The Framers Forum

The Cotswolds branch of the Fine Art Trade Guild will be holding its next Branch Meeting on Thursday 22nd September 2011 . The proceedings will begin from 6.30 pm with a speaker start time of 7 pm and the venue is the meeting room upstairs at ‘The Bull At Theale’ http://thebullattheale.co.uk/ | 41 High Street | Theale | Berkshire | RG7 5AH | Tel. 0118 9303478. The venue is conveniently two minutes from Junction 12 of the M4 near Reading, Berkshire

The guest speaker for the evening is Simon Davies from Arqadia. During the evening he will be displaying, discussing and demonstrating the Conservation by Design range. Conservation by Design provides a comprehensive range of conservation storage and display products including furniture, showcases acid-free boxes, museum boards and specialist papers, boards and materials. Are you using the correct products for your artwork? Come and find out!!

Guild members, from the Cotswolds area and perhaps further afield, are invited to attend and support this event. If you're not a member but would like to join us for this event please contact me or Cath for a personal invitation. This promises to be an interesting and varied evening including a question and answer session to allow you to put your burning questions to our expert guests. Refreshments may be available during the course of the evening.

It would help with the planning if it is known who will be attending, so if you are interested in coming along please contact the Cotswolds Regional Organiser Cath on 0750 777 4017 or email cath@emeraldframes.com by Friday 16 September 2011.

Could someone explain the reason why the Cotswold branch meeting is being held near Reading? Cotswolds branch members in my memory of the branch came from places such as Cheltenham - Gloucester - Stow on the Wold etc. Central London to Reading is less distance. Is the fact that the FATG need to hold events so far away from the descriptive area (Cotswolds) down to branch mergers - Few members in the descriptive area - The branch master likes that pub - Its close to London - Its where the pin landed?

I know that in the past its been held in Cirencester - for most of the attendees at the time it was possibly a 30 mile Journey - a few came from as far as Newbury - 40 or so miles. Gloucester to Theale 70 80 miles depending on the route you choose. Wandsworth to Theale about 40 miles - does that give you some relevance to my question? Perhaps it should have been the venue for the London Branch.

So that will mean over 100 miles round trip for almost every member based in the Cotswolds and the proceedings will start at 6.30 for 7.00pm.

You can't drive all that fast on most Cotswolds roads, so who's gonna bother going, if they can't get there on time?

For as long as I've worked at the Guild the Cotwolds Branch has included Berkshire, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. The fact that meetings were almost exclusively in Gloucestershire in the past was down to the location of the Branch Masters at that time and didn't always suit other Cotwolds members.
Cath has volunteered to act as Regional Organiser and set up this event for the benefit of those in the industry. It seems a bit snide to me to criticise her choice of location on this forum when she's courteously extended the invite to you all as well.
Theale is a convenient location for her and many other members of the Cotswolds branch, as well as having good transport links being very near M4.
There is room under the new branch structure to have more than one Regional Organiser in a Branch - if there is a Guild member reading this who would like to volunteer for the position in the west of the region I'm sure Cath would support you.
Distance to the office (which is in Fulham, incidentally) has no bearing - meetings are organised by members on the ground.

Louise - It would seem that your slightly aggressive response fails to indicate that you have paid any thought to what must be a fairly big stumbling block for potential members. Branch events are a crucial part of being a member - you may have been a little wiser to have acknowledged the problems of large branch areas and indicate that you would like to see smaller branches with branch masters equally as keen as Cath to hold local events. I apologise to Cath if she feels I was being snide - I would be the first to applaud her efforts and wish her well.

BUT the Guild has acknowledged this problem and has made changes to its branch structure to allow for more than one organiser per region as per my post

Louise Hay wrote:There is room under the new branch structure to have more than one Regional Organiser in a Branch - if there is a Guild member reading this who would like to volunteer for the position in the west of the region etc

This can only work though if someone steps up to volunteer.
Max's vision is for a team of Regional Organisers in each area working together to divide the work and get better geographic spread, especially in larger regions like Cotswolds and Anglia. Wessex has been split in two as well - we have a fantastic pair of organisers at one end of the region and no-one for the western end, which is a shame.

Louise - I apologise as that post passed me by.

It is all too easy when posting and working to miss the gist of the reply - had I done so properly I would have seen your explanation - sorry.

Markw, You were wrong and you apologised, you even explained how it came about.

There are lots of forums out there where that would never happen.

What a great place this is!

Thanks Mark

Lets's hope more volunteers come forward to organise events in all regions - if we have a couple of people per region they only need organise one event a year each AND we could get the geographic spread across the regions