Bagpuss, Freddie Mercury’s fake leather trousers and Henry VIII’s football boots would all be in a much worse state without a British group of conservation experts.

Now the Textile Conservation Centre, which has restored thousands of historically significant bits of fabric and trained about half the leading textile conservators in the world, faces becoming history itself.

The centre at the University of Southampton is to shut its doors on October 31. The university, which houses the centre on its School of Art campus in Winchester, gave warning two years ago that it could no longer afford to support it after 2009. It hoped then that an alternative home could be found but a proposed deal with the University of Oxford has fallen through.

Peter Longman, deputy chairman of the foundation that owns the centre, said that the staff, some of the most respected conservators in the heritage world, will now all be made redundant on November 1. Their expertise built up over more than 30 years will be “scattered to the winds”. Like darts, ceremonial pageantry and whisky distilling, textile conservation is one of those specialist fields in which Britain still leads the world. The centre’s predicament has provoked international outrage among museum professionals and conservation experts.

Jerry Podany, president of the International Institute of Conservation, called it “a betrayal of trust” that would damage the world's textile heritage.

Sandra Smith, head of conservation at the Victoria and Albert Museum, called it shocking and catastrophic. The university says that the decision was taken “with great reluctance” but that the high costs of running the school meant that “the cross-subsidy from other areas of academic endeavour can no longer be justified”.

The centre’s reputation is founded on the professional training that it offers and its commercial research arm. Its graduates dominate a vital niche of the heritage world. “If you go into any major museum in the world, from the Getty Institute to the British Museum, half the trained textile conservators have come from the Textile Conservation Centre,” Mr Longman said. The only serious competition in Europe comes from Berne, the Swiss capital.

The Textile Conservation Centre (TCC) is also a pioneer in textile research and has done work for most important British museums and many overseas. The repertoire ranges from ancient fabrics found in Pharaohs’ tombs to modern synthetics, such as a pair of Mercury’s skin-tight red trousers, which looked like leather but were actually cotton coated in polyurethane.Samuel Jones, who wrote a report on Britain’s conservation industry for the Demos think-tank last year, said that the TCC’s fate was symptomatic of a worldwide threat to conservation training. He said:“It’s about the importance of caring for things that we value. We need to think: what are we not going to have in the future? What if we don’t have people to look after things like the Mary Rose or the Tower of London?”

PRESERVATION PROJECTS

— Specialists at the Textile Conservation Centre have taken on a variety of projects: restoring the bullet-riddled topsail of Nelson’s ship Victory, repairing two suits of armour for the Wallace Collection and looking after a favourite children’s television character, Bagpuss.

— Bagpuss was analysed using infrared spectrometry as part of a research project on television puppets of the Sixties and Seventies. The conservators discovered that the much-loved saggy old cloth cat’s fur was protecting his foam stuffing from degradation and they prescribed a regime for his care.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010