our specialist Ty Pawb focus group. An ever growing fanbase. Now that vtco has developed Nostradamus-cum-Mystic Meg style prophecy powers I can’t wait to see what tomorrow’s installment is.
