Growing up, I thought all libraries were like my local one: a quirky, rose-pink prefab chalet that had touched down from outer space in a gap between staid Victorian shops. It felt like stepping into a story: the floorboards creaked, there was an entire library of smells – furniture polish, the forest-floor toadstool waft of old books, and a specialist librarianship smell that had to do with repairing, or preparing, books with tape or binding glue – and in winter you were allowed to drape gloves and scarfs to dry on the cast-iron radiators (in my memory, it was always dark and wet when we went).
But then, in 1962, modernism hit Guildford in the shape of a new, purpose-built library, a post-Festival of Britain design that hovered over a trickily deep, narrow, sloping site. During the next ten years I got to know every inch of the building as I graduated from the children’s library on the ground floor, through adult fiction and non-fiction on the first, up to local history and the reference library at the top of the stairs.
After I left home, I didn’t set foot in Guildford Library for more than forty years. But having been recently writing about public libraries in the age of austerity, I thought it a good idea to return. I am curious to see what, if anything, has changed. As it turns out, I am in for a shock.
The entrance lobby, which had previously held an information desk and a comfortable “news room”, a newspaper and magazine lounge that had been especially popular on rainy days, now has the makeshift look of a polling station, the booths “self-service points” for the return or renewal of books. The children’s library, once an adult library in miniature, with central lending desk and a seemingly inexhaustible stock of books on apparently endless rows shelves, now resembles a play pen, with an afterthought of books on trolley shelves. There does not seem to be much for older children.
Upstairs, the adult lending library has lost its reference desk and rows of wooden catalogue card drawers, and with them have gone the sense of efficient bustle and procedure shared with post offices and railway stations. Instead, there is rather a lot of bare space. In fact, on the non-fiction mezzanine floor, every other bookcase has been removed. Overall, the stock appears to be down to about 60% of its previous level. An anteroom has been turned into a “bookshop”, actually a clearance sale of unwanted stock selling for 50p or £1. The reference library on the top-floor is still more depleted, with the bookcases on its own mezzanine completely bare, and I am unable to find any of the books I came here to consult. The library that was always so busy has no more than a dozen users in the time I am here.
I am alarmed, too, by two developments that emerged about the time of my visit. A Little Free Library was to open in Guildford, an open-to-all book exchange similar in size and operation to a telephone kiosk library. Little Free Libraries are run by a not-for-profit organisation that has set up 60,000 similar exchanges across more than seventy countries. The structure housing Guildford’s own example is designed and built by a local charity, Skillway, which teaches workshop skills to disadvantaged or disengaged young people; Hachette UK donated a range of adults’ and children’s books to set the ball rolling. Which is all great; but with its location falling comfortably within the catchment area of Guildford Public Library, it is hard to see how this squares with the Little Free Libraries’ mission statement of reaching out to “areas where books are scarce”. If there is demand for a Little Free Library, it can only be because the public library is failing to meet its own demands.
At the same time, Guildford announced it is to pilot one of the first “Library of Things” in the country. Residents can borrow hand-held, non-electrical DIY, gardening and decorating tools for a small fee. It will be based in the Library and run by volunteers, the stock accrued by donation. However well-intentioned this may be, it stands contra to principle. The public library may be a place of reading, study, research and consultation; its mission to educate, inform, or entertain; its goal to stimulate individual learning and, deep breath, advance society as a whole. The Library of Things reimages the public library as a place of borrowing. Why bother with books, when you could be exploring the stimulation of two weeks with a socket set, or telescopic lawn shears?
There are problems facing all of our public institutions, across the UK, and the problem is clearly not Guildford’s alone. Austerity has taken a terrible bite out of social provision; needs continue to change. But up and down the country I’ve visited libraries that have adapted, that remain kingpins in their communities, libraries in poorer districts that have withstood closures, redundancies, reduced opening hours and all the other blights of underfunding to fulfil their imperative. But in the absence of want and the uncertainty of need, with a populace that can survive on the reserves of its own affluence, Guildford Library seems to have unwittingly laid bare a vision of an existential crisis in the relevancy of the public library system. I came away from Guildford feeling that I had been warned.
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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.