The future of Bradford's showpiece Transperience hangs in the balance. Nick Oldham looks at the background to the troubled tourist attraction.

When administrators started planning a re-launch of Bradford's beleaguered Transperience leisure park last year they were given a gloomy warning.

It came from a spokesman for the highly successful National Tramway Museum at Matlock, in Derbyshire.

"Transperience needs to look carefully at itself," she said. "If they bungle the reopening, they could be in dire straits very soon."

Twelve months later her words have proved to be prophetic. The administrators, Coopers & Lybrand, have just announced that Transperience - with debts of about £1 million - will not open in the same format when it is bought by one of the three prospective purchasers they are currently in negotiation with.

The £11.5 million museum opened in a blaze of glory by the West Yorkshire Transport Museum Trust in July, 1995, at Low Moor amid predictions it would attract up to 200,000 people in its first year.

But 12 months later less than half that number had paid a visit to the site and redundancies followed, including chief executive Mike Haynes and marketing manager Jayne Tyrrell.

She has no doubts about the reason it failed - a reason which is held by others.

"At the end of the day you can't expect people to come to a place if they don't know about it - and it takes money to tell them," she said.

"I was brought in six months before it opened - which is far too late anyway - and I expected a budget of £1 million to do a job of this size. I got about £150,000, which is a drop in the ocean.

"They had spent all the money making it wonderful but they didn't leave enough to market it - it was all done on a shoestring.

"We did advertise on television and radio and in the newspapers but with nothing like the frequency and size we should have done. You have to keeping hitting people again and again with big adverts when you are marketing a new product, and that costs." too few leaflets were sent out to tourist information centres, she said.

"The other big problem we had was that it was such a diverse attraction - it was difficult to pick a sales pitch because there was so much there."

Her assessment is one shared by Bradford South MP Gerry Sutcliffe, who at the museum's planning stage in the late eighties was deputy leader of Bradford Council and chairman of the property issues select committee, which has heavily involved in the project.

"I don't think there were any problems in terms of quality - what was missing was the marketing to attract more people.

"Where I think they went wrong was that the marketing and public relations was not as strong as it should have been in terms of bringing people to the museum," he said. "There was a lack of a strong marketing strategy.

"The other problem, I think, was that the prices were a bit on the high side.

"It did get off the ground - 100,000 people is not to be sneered at. But it never seemed to be able to catch the imagination - and that's the sadness of it."

Owen Claxton, Coopers & Lybrand business recovery and insolvency department manager, said the administrators had struggled very hard to see how it could get Transperience to work but it had become clear that it could not continue in its present format.

"It hasn't attracted the visiting public," he said.

"It had no unique selling point to draw the crowds and only those with a particular interest in buses or trams would visit the museum.

"It was only ever going to make money from having a large visiting public and with a number of attractions in the area, particularly for children, such as Eureka! and the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, it wasn't able to compete."

He admitted that, in hindsight, Transperience was ill-fated from the start for those very reasons.

But he was reluctant to dismiss it as a waste of taxpayers' money because the infrastructure that had been created to serve the site could still be used for employment purposes.

He said two of the firms bidding for the site were interested in incorporating parts of the Transperience museum into their plans for the site, which included introducing added features.

A third potential buyer wants to abandon the museum and redevelop the site for industrial use.

"We are at a fairly advanced stage with a couple of the parties and we hope to exchange within the next month, primarily to pay back creditors who are owed money by the trust," he said.

"We will be favouring the bid that can get the creditors' money back to them the quickest."

The future of the artefacts and exhibits at the park is also in doubt. If the sale of the land did not cover the costs of the creditors, then assets owned by the trust would have to be sold off.

At the time the down-scaling was announced in the T&A in September last year, general manager Paul Griffiths said: " At the time it was a good idea and it has been attracting 40,000 to 60,000 people a year, but it was not enough."

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