A visit to York this week, with some time to fill, gives me the opportunity to tick off one of the public libraries on my list: the Reading Café in Rowntree Park. Books and cafés under one roof are familiar enough, although bookshops and libraries sensibly prefer separate spaces for each, to keep the stock ungrubbied. But the Reading Café sounds different, a hip study lounge… I anticipate worn leather sofas, newspaper racks, desks with hooded lamps, the odd lectern. Perhaps the “Café” tag will prove generic, the way it is used sometimes to mean any functional space with chairs or benches, refreshments optional or absent. When it was opened in July 2012 York Council thought it the first of its kind, and were excited by the prospect of a model that enabled the city to open new libraries by “combining the traditional role with other attractions.”
What’s more, it is housed in the charmingly post-Edwardian park-keeper’s lodge, with its cutesy Portmeirion-vernacular detailing, in Rowntree Park, a public space in the manner of a country house garden, endowed as a memorial to the Cocoa Works staff who served in WW1, with Joseph Rowntree’s characteristic championing of the civic project.
I’m slightly wrong-footed in the park to find no signage to the Reading Café, and nothing on the façade when I get there to tell me I’m in the right place. I walk right the way round, in case the door I was going to try was a fire escape and the main entrance was on the opposite side, but I was right first time. When I go in I think I’ve wasted my time. It’s just a café, a clattery one at that, a group of mothers and babies in for a morning coffee, nobody reading books or newspapers or anything else, one bloke in the corner having a go at doing something on his laptop. Then I notice three slender bookcases, filling the wall spaces between windows. The books are mostly hardback, with index numbers on the spines. 800 books or less in all. The library.
I’m probably not seeing it at its best. A few flyers tell me there are author events and a book club, and a system for ordering books not on the shelves. But on what I guess is a typical morning you wouldn’t have known it. On Trip Advisor, the solitary voice of somebody who surely never came here claims “principally it is a library with a café too,” but all the other reviewers discuss the outlook from the terrace (“lovely”), the food and drink (“delicious”), the service (“slow and unfriendly”) and the ambience (“grubby”) without mentioning the library.
My verdict? You wouldn’t come here for the books. Maybe that doesn’t matter, but what does bother me is that what could have been splendid is so compromised. The feeling I get is that this is a cheap way of getting another library space onto the council list at minimal outlay. The location is clearly ideal for a café, and the presence of the books seems little more than gimmicky. Ironically, there is room here for a library, and a good one. The upper floors of the building have been vacant for some years, and the current plan is that they are renovated and sold off for private accommodation. In other circumstances the park could have its café-café on the ground floor and reading-café above. But there is no money in the public kitty for renovations, or staff, or stock. Until there is, we will have more opportunities like Rowntree Park to get used to making the best of a bad job.
The bigger question is of course whether we want reading cafés. Thirty years after a Saatchi campaign described the V&A as “An ace cafe with a nice museum attached,” the irony has been mainstreamed, and we take our books and our art with sprinkles on top and a cinnamon cookie on the side. Do we need to be so spoonfed? Can we no longer take our poetry without soothing music cushioning the background in the way we cannot take cinema without popcorn? One side of this debate is clearly the need to find ways of bringing home the revenue, and to some extent we have learnt to pay up in order to put up. But we have to find a balance, and that means we don’t put the books in the background, that we find places for our espresso machines and cup-cake cloches, our souvenir mug racks and greetings card displays, without displacing the bookcases.