A museum for the Emergency Services?

Reading this morning that the hanger sized grey monolith that will become the media centre for the Olympic games in 2012 faces an uncertain future got me pondering an idea I had some time ago.

On my visit to the excellent – if nigh on impossible for the average person to visit – London Fire Brigade Museum, I pondered why we don’t have a museum dedicated to the emergency services.

There have been various attempts to close down the Fire Brigade Museum, or modernise it – but the lack of visitors makes the tax payer funded cost difficult to justify. Equally, while quite interesting, a fairly small museum about Fire Engines and memorabilia would struggle as a commercial operation.

There is a newish and very small police museum, plus the infamous Black Museum in Scotland Yard – plus another private visit only City of London Police museum.

In my days with the St Johns Ambulance, we had various heritage ambulances dotted around the place, and there is a collection of hospital museums around London.

What could be better than to bring them all together into one location – or at least, enough of them to create a “destination venue”, much in the same way that the Transport Museum has become a key destination for buses and trains in the centre of London?

After all, what could be a better venue for a large collection of huge fire engines, ambulances and police vehicles than a massive, empty warehouse building – which is also remarkably close to lots of train services from Central London? Add in the ability to reuse the rooms for all the smaller displays and you might just have a museum building just waiting to be used.

I bet the local shopping centre would be delighted to have a potentially major tourist attraction on its doorstep.

I would download the briefing document from the London 2012 legacy website to have a read and ponder deep thoughts, but despite my moderate experience in hunting down RFI documents on government websites, I have been utterly unable to find it. Maybe that is part of the problem with finding a tenant?