Save Lambeth Libraries march defies lousy weather and crazy policies: ALL TEN libraries must be defended!

Can you hear us, Lambeth Council? Can you read? Save Lambeth Libraries marchers outside Tate South Lambeth Library, Saturday March 5 2016.

"No ifs!  No buts!  No Lambeth Library Cuts!"

It was the same chant, on a march with many of the same people, but also plenty of new people, on the same route - from the Central Brixton Tate Library in Windrush Square, to the Tate South Lambeth Library in Vauxhall - for the same cause - as the first Save Lambeth Libraries march back in November.

The weather was even worse today - just as wet and even colder than on that autumn day - but the emotional climate was different. We're less than a month away from the proposed closure of two of the

Best banner of the day? Says it all, really.

borough's best-loved libraries, and despite an 11th hour U-turn on the plans for Tate South Lambeth and Upper Norwood Libraries, the "bookish gym" madness is still very much what Lambeth intends to push through at Herne Hill's Carnegie and the Minet Library on the Brixton-Camberwell border.

We've had four months of protests and action in between, in an imaginative and well orchestrated campaign, but a campaign which for a lot of the time seemed to be meeting a solid grey wall of indifference at the level of Lambeth council.

At some of the meetings, you actually got the feeling they were sniggering at us for our audacity in using time-honoured democratic protest techniques in response to their newish-Labourish cost-cutting Culture 2020 policy and its follow-up, the proposal to turn three branch libraries into fitness or "Healthy Living" centres with a few books, PCs and wi-fi but no trained library staff.

That is, until yesterday, when (somewhat coincidentally? oh surely not!) a partial climbdown, a semi-U-turn was allowed to slip out. As reported so swiftly on the always excellent Brixton Buzz site, Councillor Jane Edbrooke has decided to spare Tate South Lambeth library from the immediate indignity of having its books and staff replaced by gym equipment.

However, the plan to do just this at the wonderful Carnegie and Minet libraries remains - which was why today's protest was so moving. It was all about solidarity, and the overwhelming message was that Lambeth has 10 libraries - that's not enough perhaps, but we have 10 and we're not going to lose even one of those – particularly not to what has now been described as one of the most crackpot schemes in British local government this century.

Yes, a very good point, libraries do need trained staff. Under Lambeth's
plan, there'd be no full-time professional  librarians at the proposed
'bookish-gyms' to be run by Greenwich Leisure Ltd at the Minet and
Carnegie Libraries

It was great that people from the semi-reprieved Tate South Lambeth and Upper Norwood libraries were there on the march to make clear that they were still part of the campaign.

It was great that, again, there were people from Lewisham, Barnet and Wandsworth libraries voicing their support, and calling for a London-wide or nation-wide save libraries campaign to grow out this grassroots movement.

It was good to see local author Will Self (and his dog) telling us not to get too hung up on the nostalgic joy of books , but to protect the spaces that libraries occupy and the access to information that they offer. He made the obvious link between library closures and gentrification, too - though I think the people who will be snapping up those £1m + flats in the Oval Quarter, Brixton, and Vauxhall will be going to much snazzier gyms than those likely to be offered by GLL.

The real point of the whole events was best made by two people - Laura Swaffield, who has been the lynchpin of this whole campaign since it started (well, in truth that's years ago, as Lambeth has often tried to chip away th eLibrary service when budgets are not balancing, it's easy meat).

She made the point, one that cannot be repeated often enough, that these libraries are - morally speaking at least - not the council's to muck around with. They were all given to the community, not the council, by their various benefactors (yes, see how an earlier generation of corporate monsters gained immortality, the Tates and Carnegies).

That's the truth behind the slogan: "Don't steal our libraries!"

Of course Lambeth's lawyers have had no trouble in dealing with that little inconvenience.

The other great speaker was the chair of the Friends of the Carnegie Library in Herne Hill, Jeffery Doorn. He spoke with passion but also  great precision about what this library does for its community.

The notion of this incredibly popular place (busiest children's library in the borough) being turned into a sort of third-rate gym is shocking. It seems amazing that the very people whose well-paid job it is to protect and improve local amenities are blind to this. The whole building screams, Library! Books! Reading! Scholarship! Learning! Stories! Imagination! Soul!

(To get a really good taste of the place, please check out the short video Save Carnegie Library by Kaatje Jones on YouTube).

It really does look like people are going to have to take direct action to stop this place being ransacked or desecrated on April 1.

That was again the shocking realisation - that the ultimate nonsense everyone has been so energetically trying to avoid - not just by protesting but by offering sensible, worked-though alternatives - is now very unlikely to be stopped. It's not actually the money any more. It's more that too many political careers are at stake.

It was a foul day but a beautiful event, and thanks again to all the brilliant people of the Save Lambeth Libraries and Defend the Ten campaign.

Local author Will Self explains why he opposes plans to turn two of Lambeth's public libraries into gyms
with a few books on the side.

Don't steal our libraries! Please….

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.

Lambeth Libraries demo: true grassroots protest flourishes in the rain

Speakers at Brixton Library at 11am promised us there'd be sunshine when we got to the Tate South Lambeth Library in that bit of the borough known as Little Portugual.

The 600-strong march stretched half-way down Stockwell
Road,  en route for South Lambeth

Their words fired people up wonderfully, making the mile or two's march seem like nothing.  The guy who spoke about the importance of libraries for disabled people was especially good, as was the Green Party councillor for Streatham St Leonards, Scott Ainslie, who said he wouldn't've been here today but for the Edinburgh public libraries that opened his eyes to education and history and politics, back in his youth.

So many of us could have told similar stories. I was bowled over by the warmth of this crowd, and have to thank the lovely team from Upper Norwood Library for the loan of their orange "I love libraries" umbrella. (I will get it back to you soon, promise!)

 They also had a banner, "A library saved my life" which I would happily have carried, but it was definitely a two-person affair.

Among plenty of imaginative banners and placards, the prize must go to the polystyrene tombstone proclaiming, RIP Carnegie Library, 1906 - 2016". It was even entwined with ivy.

This guy led some great chants, wish I could remember all
the words...

Great also that library staff from Barnet (where a strike is planned) and Wandsworth joined the demo.

The organisers reckoned about 600 people marched, and that seems a fair estimate. The police are saying about 100. Judging from photos, it was certainly more than that.

Whatever the true figure, it was more than enough to make an impact, stretching half-way down Stockwell Road. There was plenty of encouragement from the pavements and from passing cars and vans. Even a cabbie tooted his approval.

The crowd was cheerful and the chanting - while not the angriest I've heard - occasionally had some bite. I mean, we're library lovers, much more used to keeping quiet…instead of yelling in unison (and with Unsion at times), the following:

"No ifs,  no buts, no more Lambeth Library Cuts!"

"What do we want?"

"Libraries!"

"When do we want them?"

"Forever!"

And many other much better ones whose words I have already lost….

In fact it was raining even harder in SW8 than it had been in SW2. But it didn't matter a jot. This was a real grassroots protest and as everyone knows, grass thrives on rain.

Almost the end of the road: after a warm welcome from Tate South Lambeth Library staff,  three young marchers went inside to hand a petition over to councillors, who were holding their surgeries.

So, the Lambeth councillors inside failed to come out into the rain to meet us (see more on this in the comments section of Brixton Buzz story).  Sad but not surprising. The time will come, maybe next Tuesday...

The next step: on Tuesday 10 November, there's a public meeting 6.30 pm at the Lilian Bayliss School, 323 Kennington Lane. It's a chance to question elected representatives on the library policy, so should not be missed!