Tax rises could push back museum’s breakeven plan

THE director of the River & Rowing Museum in Henley says getting its finances to breakeven point could now be a year later than planned.

Steve O’Connor had hoped to achieve this by March 2027 but operating costs are to increase due to changes made by the Government in its October budget and the rising cost of energy.

He said a rise in employer national insurance contributions from 13.8 per cent to 15 per cent and a lack of funding support for museums was hitting the arts industry.

Mr O’Connor, 43, who took over the running of the museum in July 2023, said the budget “wasn’t very kind” to the sector.

He said: “Support is badly needed because funding for the arts and heritage sector is really low. We’re not alone in terms of always needing to fundraise, always needing to find support.

“There are lots of other museums and organisations like us who are in the same boat and that’s a very common theme that we're seeing at the moment.

“The day-to-day running of a business is more expensive. Because we're a museum and a charity, we're not exempt from those running costs and so certainly the national insurance hike is something that we've got to bear.

“It has become increasingly expensive, particularly around the cost of energy to maintain these collections and to maintain these buildings.

“But what we didn't really see was any real funding going into arts and culture and no real support for the core running cost of museums.”

At the end of the financial year last April, the museum recorded a deficit of £911,374, down from £1,159,100 in 2022/23. This included the cost of the remaining building works associated with a £1.1 million refurbishment project which began in October 2022 and shut the museum for nine months.

In May last year it was announced that the museum was aiming to break even in the next three years, although now the target may have to be reassessed.

Mr O’Connor, who lives in Ancastle Green, said: “Genuinely, it has been a really good year. We're not there yet but we're getting there. We set ourselves three years to achieve that target, so it's good to see at an overall level that it is working.

“The original plan was to break even in 2026/2027. We think now it'll be around that or it will be 2027/2028 but certainly the direction of travel is looking good.

“We have one or two projects that we need to bring online before we can make a truly accurate prediction but certainly towards the end of that third year, we would expect us to be in that breakeven territory.”

Mr O’Connor said that the museum was performing well compared to this time last year, when the Thames Path being closed in January and February due to severe flooding.

He said: “Day-to-day we’re seeing business numbers are slightly up and it has been nice to just keep that footfall going all through the winter period.”

Mr O’Connor said that to increase visitor numbers and encourage repeat visits, there are plans to ramp up the number of events it was hosting and its galleries will be changed around, which will involve showcasing items currently stored off-site.

He said: “We have about 1,000 objects in storage, including several rowing boats and river boats. We have a collection of stuffed fish from the 19th century from one of the Hobbs of Henley ancestors and many, many other objects related to life in and around the river.

“We won’t have a perfectly interpreted story for each of those but we think it's really important that they're on display so that people can see for themselves. We want all of the major objects we have in our collection to be on display.”

Some of the changes will include moving the “Henley Story” exhibition, which tells the story of the town from prehistoric times through to today, into one of the main galleries and changing some of the display cases to become more space efficient.

Mr O’Connor said: “Our curatorial team are working on that at the moment and it should make it a more appealing and interesting gallery to walk around. We haven’t updated the galleries very frequently over the last 20 years, so this is a good chance for us to start that.”

Several temporary exhibitions the museum had hosted, such as the Space Vault, one of the UK’s largest private collections of space artefacts, and the Games at Henley, which showcased more than a century of the town’s sporting legacy, were successful.

In addition to encouraging more residents to visit the museum, Mr O’Connor said he was working with Henley Town Council to encourage tourist groups and was planning to attend an excursion show next month.

Mr O’Connor said that the museum had developed a new app in collaboration with media company Bloomberg, which provides a free digital guide and audio tours of the museum’s galleries.

He said: “That has been really successful. Anybody can come in with their phone and see all of the collection, listen to some narrated tours by our curators and find out about the stories behind some individual objects.”

As reported by the Henley Standard two weeks ago, the museum is now running its own café space on the ground floor, having taken it over from previous operator Velolife, which also runs cafés in Wargrave and Warren Row.

Mr O’Connor said: “We worked together for two months before we took it over officially on January 8. I know things are going well for them at Warren Row, so they particularly wanted to focus on that and all the cyclists that come and work with them and come and eat there.

“For us, it was a chance to really focus on the visitors we get here, most of which are young families and also those who are slightly older.

“What we’d also like to try and do is run it into the evenings and see what we can offer for the young people and parents who may want to get a pizza or something after school. We are always looking at and trying new ways to bring in visitors.”