Love letters to Lambeth's Threatened Libraries part 3: The Minet Library and Archive

Solid, functional, built to last: the Minet Library is not the sort of place that looks likely to take kindly to fashionable
notions of pop-up gyms and unstaffed libraries-lite….it's an archive, for heaven's sake!

However you arrive there, the Minet Library is always a surprise. Coming from the traffic-snarled grime of the A23 and Loughborough Road, it seems like an oasis of tranquillity, keeping an eye on the massive housing developments of past (Angell Town) and present decades (Oval Quarter) to either side.

Sat there in the middle of leafy Knatchbull Road, a street of fairly grand Victorian, Edwardian and later houses,  it has a strange crouching presence, with the outward appearance of a low-lying suburban redoubt. There's even what at a first looks like a drawbridge leading up to the entrance, which is in fact  a wheelchair access ramp.

That impression is perhaps not entirely misleading. The original Minet Library, built in the 1890s, was destroyed during aerial bombardment in 1940. This building, judging from old photos, was a neo-gothic affair with an octagonal reading room.

It was built at the expense of William Minet, the great-great-grandson of Huguenot immigrants to London who became major landowners in the Camberwell and Lambeth areas in the late 18th century.

At this point, I will quote from the wonderfully detailed  Myatt's Fields Park website:

"Minet Free Library and a parochial hall opposite St. James’ were…[William Minet's] bequests to the neighbourhood. William Minet was interested in the Co-operative Movement and the library was built by a company which he formed on co-operative lines.

"Myatt’s Fields Park was an integral part of the philanthropic projects undertaken by the Minet family for the estate. As Sir John Betjeman, who found the area ‘a strangely beautiful place’, put it in 1978, ‘Thank God for the Minet family’."

Have to agree with Sir John there…though Lambeth residents already knew the areas between those brutal trunk routes, the A3, A23, and A2, were beautiful, nothing strange about it.

Pre-war, the library was run jointly by Lambeth and Southwark boroughs. It also, then as now, had a dual function, being both a public lending library and the home of the local council archives.

Open door policy: the public are welcomed into the Lambeth Archive, and
have access to the same expert advice form staff as any academic
researchers

These, fortunately, were stored safely in a deep basement and survived the blitz.  The new library, built by Lambeth in the early 1950s, has that austere, brick-built solidity of the post-war era: functional rather than decorative, but admirable in its functionality.

It's saying, this time, we're here for everyone, and we're here to stay. As you enter, there's a large vestibule full of interesting things - and two big glazed entrance doors. One leads straight into the library, the other into the archive. Both are equally accessible to all. This is 1950s democracy in solid brick, wood and glass.

Strong, permanent: the library sits there, challenging by its presence the shiny architecture of the new Oval Quarter being thrown up a bit to the north. But we're entering a new age of austerity (for some)  and wealth (for others) and conflict, and the Minet's going to need all the help to can get, so it would seem - just at a time when it could in fact act as a hub for an even bigger community.

But, as we know the Minet is one of three libraries Lambeth is threatening to turn into gyms. Lambeth say the archive will stay in the Minet "for the time being".

Like all the other threatened libraries, the Minet has an active Friends group which has been keeping everyone informed on the council's moves, representing local interests at meetings, and which is now organising campaigns to challenge the threats to this institution, which remain, after months of protest, pretty much unchanged.

Yes, look how much goes on here:  is all this to be
be squeezed out to house some running
machines?

Friends of Minet Library are part of the Minet Hub which also represents the nearby Myatt's Fields Park and the Longfield Hall, a well-used community space which house a dance academy and much more, just two door up the road.

Lambeth made the Minet its official archive. Everything that has been documented in the government of this borough is there. There's an excellent account of the way this archive is run, and its value, by Ruth Waters on the Brixton Blog.

As we've already reported, the longer-term future for the building is far from safe. 

It's not a re-development prospect right now because of surrounding residential property, but that can change very quickly.

Meanwhile, I am stuck in the vestibule, looking at the amazing balsa-wood model of the future of Brixton, as seen by town planners in 1967. This table-top model is all that remains of the grandest, most radical redevelopment scheme in the borough's history, and it reminds us of that time, just before the Six Days War and the ensuing oil crises, when the car was king and every city was going to be modelled on Detroit or Birmingham.

Brixton as it might have been -  in 1967 the whole of central Brixton
was to be redeveloped as part of the inner-London orbital motorway
 scheme, and now this model in the Minet LIbrary is (nearly) all that's
left of it….

A six-lane inner South London orbital motorway flys over central Brixton, lands somewhere on Acre Lane and ploughs off through Clapham Common to the A3/South circular interchange near Wandsworth Bridge. That little stretch down to the river at Wandsworth Bridge was the only bit that was actually built in south west London, apart from the Coldharbour Lane barrier block, which was designed to insulate its residents from the worse impact of traffic speeding past their kitchen windows.

There are two groupings of slightly wonky 50-sotrey residential towers (eat your heart out, Nine Elms), built on the stacked threepenny bit model you can still see in a more modest form above East Croydon station.

And can just about see the notional aerial recreation centre, suspended on a gantry bridge above the motorway, just like one of those early service stations on the M1, such as Watford Gap. Just think, Brixton might have had the first glass-bottomed swimming pool in the UK, 50 years earlier than the one planned for the well-heeled residents of the future Battersea Power Station.

Poignant exhibits in the miniature Brixton Museum,
showing until December 8th in the foyer of the Minet Library

Just think…and then thank god for OPEC and the quick binning of all those road-building schemes. As a result we still have Brixton, rather than a zone 2 version of Croydon on this stretch of the Brighton road.

All this and I haven't even got into the library yet. Ok, but hang on over to the left there's another exhibit: the Brixton Museum, an art installation by Anchor&Magnet,  a space for "dialogue, reflection and exchange". It's only there for a few more days so get along to see it and contribute if you can.

Into the main library, and again it's a light, welcoming space, and it is being used by all age groups. Just like Tate SOuth Lambeth and Carnegie, this is a popular, busy public library, serving the community with print and digital media, advice and information, and maintaining spaces that used by so many community groups.

If you're feeling like you need some exercise after your
visit to the Minet Library and Archive, why not go for a
stroll in beautiful Myatt's Fields, two minute's walk
 down Knatchbull Road?

Check the various noticeboards to see just how much goes on here - it really is an amazing variety of activities. You only have to glance at the news pages and twitter feeds of the Friends of  Minet library to realise how important this library is to local residents, and how deeply felt the affection for this place is. You can't help feeling Lambeth council has taken on a bit more than it reckoned with, when you visit this  marvellous place.

And, if you're in need of a healthy workout after your visit, walk the 100 yards or so to Myatt's Fields, a park very carefully and sensitively restored by the council a few years ago. Here surely is the true healthy living centre of this part of Lambeth.

Why ruin a cherished library so that a few hundred of the thousands of local residents can build their muscles up to a point which will probably be difficult to sustain into their late middle age?

Was that a fair question to ask you, Lambeth Co-operative Council? Was it? Was it?

Is this a busy library, or what? Just where are all these activities going to go if - as proposed - Lambeth decides to install a GLL-run keep fit centre into this building…?

Transpontine: my new favourite south London blog

Am here to praise a not so buried treasure - Transpontine. Just a quick note - but heavens, I could write a ream or roomful of words about this blog.

It's transpontine - like trastevere or oltrarno or rive gauche, so blah, blah and on - but do note it is specifically south east London, and as a south west London resident I applaud that. SE kept flag flying long after SW capitulated, the crowds crossing yahoo bridge - Chelsea, Battersea, you know.

So, this one has the feel, the great feel of a sort of student mag from the 70s, but still being written by the same people now in their 30s or 40s or whatever:  better writers, more mature, funnier.

It's actually a rather grown up blog of the twenty-whatevers, which keeps filling me in on all those gigs back in the early 1990s that I so nearly went to and then failed to get to. And on all the great things that are happening just a 35 minute 37 bus ride from my front door, almost all of which I shall miss.

Especially stuff at The Venue, New Cross, and so on. But this does seem to be the blog that digs deeper than most….love it.

South London's east-west divide

North of the Thames, people seem to think of South London as one great undifferentiated blot of unpleasantness (with exceptions made for Greenwich and Dulwich, while Blackheath Village always was a minor southern outpost of Hampstead).

Anyone who lives, or has ever lived in a postcode beginning with 'S' will know how wrong this view is.

The east-west divide on the sunny side of the Thames is just as strong as the rivalries that can flare up between the benighted denizens of the W,  NW,  N and E zones.

And although there is no simple "S" postcode, there certainly is a central south London zone that has no interest in knowing what goers on either side of it. Central South London stretches from London Bridge to Vauxhall Bridge, and takes in Borough, Bermondsey, the Elephant, Kennington, Vauxhall and Stockwell, the zone tapering out in final southern glory at Brixton Hill.

Although Brixtons's codes are SW, it is just as much south London heartland as Lambeth Walk and Bermondsey Street.

Sticking strictly to inner London - roughly the same as zone 2 on the TfL map - you'd  have no trouble naming the adjoining South West and South East neighbourhoods.

SW - which of course shares a postcode prefix with some very posh neighbourhoods across the river - is simply Clapham, Battersea, Wandsworth, Balham, Putney. All of which suffer from their image as  being the not-quite-so-rich-bastards' alternatives to Fulham and Chelsea.

Similarly, for SE we have Camberwell, New Cross, Peckham, Deptford, Brockley and Lewisham. But these prickly places have no such shame, they do not need any reflected glory from north of the river.

So, what about all those other places? Tooting? That's the beginning of  outer south London, having more in common with Mitcham and Norbury.

Blackheath and Greenwich?  They are both distinctly different, they're not in the same game at all.

Blackheath, as already mentioned, is simply oh too nice to really be in the same borough as Lewisham, Eltham or Catford. Greenwich is a weird mix of historic royal Park, posh village (Crooms Hill etc)  and former naval base which also retains a hint of the scruffy Kentish estuarine resort.

Similarly, out in deep SW land, Richmond and Twickenham have more in common with the plump Thames Valley towns of Marlow or Henley than anything in London. Barnes, too, is truly Surrey-by-the-river.

So let's get back to the core SE and SW areas. What's the big difference?

The first, clinching factor is landscape. South East London is built on a range of hills - seven of them, just like Rome! - which lap like great waves towards the city. Rising above Brixton and its own hill, we have Tulse Hill, Herne Hill, Denmark Hill, Champions Hill, Knights Hill. Moving east again, Telegraph Hill, then further south, Stratham Hill, Gispy Hill, Forest Hill.

Overlooking Greenwich - providing the best view of London anywhere - we have the park and  Shooters Hill. On the southern horizon, the Sydenham hills of Crystal Palace with their twin TV towers.

SW, by contrast, is an unudulating plateau falling into marshland. Clapham, Wandsworth and Wimbledon commons are relatively flat. Lavender Hill is a gentle bump in the road. Putney has a hill, but it's mostly tarmac and the view from the top is just not up to the amazing views you get in south east London. Wimbledon has some mild hills but they tend to be associated with tennis players.

The topogrpahy means that SE London's parks are all far more interesting: contrast Greenwich Park, Brockwell Park, or Dulwich woods with the dull commons of SW4 and SW11. OK Richmond Park is beautiful but that's too far out to count.


The second big difference is public transport. SW has tube lines, SE does not. But SE now has the DLR as far as Lewisham and London Overground/East London line linking it with the great orbital movement of rail's version of the M25.

It's clear that SW's tube lines are actually the bane of its life - that hideous tract of the Northern Line from Kennington down to Morden is what attracted all the overpaid city workers to the area.

The next difference - wealth. Traditionally SW was richer, maybe because most of the money in Kensington and Chelsea tended to leach across the river to the nearest adjacent boroughs and then out down the A3 into the stockbroker belt.

But this is to oversimplify. Look at the architecture: by far the finest suburban villas of the 19th century were in SE postcodes. There's no better street of grand domestic architecture in all of London than Camberwell Grove.  The beautiful houses surrounding Blackheath and Greenwich parks are more elegant than any of that brash stuff in NW3.

Those were the days when the most successful actors and writers headed for the wooded slopes of south east London to escape the stinking wen.

The miserable clerk, meanwhile, were shunted towards the endless Victorian terraces of Clapham and Battersea. Comforting as these now seem,  they are pinched in comparison, and cynically repetitive.

Arts and entertainments is the next category, and again SE sweeps the board. Each of the centres - even including New Cross and Peckham - has internationally famous music and art venues, there's Horniman's Museum and the Dulwich art gallery, Depford's Laban Dance centre, Goldsmith's, and the joys of Camberwell.

Overall, you have to admit that SE London is the victor here: it always had the edge, to be honest.
After those vital three decades in the darkness, it has again been rising and shows no signs of falling away.  Peckham the new Dalston, etc.

Whereas SW is stale, saturated, and over-populated with the sort of recently-young couples with small kids who make you want to stay well away from all pubs on any day there's a big "rugger" game, and well away from all public spaces when the sun shines. Sorry, Clapham, but you blew it all away in about 1980 with the arrival of Foxtons and their yuppie clientele.

My advice - do the estate agent's old trick. Ditch the name, Clapham, replace it with "West Brixton".

Oh, and the last word on all this: the word is Death. We all die and need somewhere for our bodies or ashes to rest. SE London has two of London's "magnificent seven" Victorian cemeteries - Nunhead and West Norwood.  SW has none.