In the morning I’m in go-ahead Market Harborough, where I discover the public library housed in a converted corset factory in – would you believe it? – Adam and Eve Street. It is a handsome, bright building, lit by the huge windows familiar from textile mills where handicrafts were practised on an industrial scale, where good work was the order of the day, and where good work demanded good light.
There’s plenty going on here. The stylish café at street level is bustling, while the library shares the floor above with the eclectic local museum, showcasing the town’s industries of corset-making and shoe-making, and treasures from nearby Stone Age and Roman archaeological digs. Within an annexe is a gallery, at the time of my visit showing a fresh look at the life and works of Market Harborough apprentices in six different trades.
But what grabs the attention most is the large lending library room, dominated by a structure of wooden ribs, shaped like an inverted hull, which cradles the children’s library. It ingeniously echoes not only the joists of the top floor of the factory, seen in adjacent photos, but also the skeleton of a whale, and the whalebone ribs of a corset. As a piece of public art it is witty, purposeful and totally on the button.
Wooden panels on walls and partitions around the room carry inspiring quotes about libraries and books (sample: Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future. – Ray Bradbury). I cannot help thinking these are needed to bring the mind back to the matter in hand: this may be a very serious adventure playground but it is still a library, and for the square footage of floor space, and the size of the population trawl, the stock of lending books strikes me as fairly meagre. Otherwise, full marks.
Market Harborough is a Leicestershire County library; I’ve time in the afternoon to head north to sample one of the 17 libraries run by the unitary authority of Leicester City. Checking locations and opening times on the “find a library” tab of their website, I am intrigued to see something called the Pork Pie Library. Never mind the books, this is too good to miss.
When I get there, I am faced with a truly stunning example of British inter-war avant-garde architecture, Modernism with a capital M. The building is all round brick walls. A tall cylindrical central rotunda with vertical windows on the upper level is the “pork pie”, a label which began as a colloquialism (the name above the door is Southfields Library), but which has since become adopted for the building. Even the nearby roundabout is now officially the Pork Pie Roundabout. But it is not just a pie, it is a collation. The architects incorporated around the centrepiece three lower pies, flans perhaps, circular rooms whose squatness is accentuated by horizontal window banding, rooms leading off the central hall and serving as separate children’s library, reading room and lecture hall. Opened in July 1939, the library represents a last gasp of utopian modernism. And it does what it says on the tin: during the brief time I spend in the library, I feel as though I am somewhere quite special, from the way the light funnelling through the rotunda windows gives the feel of a much larger building, to the elegantly curved wooden bookcases snug against the walls, to the expectations expressed in the openings into the satellite rooms.
Adventurous civic building in the 1930s’ suburbs inevitably brings to mind Frank Pick’s glorious commissions for suburban Northern and Piccadilly line tube stations. True enough, subsequent research shows that the Pork Pie architects, Symington, Prince & Pike (incidentally, an anagram of “Symington Prince and Pike Architects” is “enchanting pork pie mindset scarcity”), were influenced by Charles Holden’s 1932 masterpiece, Arnos Grove Underground Station. It is pleasing to learn that in drawing up his plan for this, a great rotunda on a rectangular plinth, Holden was himself inspired by Stockholm City Library, designed by Gunnar Aspland.
I spot a poster in the lobby advertising an event in the library the following day, a talk to be given by Leonie Orton, sister of playwright Joe. Obvious concerns about whether defacing library books runs in the family give way to curiosity about why Joe Orton’s sister would be coming here. His life seemed to epitomise the metropolis, so it is easy to forget that the family were originally from Leicester. And, a little further investigation reveals, as a girl Leonie was given a copy of Black Beauty, from her brother Joe, who had stolen it from… the Pork Pie Library. I wonder if she’ll bring it with her?
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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.