Your point about other, under-funded museums is a good one. (One of the comments on the Telegraph site pretty much implied that Bentley Priory was more deserving of Lottery money than the Mary Rose — it being a mouldy old pile of timber and all. What a pillock. Of course, money spent on the Mary Rose is money not being spent on other museums …) One point I didn’t make was that it’s not like there aren’t plenty of other museums and memorials devoted to the RAF/aviation/etc anyway. That’s why I tried to think of a way to make a Bentley Priory museum different from the others. I don’t see a lot of point in having a museum there just for the sake of having a museum. (An interactive filter room would be very cool though — you could also have observers watching simulated raids come in over the coast, trying to estimate their numbers etc and reporting that to the filter room, and other kids watching oscilloscopes at a simulated CH station … though that last would probably have to be simplified greatly, of course. Then at the end reveal the ‘true’ raid strength and see how close they got.)

“To Whose Gods
.
[In which conservation, running out of control, threatens to break the thread of history.]

Man has raised the pyramids alone
Has mountains through his efforts and endeavours overthrown
With pain strength and discipline his deities outgrown
And carved his initials on their stones

Let the earth move the monuments and mounds
Let acid rain eradicate and the rolling oceans pound
What can never last forever let in time be broken down
And let history cast the ruins underground

Of the stone circles fallen and decayed
Let quarrymen and masons come and take the bones away
Ship them out from railheads a thousand tons a day
And let no trace or memory remain

To new skies the wire towers reach
In factories in railway yards and iron foundries
At Cambois power station lying smouldering by the sea
And to new Gods let these cathedrals be

And when the time capsule opens on our age
Will a future generation stand bewildered and amazed
Among the brick stacks cooling towers and masonry remains
And ask to whose Gods were these cathedrals raised?”

Me, I spend a chunk of my professional life trying to help out under-funded museums. There’s only a finite amount of money that can ever go towards them. So I incline towards ripping out Dowding’s office and the filter room, and reconstructing them at Hendon.

The filter room would be a way cool hands-on destination for schoolkids – set it up with replica kit, give them all historical roles, then get them to re-enact Adlertag. Teamwork, er ‘citizenship skills’, and historical understanding would all benefit.

PS Lose the BoB, lose the war? Nah. Actually, losing the BoB might have helped to precipitate Sealion, AKA: “the destruction of the Kreigmarine and the Luftwaffe”.