I’m in the Newcastle area, and have a chance to visit two examples of the shock new wave of library design from the early 1960s, when post-war austerities were finally shaken off, public funds for ambitious amenities were released, and local government pilgrims to Scandinavia and the USA were returning fired with the possibilities of a modernist approach to civic architecture.
The road to Jesmond follows a double avenue of trees across the open expanse of Town Moor, which with its grazing cattle is for all the world like driving through a Thomas Bewick woodcut. It is a scene that has rarely survived outside the parklands of country estates, but this is ancient pastureland, ancient even in Bewick’s time, putting some clear historic space between Newcastle and its handsome semi-detached suburb of Jesmond.
Jesmond Library was closed by Newcastle City Council in 2013, despite being one of the few post-war buildings in the North East to be given Grade II listing. Local residents rallied to keep it alive, forming Friends of Jesmond Library as a registered charity, and taking over its running with volunteer support. The building, sited among Victorian townhouses on a corner of St George’s Crescent, is alone worth the detour. A circular steel and glass carousel dating from 1963, it was built at a good-old-days cost of less than £35,000, much the greatest single expense being the cost of the glazing. The circular plan is traditional in library design – think the old British Library Reading Room – giving the advantage of panopticon supervision from a central desk. But the circumference of Jesmond’s drum walls is novel, being stepped in a saw-tooth pattern, allowing maximum book capacity by ranging bookshelves against the longer tangential wall sections, with shorter indents of glass radials closing the edges. In reaching this solution for increasing stock levels while maximising natural daylight, the architect has achieved a jet-age rotary dynamic for the exterior.
That architect was Henry Faulkner-Brown, who went on to design many library buildings around the world, and whose celestial voice dictated what became set in stone as the “ten commandments” of planning libraries. These decreed that a library should be flexible; compact, for easy movement of readers, staff and books; accessible, with an easily comprehensible plan; extendible with minimum disruption; varied; organised for ease of browsing; comfortable; constant in environment; secure; and economic to run. Easier to formulate than to follow — the Catch 22 for any service provision is that it cannot be good, and quick, and cheap, all at the same time — the commandments have nevertheless become a handy checklist in library planning worldwide.
I have another motive for being here: as a library card collector, I am hoping that this will be my first entirely independent library with its own library card. Certainly the website points in that direction. There is no mention of council involvement, no suggestion that a Newcastle library card will be recognised. “Membership of Jesmond Library is free and open to everyone”, it says. Join up and get a card, that says to me. The staff are pleased that I want to join Jesmond Library, have no objections to my London address, sit me down with an application form and transfer my details onto the computer database. I’m told about opening hours, the use of PCs, where to find stuff. And, if I want to borrow books: “we don’t have a library card, just jot down what you’re borrowing on a piece of paper”. Not so jet age, after all.
By way of comparison, in the afternoon I head down the road to Denton Burn, to sign up with the regular Newcastle City Council library service. Here is a rather different legacy of the ’60s: traffic from the nearby A1 and A69 spilling down the main drag through Denton Burn to Newcastle city centre, two lanes each way, cutting this community in two, pedestrian barriers all the way around the crossroads, a steel footbridge the permanent reminder of the rupture it stands to heal. And here is another sticking plaster: to the side of the artery road is the library, flat-roofed and classically proportioned with its exterior of floor-to-ceiling glass between regularly-placed steel columns. It is as though Jesmond Library had been flat-packed and reassembled into a proper boxy building shape, with set-square and ruler, by some terribly tidy person. Two years older than Jesmond, it was more expensive, less ambitious architecturally, its architect, Henry Wood, much less remembered. But do you want your libraries restless and edgy, or tranquil and airy? For all Jesmond’s thrill of the ride, there is something unsettling in the awkward accommodation of right-angled tables and bookshelves within the close circular walls. I find that missing library calm at Denton Burn, and I’m going to give it a solid 10.
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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.
Photo by Alix Chaytor from Wikimedia Commons