Why do libraries matter so much? Carnegie's occupiers let the poets explain

Amazing scene in SE24 yesterday afternoon: a young woman was reciting, with passion and clarity, a poem about one of London's great lost libraries, the old Whitechapel Library. She was reading this on the steps of another amazing but seriously threatened London library, the Carnegie Library, Herne Hill.

The poem, Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East, by Bernard Kops, described how this library gave him - as a drifting East End street urchin during the early years of the blitz - everything he needed to get going as a writer and to become the great playwright and poet we know today.

It includes these lines:

I emerged out of childhood with nowhere to hide
when a door called my name
and pulled me inside.

And being so hungry I fell on the feast.
Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East.

And my brain explodes when I suddenly find,
an orchard within for the heart and the mind.

Plenty of other great poems were read out by people  both inside and outside the occupied Herne Hill

library.

Ted Hughe's late poem, Hear It Again, is another amazing work. Hughes had no doubt that libraries were not merely important, but a crucial factor in the development of civilisation.

He pulls no punches. In the first verse, he announces that the destruction of the library in Alexandria 14 centuries back "brain-damaged the human race".

Then these terribly prophetic lines, later in the poem:
And it's plain
Decay of libraries is like 
Alzheimer's in the nation's brain.. 


The traffic on Herne Hill Road at that time was busy. But whether coming up from Loughborough Junction or down from the leafy heights of Herne Hill, almost every vehicle slowed down and beeped its  support for the occupiers.

In fact, I counted twenty, in the space of about 3 minutes, and 17 of them beeped. They even made it difficult for some of the poetry readers to make themselves heard!

And it was not just private cars. The biggest beeps came from white vans, trucks laden with building debris and scaffolding, taxi cabs, scooters, minibuses, oh yes and Range Rovers and the occasional Audi. Even the police car that had been parked round the corner gave a  little peep as it drove off, and then a couple of growls from its siren.

There's no doubt whatsoever how deeply loved this library is. Nor how much respect there is for the people who are doing their best to save it from this strange Lambeth Council plan to instal some sort of gymnasium.

Attached to the locked metal gates outside the Carnegie Library,
Herne Hill, here's a message those wishing to gut this building need to
understand

We now know, thanks to the Brixton Buzz website,  that Lambeth has issued a possession order to evict the occupiers and get on with its ludicrous scheme of turning part of this dignified building into a gym.

I've read stuff from Labour councillors saying we shouldn't worry, that the library will re-open with the same books, etc etc. Well, I wonder about that.

The real, absolute killer in the Lambeth plan, which they freely admit, is that there will be no trained, paid library staff in the new "healthy living centre". So however many books they have there - and you do wonder who will be looking after them, replenishing stock, etc - there won't be anyone there to help you with informed, expert advice on where to look, or what to try.

And, while Bernard Kops' beloved Whitechapel Library has now closed (it is now part of the art gallery), at least that council (Tower Hamlets) provided a proper library building to replace it, staffed with real, paid librarians.

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.

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…?

Love letters to Lambeth's threatened libraries

Here's a case of a campaign banner which intrinsically explains why the campaign is necessary. Tate South Lambeth Library, November 2015

I'm not Joni Mitchelll's biggest fan, but two lines of one of her old songs have been playing over and over again in my head of late.

You know the lines…."Don't it always seem the way….", and if you live in Lambeth (and plenty other parts of London, etc) you will know how horribly meaningful it has become, in relation to pubs, cafés, shops, music venues, much-loved murals and even whole council estates…and now, of course, our libraries as well.

And that nagging refrain is driving me mad, sending me out to make sure that at least I will know what we had until it was gone, if the plans laid out in the borough's "Culture 2020" programme actually come to pass.

So it became essential to revisit all of Lambeth's libraries, and especially the ones which are under threat of closure or having their hearts ripped out. There was a practical reason for this pilgrimage as well. I need to go out of my home to work. I don;t like working in cafés. Libraries are by far the best place.  But every time I've been to my own local library (Clapham) over the past few weeks it has been a problem finding somewhere to sit. The place has curiously limited desk space, there are strange little rooms where I don't think I'd be appreciated, and there some incredibly uncomfortable benches.

So - I'm off. Over the next few weeks I want to visit all 10 libraries in the Borough. I already use Brixton quite often (and that's at capacity as well).  A few weeks ago I wrote about the Carnegie Library in Herne Hill, so that, retrospectively, can be the first of this occasional and probably never-to-br completed series.

The Tate South Lambeth Library was next  on this itinerary, admittedly because it was on the route home from where I was working last week.

What becomes immediately apparent, as you enter each of these libraries, is how very different each is from the next. And how expertly each one has adapted itself and developed services to meet the needs of their surrounding populations, again so different across this hugely diverse borough.

This handsome old library was a case in point. It was also where the protest march of three weeks ago ended, and where the Councillor who devised the 'healthy living centre' plan was holding her surgery. It's a well-positioned building, bang in the middle of the Little Portugual section of South Lambeth Road and facing that colourful parade of  Portuguese cafés, delicatessens and restaurants.

The big banner outside, "SALVE A NOSSA BIBLIOTECA" says it all really. This library is real hub of the local community, including the large Portuguese-speaking community.

From the outside it's an imposing Victorian municipal building, red-brick with ornate terracotta tile work, grand but inviting. Inside the two main rooms are light and airy, but every square foot of space is being used - and even at this quiet time (2.30 on a Tuesday, before schools are out) there's a good mix of people using the building, the photocopiers.

Given to the people of Lambeth nearly 120 years ago, the
library has survived two world wars, depressions and
recessions, only to face the indignity of perhaps being turned
into a gym. So much for social progress.

It's only when you look at the noticeboards or the Friends' website that you realise wheat an amazing range of activities are held here - from a gardening club through to IT sessions for blind and partially-sighted people, a classic film screenings, ESOL classes, a knitting group….the list goes on. In other words it is doing exactly what a branch library should be doing, and would do much more of if it had the resources.

Lambeth's ongoing so-called consultation on the future of this and other libraries has put forward the idea that either Tate South Lambeth or the Durning Library, a mile and a half away in should become a "Town Centre" library for this part of the borough.

Whichever one is chosen, the other will be doomed for conversion into a bookish gym.

This is a desperately unfair and invidious tactic, pitting two of their own libraries, one  against the other, when the staff in each  are working so hard to meet the needs of their own users,  with quite different needs despite their proximity. Is this how a co-operative council behaves?

Next stop: The Minet Library

Lambeth's library-loving residents get angry at extraordinary Carnegie Library meeting

Herne Hill's Carnegie Library packed with angry residents for a meeting to
discuss ways of resisting Lambeth's weird 'bookish gym' scheme

A meeting at Herne Hill's threatened Carnegie Library on Monday (November 17) evening sent out a loud, clear message to the council which is planning to close or re-purpose half of the borough's ten public libraries. The message was simply: "no!"

The library was packed. It was standing room only. The Lambeth library-using demographic was thoroughly represented, and the crowd, cheerful to begin with, grew increasingly angry as the absurdities of the council scheme, and the real danger of the loss of at least three treasured libraries - were examined in forensic detail by members of the Friends of Carnegie Library, by a Lambeth Unison rep, and by many, many speakers from the floor.

What became clear was that the Lambeth plan to hand three libraries - Carnegie, Tate South Lambeth and the Minet - over to GLL - were not merely unpopular and almost universally derided as "bonkers".

They were also strangely thin on detail - fuelling suspicion that there's a hidden agenda here, and that a real long-term aim could be to flog off some of the buildings (but not until the next local elections are safely in the past, that is post-May 2018).

Such speculation was based on some good digging-up of intelligence:  a land registry map of the Minet Library, for example, showed how it was not yet ripe for the property-development plucking, as there are two adjacent residential properties with windows overlooking the site.

Then there was the matter of the formation of a "shadow trust" to run the new "Healthy Living Centres".  As the same names of the same councillors cropped up time again, it seemed this was again just a hastily-formulated attempt to formalise the scheme. "Anyone can set up a trust. You just download a form from the Charities Commission, and fill it in."

A degree of scepticism was also noted regarding Lambeth's rejection of the librarians' own proposals to save all ten libraries. Their neat plan to save the requisite cash was rejected for lack of "a proper business plan".

We were then shown the business plan submitted by GLL: looked like one and half sheets of hasty Microsoft Word processing. No detailed financial breakdown.  The vagueness of it all - for example, the estimated cost of £1 million per library for conversion into a gym - was perplexing. Normally these planning and property developer deals are very efficiently cloaked in acres of luxuriant verbiage, charts, diagrams, spreadsheets, computer animations, and what have you.

One thing that is clear is that running gyms and leisure centres seems to be a damn good way of minting money. Apparently GLL, the Greenwich Leisure group that has been picked for this plum job, has been embarrassed by the money it has made from running Lambeth's recreation centres, and has generously decided to reinvest a million or so into these new bookish gyms.

Other speakers noted the importance of Vauxhall MP Kate Hoey's  referral of the Lambeth library scheme for judicial review. This, as one expert member of the audience pointed out, could be the real scheme-breaker, as Lambeth would have to prove they were not failing in their public duty to provide library services, and to give detailed reasons why they appointed GLL, and whether all due legal processes had been adhered to in deciding to hand public buildings over to a private concern.

The Friends of Carnegie Library were themselves consulting lawyers on the legality of the proposals.

As for the morality of the proposals - well, you don't need a Pope or Archbishop to tell you that the idea of an elected council deciding to dispose of properties that were donated to their local communities by individuals (Carnegie, Tate, William Minet) on strict conditions they should remain as community assets - is not merely wrong.

It is actually - if you'll excuse an outbreak of upper-case - BORDERLINE FREAKING CRIMINAL!



This meeting began at 7pm: by 8pm, when it should have ended, it was just hotting up.

People were volunteering, lists were being drawn up of skills, contacts. A local resident who'd run public consultations on a new park in New York offered to help with drawing up a business plan. A man from Wandsworth Libraries gave an account of their similar struggle two years ago, and how they'd emerged with some success - but only by keeping totally united.

By 8.30, people were arguing the merits of  a sleep-in at the Carnegie, should our worst fears be realised,  on April 1 2016.

The spirit of 68, or was it  76, or 81, or 89 (do I mean 1989 or 1789? I mean both!) was in the air. It was a brilliant meeting.

The next one is Wednesday 18th, at 6.30 at the Elmgreen School in Tulse Hill.

This is a full council meeting: The Friends of Carnegie and the Save Lambeth Libraries campaign will be handing in their petitions, all of which will have sufficient signatories to ensure the campaigns have the right to send deputations to the meeting. So it will be a crucial one.

PS: People wondering why the council is holding its big meetings in schools were reminded that the main council chamber in Brixton is currently closed. The old Town Hall on the corner of Acre Lane is being redeveloped, and the council is building a new town hall further up Brixton Hill. At some expense. A bit more than the cost of keeping these libraries going….? No, surely not.