Loving Lambeth's libraries, part 4: rising above it all at the Upper Norwood Joint Library

On the edge of the abyss:  Upper Norwood Joint Library enjoys a suitably lofty view of the vanity-towers and money-pots of the City of London

Let's pull the plug on another non-series of blog entries by visiting a library that is definitely in Lambeth  - and very much part of the Save Lambeth Libraries campaign - but which is not entirely of Lambeth.

The destination is Upper Norwood Joint Library, 'joint' because it is, uniquely in the UK, funded by two local authorities, Lambeth and Croydon Boroughs, but independent of both.

It has been this way for all 115 years of its existence, and the proud spirit of independence and difference is palpable as soon as you enter the Victorian red-brick building, with that great panoramic view of London as a backdrop.

It's at the far southern boundary of  the borough, the point where Lambeth meets the similarly extended fingers of Southwark, Lewisham, Bromley and Croydon.


To get here we have to trek across the foothills of  Brixton, Streatham, Tulse and Herne Hills, then rise again above West Norwood and onward again to the greater slope of Gipsy Hill, and still ascending, up Westow Hill  to the edge of plateau, with its dizzying views across south London and the towers of the City. Apparently we are only 380 feet above sea level but it feels a great deal more.

From across the street, the library seems to be perched on the edge of an abyss, and it's true we're not far from the edge of the known world here. You find  the last stop for London bus routes 322 and 137, and then this drop away into the blue hills of Surrey and Kent….a different world.

An old poster by the entrance explains it all:

"Upper Norwood and Crystal Palace
Exceptionally healthy because of the prevailing wind from the coast
380 feet above Thames therefore out of the valley of fogs..."

You get the feeling people up here are a bit hardier, hill-folk with bigger lungs and sturdier legs…but they are very friendly….

This area has a romantic name, in memory of the palace of glass which once stood here, until one evening in 1936 it caught fire and burned so bright it lit up London, pre-empting the Blitz by four years. The great Paxton building continued burning so fiercely that it singed the sky. The footprint of that building is still there to this day, a massive patch of windswept grass with a few damaged statues, low walls and wide flights of steps remaining as the only solid evidence of what was once there.

If you want to know more about the Crystal Palace, there's no better place to do so than this library, which holds a unique collection of books, documents and cuttings on the subject.

But it also has specialist collections on various other aspects of local history, including the Victorian-era   poet, Chartist and spiritualist Gerald Massey (born in Tring, Herts, died South Norwood Hill, 1907).

It's a truly delightful building, with the bustling lending library downstairs and light, airy, quiet reading room and reference library on the first floor. The basement used to house a reserve collection of classic literature: it's not entirely clear if that's still there, as the library now rents out part of that space as a meeting room and event space.

It almost goes without saying that this library runs an incredibly full programme of activities for the whole range of community groups. It's also - perhaps sadly - true that it has been fighting plans for its abolition much longer than most. Because of its unusual constitution, the library has been at the receiving end of cuts programmes from both Croydon and Lambeth councils for much of the past decade. And as a result of this a strong and active campaign group has developed to protect what is clearly an invaluable and irreplaceable community resource.

In 2012 this group of supporters decided to create a charity with the aim of taking the library into the control of its community. As you can read on its website, the resulting Upper Norwood Library Trust is still working energetically towards this aim, as well as playing a big role in the wider campaign to fight library cuts nationally and locally.

At this point on the long haul up Gipsy Hill, you turn and look back and there's the beating heart of global capitalism.

As with so many threatened public libraries, one of the biggest problems is to secure long-term funding to pay the salaries of professional library staff. Isn't it odd. can you imagine the uproar if someone tried to run a gym without properly qualified trainers, physios and so on?

Meanwhile, the harsh reality is that Lambeth's plans to close or re-purpose half of the borough's 10 libraries are still on track. The massive protests of the past year, reaching some sort of climax in November, have not deflected the clique of councillors who seem to be staking their professional reputations on the plans to convert libraries into gyms run by GLL (Greenwich Leisure Limited).

On Christmas Eve,  a tweet from Zezi Ifore reminded us that there were just 100 days left to change their minds…

And now, with only 91 days left, anyone who likes using their local libraries in Lambeth needs to go to the Defend the 10 website for advice on how to resist this bad idea.

Note to Self: yeah, Croydon is extremely strange, quite sexy, and oddly beautiful

Croydon, south London's Alphaville, former city of the future, reflected in the windows of Croydon Art and Technology College in about 1970. And now it's about to happen all over again….

Lovely to read that the Stockwell bard, Will Self, has discovered the suburbs of my youth.

According to an article in  the Evening Standard, Mr Self is encouraging Londoners to re-connect with the outer suburbs, in his latest role as a patron of something called Doughnut: The Outer London Festival, which takes place at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich on Saturday 5 September.

Of course Greenwich is almost as far from central London as Croydon, and yet standing on the hill there surveying the grandeur of its naval past and the  flashy excesses of  Canary Wharf etc across the water, you feel you are right in one of the ventricles of London's dirty old heart.

It's great to hear that Mr Self has discovered the pleasures of  Croydon and the verdant hills of the North Downs beyond. I am also thrilled that he believes outer suburbs such as these "heave and pullulate with sexiness".

I was brought up in an area of South Croydon, known as Purley Oaks. Oddly enough the only wooded area near us was called Purley Beeches. But the trees were real and beautiful, and within a 30 minute walk from our house were the open hills of Riddlesdown and  Kenley, or the thick woods of Shirley and Croham Hurst.

I think these were all useful locations for necessarily alfresco sex, but I cannot produce any evidence for my belief. Or nothing that I am prepared to share here.

In the mid-60s, we young teenagers did not appreciate the fact that we lived in a golden age. We certainly did not appreciate the fact that our neighbourhood gave us easy access, both to the fleshpots of central London, and the healing hills and open country of the Surrey-Kent borders, the downs and the weald.

But we used these amenities very well, and generally enjoyed them without thought, until….well, I was only about 14 when I became aware that my area bore a deep social stigma, that persists to this day.

Even in 1968, Croydon had a poor reputation. It was still in the throes of a complete change of image, from rather stuffy north Surrey commuter town to a new London Borough. Many on the new council dreamt of Croydon playing leading part in Tony Benn's white-hot technology revolution. It would be modern, mod, and even a wee bit swinging, hanging on to swinging coat-tails of London. It started to build what it hoped would be the hottest example of a modern commercial centre.

Buildings we then though of as skyscrpaers went up: the 22-storey Nestlé building seemed ridiculously tall and glamorous.

A big swathe of the Victorian town centre was bulldozed to make way for a four-lane underpass, just like the ones in Leeds or Birmingham. There was a flyover under construction. We would be the motor-city of south London.

And then the cream on the cake - the Fairfield Halls complex, council-owned, better acoustics than most of central London's concert halls, and the site of my musical education. Aged 10 I was taken by my mum to see Duke Ellington at the then-new hall and never fully recovered. I was smitten, hard bitten by his impossibly elegant jazz - here in Croydon, of all places!

Up to our teen years we had unparalleled freedoms. We walked or cycled alone or in gangs around vast areas of north surrey and south London. We took buses and trains, we roamed through bomb sites and ruined buildings, we collected the tail-fins and cartridge cases from 1940s aerial bombardments, we drove beaten-up scoters and mopeds abandoned by our elder brothers on the crumbling runway of recently de-commissioned Croydon airport.

We nicked cigarettes, gin and Cinzano from our parents' drinks canbinets and monopolised their radiograms (or in expectional cases, their hi-fi systems) for our first proper parties.

We had so much freedom - too much, of course there were many casualties - but we also din't have much money, and the things we wanted cost too much.

We were just like kids of 12 to 16 everywhere else in Britain in 1965, 66 and the watershed year for me - 1967.

That year the next lot of new drugs reached the outer suburbs  and it all changed again. We grew our hair long and died our clothes pink and purple. We looked for interesting things to smoke. We started buying the "underground press", mainly Oz and IT (International Times).

I remember reading with shame and anger a snooty review in IT of an Incredible String Band concert at the Fairfield Hall, written by some stoned Ladbroke Grove wit, praising the music but being rather distressed to see "Croydon's lumpy hippies" in the audience.

One of those phrases that gets branded onto one's soul. I like to think of that phrase and then think of Kate Moss, and other less than lumpy products of this borough.

That was the sort of attitude that gave so much force to the 1976 punk movement that burst out of the London suburbs - Croydon and (more famously) neighbouring Bromley producing  many of that first wave. All part of the deep poetry of the outer suburbs that Mr Self recognises.

Punk was our chance to get back at those posh north London kids who'd all got picked to edit the 1969 "Schoolkids' Oz" - what a great career move that was for some of them. Even at the advanced age of 21, many of us took to the teenage punk scene with too much enthusiam, hoping no-one in the crowd at the Greyhound recognised us as the poltroons who were wearing loon pants and tie dies a year earlier.

That was Croydon, then. It might have been Barnet or Basildon or Headingley or any other small town on the edge of big city, a dormitory area for what in those days were called the lower middle classes, with pockets of working class (the council estates) and the occasional wealthier types (but they tended to live in bigger houses out in Shirley).

Yes, I can see why he finds it strange. All those lives being lived without any reference to the edicts of the metropolitan elite, yet only a 20 minute train ride away from them. All that suburban business - the vice, the good works, the charities, the hobbies, the religions.

Is it really going to be sexy again? Even in the 60s its supposed sexiness was soon seen through. Someone likened it to Canberra, Australia's apparently deadly dull capital.

Still, if Will Self says so, I'm not going to argue. I like his novels,  but I love his journalism, his wonderfully lugubrious commentary on the world - he's splendidly multi-faceted. In one facet you might see a dark echo of JG Ballard, in another a bit of Howard Jacobson, a glint of Iain Sinclair over there...and then the one I really appreciate most, where he seems to channel the wry side of Clive James….. oh how we need that sort of intelligence in our media.

There's a slot on Radio 4 after Any Questions, with a rotating cast of opinionated voices. Clive James did it for a while, and he was always the best by miles. I tune in, waiting nervously to hear who's on tonight. If it's WIll Self I cheer, inwardly at least, and drop everything to listen. If it's any of the others, I  groan and go to another station.

So I'm going to go to Greenwich tomorrow and hope to find out exactly why he has such a high opinion of the suburbs of my youth.