Today I’m visiting two public libraries run by the City of Wolverhampton Council, one modern, one eighty years older, each in its very different way an embodiment of the spirit of the time and social plan it was built to serve.
First stop is Low Hill, an inter-war garden suburb planned and built from scratch. It has an extraordinary symmetry on the map, with starburst patterns of Roman-straight roads, radiating from axes of roundabouts and satellite roundabouts, set within sweeping orbits of longer crescents. It could be the sketch for a crop circle formation. But at street level the avenues are broad, the uniform cream stucco semis set back and apart, showing the new awareness of ’20s town planners for the benefits of fresh air and light. So generous are the open spaces that Showell Circus, from which I count no fewer than eight radiating roads, is the country’s first traffic roundabout awarded village green status.
And here on Showell Circus is Low Hill Library, a pepperpot design that could be an ornamental tollhouse, or a National Trust teashop on the other sort of estate. At a glance you could guess to within a couple of years that it belongs to 1930, sharing its classical proportions with elements of art nouveau and neo-Jacobean arts and crafts, in a unity at once modern and comfortingly domestic. Designed by Borough Engineer H. B. Robinson, its construction in brick and stone emphasises the horizontal, exaggerated in the partial use of flat roofing. The profile has three stepped tiers, banded with glazing to flood the interior with natural light, making it a lantern. A two-way lantern: there is a duality at play in the way it draws in illumination, and radiates its message like a beacon across the estate.
Eighty years on, the neighbouring district of Wednesfield acquired a very different library and community centre to meet a very different context. Heading here from Low Hill, I pass through Wednesfield old village, whose late Victorian speculation semis and terraces line streets that are too narrow, cars parked bumper-to-bumper along both sides, speed humps all the way down, the tiresome courtesy of the flashed headlight and waved thank-you. I drive further south, past the library, where I am met with a ramshackle spillage of industrial, retail and storage sheds, parking lots and security fencing, a vision of the tussle of untrammelled market forces made alloy and concrete, that carries on all the way from here to Ikea. And between, marking the meeting point of those very diverse communities to the nearest centimetre, Wednesfield Library.
As at Low Hill, the library design showcases the local environment. But in place of Low Hill’s geometry and symmetry, what we get at Wednesfield is eclectic, a postmodern mash up, as if a tornado had blown through the terrace streets and factory estates, lifting panels and mouldings and pallets into its vortex, spinning them into a fusion of impacted forms. I am reminded of something almost exactly one hundred years older, the Futurist sculpture of Boccioni’s Development of a Bottle in Space. Call this the development of a library in space. It is an oval of contrasting facades within a single building, whose sections abut in a visual funfair of curves and diamonds and perpendiculars, in colours and textures that shift and disrupt, loom and disappear, as I walk the path round.
The library was opened in June 2010, just weeks after the general election. The verdict? According to community groups that took up residency, it is “a complete folly”. Rooms are condemned as stuffy, poorly ventilated, too small, their shape and size “ridiculous”. There are not enough computers, no space for more, and a social club for children had to throw away toys, as there was only one cupboard for storage.
I spend less than two hours in the building and do not have the opportunity to experience its running on a day-by-day basis. But sitting at the only study space I can find, two small tables pushed against a wall in a will-this-do manner, I jot down my own impression that for a building that cost a hefty £2.2 million, on a spacious and apparently unrestricted site, the interior appears poorly served and sadly compromised by the priority to create the thrill of that zingy, iconic exterior.
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This is extracted from An English Library Journey, a new title due out in May 2022. Further details to be announced on this website.