The Museum will amplify our work to create an engaged, resilient community with strong social networks and more fruitful commercial relationships. It will reflect what our locality was like in the past, but help envision what it might be like in the future.

Surbiton has numerous vacant shops on parades suffering from poor environment and low footfall. But we will challenge any sense there is inevitable decline and use the energy and imagination of the broadest community to deliver a vision to revitalise these areas.

Our networks already deliver a busy calendar of events, and our work has helped build a sense of place that is being celebrated with pride. But suburbs like Surbiton face distinctive challenges to future growth as high commuter populations spend limited time shopping or socialising locally.

We want to overcome these obstacles by expanding engagement and developing a new vision that shapes a more positive, inclusive future for Surbiton’s communities and local businesses.

What we'll deliver:

• A platform for local collectives like Made in Surbiton and This is Brighton Road to encourage sustainability
• Capitalise on 5 years of community engagement, recruiting 50 more volunteer activists
• Celebrate the community with a place to publicise our past, celebrate our present and envision a potential future
• Enable greater engagement and involvement with Kingston University’s Sustainable Design Masters Degree Course
• Map the requirements of start up businesses that want to establish themselves in the area, feeding into council plans
• Train 3 new Tour Guides to lead "Surbiton Fact & Fiction" trails
• Allow UCL to study local behaviour, as part of Anthropology of the High Street, and share outcomes with stakeholders
• Establish management group to provide leadership and develop an 'exit strategy' to ensure future sustainability
• Offer a location and support for local schools to visit and to hear, create and tell local stories about ‘their place’
• Provide a base for the new start up businesses to enable them to strengthen their offer and share local knowledge
• Provide a meeting and thinking space to enable more people to become involved in creating activity in the town
• Provide a platform for the Kingston Pound project and a base for the organisation of events and activities
• Support the 2015 launch of emerging projects, such as 'Casserole' and 'Senior Isolation'
• Work with our partners to build wide scale awareness of the project in the area

Why it's a great idea:

The Museum will capitalise on five years of community engagement, to open up much needed discussion about the future prospects of some of the more challenging parts of our neighbourhood, bringing people together to develop and direct changes that make a real difference.

Ultimately, the result will be a distinctive, welcoming and vibrant high street that local people have helped to create. A street with a diverse community of local businesses that far more effectively serves the community with what it needs and wants.

We will be using and upgrading a vacant premises to provide a safe environment for local people to explore personal hopes and ambitions with minimal risk. It will encourage experimentation and research, and open up access to technical or specialist support and non-judgemental encouragement and guidance.

It will be a space for the community to learn about its past, celebrate its present and envision the kind of future it would want to inherit.

Steps to get it done:

• As we're keen for The Museum to be a permanent feature in Surbiton, we'll be seeking ongoing funding during the project
• We'll agree with our partners what evidence we'll be using for our plans and the baseline for our evaluation measures
• We'll be evaluating as we go, and plan to share learning at a conference / seminar for stakeholders
• We'll identify suitable premises to become The Museum, from the candidate vacant shops on the Brighton Road
• We'll put a management team and our network of volunteers and partners in place, recruiting more as we progress
• When we've finalised our community and stakeholder engagement programme, we'll publicly launch The Museum of Futures
• Having occupied the premises, we'll be busy preparing it for use, and roll out our wider engagement programme

We have assembled a group of partners that have already informed the project. They represent a wide range of both large and small organisations - business, academic, voluntary and not for profit - and our success will in part depend on our fruitful relationship with this diverse group:
- Kingston Council
- Kingston University
- University College London, Anthropology Department
- Made in Surbiton - collective of local makers and producers
- Surbiton Business Community
- Maple Works - local workspace and virtual office for freelancers and start-ups
- Creative Youth - charity enabling young people to realise their potential through the arts
- The Kingston Pound - community currency project
- Future Mellon - art research project