Books, Buildings and Social Engineering

Early Public Libraries in Britain from Past to Present

Alistair Black, Simon Pepper, Kaye Bagshaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317173281
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Bibliothèques et sciences de l'information

Public libraries have strangely never been the subject of an extensive design history. Consequently, this important and comprehensive book represents a ground-breaking socio-architectural study of pre-1939 public library buildings. A surprisingly high proportion of these urban civic buildings remain intact and present an increasingly difficult architectural problem for many communities. The book thus includes a study of what is happening to these historic libraries now and proposes that knowledge of their origins and early development can help build an understanding of how best to handle their future.

1
Introduction

On a fleeting visit to early-twentieth-century Manchester, an American travel writer had this to say about the city’s historic and impressive gothic-styled John Rylands Library, designed by Basil Champneys and opened in 1900:

Books in a library, except [if] you have time and free access to them, are as baffling as so many bottles of wine in a cellar, which are not opened for you, and which if they were would equally go to your head without final advantage. I find, therefore, that my sole note upon the Rylands Library is the very honest one that it smelt, like the cathedral, like coal-gas.¹

Moving on to the seventeenth-century library in Cheetham College, which he understood to be the first ‘free’ library in England, he was much more generous in his appraisal:

In the cloistered picturesqueness of the place, its mediaeval memorials, and its ancient peace, I found myself again in those dear Middle Ages which are nowhere quite wanting in England, and against which I rubbed off all smirch of the modernity I had come to Manchester for.²

In both cases, the traveller appeared to be much less concerned about the contents of the library collection than the physical setting in which it was kept. A library is fundamentally a collection of books (or other items of knowledge); but it is also, perhaps even more so, a place, a series of inter-related spaces where meaning is constructed and conveyed, where people communicate and where complex signification practices occur. Libraries are places that are greater than the sum of their books.³

The Library as ‘Place’ and ‘Space’

The most commonly experienced ‘library place’ in our society is the public library. The public library in Britain today does not enjoy the status it once did. Like so many state institutions, the public library faces serious funding problems. While demands on the public library have continued to grow, education and training for public librarianship and the recruitment of skilled staff have contracted.⁴ Nevertheless, the public library remains an extremely important civic institution and organ of cultural production. The public library – like other types of library – refuses to go away. In fact, some library planners are highly optimistic about the future of the institution. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport, in setting out a framework for the future of public libraries in the medium term, reminds us that:

More people go to the library than to cinemas or football grounds. The public library is a huge asset handed down by generations of social reformers. Its role is just as relevant in the twenty-first century as in the nineteenth … Knowledge, skills and information are becoming more important in our lives, economically, socially and as citizens. Libraries have a central role to play in ensuring everyone has access to the resources, information and knowledge they need.⁵

Others would argue that such an upbeat assessment and vision perhaps owes more to rhetoric than to reality; that public libraries in Britain today have ‘dumbed down’ their services and departed from their historic civilising tradition.⁶

It has been said that libraries were once at the centre of the information universe. In the age of the internet there is no sign of that privileged position being restored, but that doesn’t mean to say that libraries will be catapulted into the dark recesses of the information cosmos. The main justification for saying this is the enduring acceptance of libraries as places. The library is first and foremost a place, a spatial experience. Libraries are not just about books and information, they are said to offer a ‘neutral welcoming community space’⁷ and to be ‘about companionship’;⁸ places that are as amenable to the café culture as they are to humanistic culture.⁹ In the modern vernacular, public libraries are, and always have been, ‘third places’, distinct from the other two main ‘sites’ of human existence: work and home.¹⁰ Alongside everyday, ‘hangout’ institutions like coffee shops, bookstores, public houses, sports clubs, lunch clubs, community centres and hair salons, public libraries have historically displayed the core characteristics of the ‘third place’: they are neutral, levelling, relatively unpretentious communal territories that are familiar, comfortable, accessible, that encourage social interaction, conversation (within limits) and a mood of playfulness, that are frequented by ‘regulars’ and serve as homes away from home, releasing individuals from the daily grind and providing solace and distraction.¹¹

Despite the digital revolution, not since the Carnegie era has there been so much interest in library buildings.¹² Library buildings have become ‘inspiring public places’.¹³ Even the optimism surrounding the fresh, modern library styles of the 1960s – constituting a post-war renaissance in library buildings¹⁴ – did not generate the kind of enthusiasm that we are currently experiencing for debate about, and innovation in, library design.¹⁵ Running parallel with the increasing interest in the physical library there has, of course, also been much discussion about the digital, or electronic, library, the library without walls.¹⁶ In the digital library the emphasis is on the library as ‘space’, where content is stored, and operations occur, ‘virtually’, in cyberspace. Some have gone as far as to argue that digital library spaces are in fact places, as real as the physical library, because they fulfil the same functions. Digital libraries might be viewed as places in the conceptual sense. Like physical libraries they add value by organising materials and making them available; they project a ‘look and feel’ and a brand; and, via Web 2.0 technologies, they are increasingly social in their nature. Libraries are fundamentally spatial, but it is possible to argue that ‘the definition of space must be broadened: the most critical element of this [library] space may not be that it is physical or virtual, but that it is intellectual’.¹⁷

Even as the digital library – or, more to the point, the hybrid library combining ‘clicks and mortar’ or ‘bricks and clicks’¹⁸ – advances unrelentingly, the physical presence of the library in our society appears little diminished. Growing interest in the library built-form, certainly that of the public library, has come from a variety of sources. The relationship between users and the physical environment of their libraries remains for many as personal as the relationship between users and their books and other cultural materials. Local preservationists have been keen to protect the civic heritage by fighting historic library closures and insisting that adaptations and renovations be undertaken with sensitivity.¹⁹ Cultural commentators appear fascinated by the indefatigability of the library in an age of computers and consumerism.²⁰ Librarians and library strategists have been keen to fashion library buildings to meet rapidly changing times and demands.²¹ Finally, architects have come to recognise library renovation and the design of new libraries as both lucrative and artistically challenging.²²

Revising the Whiggish Account of Public Library Design

Although the current excitement surrounding library design is to be welcomed, it does have a negative by-product. The trumpeting of new library architecture – of ‘eye-catching new buildings’²³ and flagship designs like the Peckham Public Library, Norwich Public Library, the Brighton Jubilee Library and the Whitechapel Idea Store – tends to reinforce the widely held view of early library architecture as ‘mistaken’. Retrospective analysis is dangerous. In respect of public library architecture, it also has a long history. In a contribution to the Library Association Record in 1957, R.C.G. Desmond believed it was ‘impossible to be enthusiastic about public library buildings in this country and difficult even to be charitable’.²⁴ Given that building restrictions had been in place since the start of the war, and so no new purpose-built library had by then appeared for nearly a generation, Desmond was effectively commenting on the pre-1939 stock of public library buildings. Even before the heightened expectations of the 1950s, negative views on early public library architecture, as Chapter 8 reveals more fully, were circulating freely. Lionel McColvin, in his masterly survey of public libraries in 1942, opined that in the 1880s and 1890s the libraries that had been built were ‘ugly, uncomfortable , cold, badly lit, dreary, undecorated monuments’; they were ‘undecoratable monuments to an enthusiasm which paid no heed to the morrow’. ²⁵ Also in 1942, the librarian Ernest Savage proclaimed that: ‘The worst period of library architecture was between 1895 and 1914.’²⁶ Earlier, in 1924, the Department of Education held the view that ‘one of the chief causes of the comparative failure of public libraries is their generally uninviting appearance’.²⁷

Respect for pre-First World War architecture, especially that of the nineteenth century, is a relatively recent development. Only since the 1960s has ‘Victorian’ been a word that house buyers have admired and estate agents cheerfully used as part of their marketing vocabulary. As a reaction to modernism, preservat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART ONE: CONTEXTS
• PART TWO: PERIODS OF PUBLIC LIBRARY DESIGN
• PART THREE: THEMATIC STUDIES
• PART FOUR: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Gazetteer of Early Public Library Buildings in Britain 1850–1940
• Select Bibliography
• Index