A new chapter . . . how the Library of Birmingham, due to open in 2013, will look. Photograph: Birmingham Council
‘It will be much more than just a library. Perhaps we should call it a palazzo of human thought,” says Mike Whitby, Birmingham city council’s leader, as he reclines in his vast office. He’s talking about the new £193m Library of Birmingham, currently under construction at Centenary Square between those other two Brummie palazzi, the Repertory Theatre and the former civic centre called Baskerville House.
Cardiff, Newcastle and Swindon already have new super-libraries, while Liverpool and Manchester’s central libraries are undergoing multimillion-pound renovations. Councillor Whitby thinks Birmingham’s will be better than any of them. Thanks to Dutch architects Mecanoo, the library will be a highly transparent glass building wrapped in delicate metal filigree, housing within its 33,500 sq m a few million books (fingers crossed). It is a key component in the city’s bid to be the UK’s capital of culture in 2013 and should help fulfil Whitby’s aim of putting Birmingham in the top 25 world cities by 2020, as ranked by the Mercer Quality of Living survey (it currently comes joint 56th, with Glasgow).
Whitby’s office looks out on to the existing Birmingham Central Library, an inverted modernist ziggurat built in 1973-4. This is the building Prince Charles famously described as a place where books were incinerated rather than borrowed. Unlike him, I once spent long, happy hours reading here, amazed that so many books (2.5m of them, stretching over seven floors) were at the disposal of a non-princely nobody like me. Now culture minister Margaret Hodge has given the go-ahead to flatten this Grade II-listed building; demolition will be completed over the next five years. Why must it go? “It leaks, and great big chunks of concrete keep falling from it,” says Birmingham head of libraries, Brian Gambles. He keeps a souvenir chunk in his office to prove the point. “It’s ugly and unfit for purpose and would cost too much to properly renovate.”
Last week I spoke to Hodge in her office near Trafalgar Square. She told me that running a successful public library in the 21st century is tough. Technological advances and higher expectations of service mean that libraries must, in her glum progressivist phrase, “move with the times to stay part of the times”. “I do care passionately about libraries,” she says, “but they have to change. The footfall is down and book issues are massively down. Only 14 of 151 local authorities have libraries that offer ebooks.”
Hodge has spent the past six months in a consultation process that asks some unsettling questions. What, really, is the point of a public library in the 21st century? How should libraries respond to today’s 24/7 culture and the greater availability of cheap books? Why can’t that beardy librarian double as a barista? Next week, she will publish the answers to these questions in her department’s Library Review, though you’d be forgiven for thinking that its delayed appearance (it was due to be published last October) has been timed to get lost in the runup to the election. Certainly, when we meet, Hodge’s mind appears more focused on trouncing BNP leader Nick Griffin in her Barking constituency.
She declines to confirm what will be in the review, but among the changes we can expect is an opening up of libraries to volunteers – a move that will upset librarians, unions and campaigners. “There’s nothing that depresses me more,” Hodge says, “than going into a library and being confronted by a computer and someone in authority who isn’t going to deliver the citizen-focused services I think should be on offer. I won’t have this. Libraries can’t go on being merely traditional. That’s why we should consider volunteers. In Manchester, I celebrated a scheme recently to get young people working as volunteers in libraries in ways that are of great benefit to them and the customers. That could be a blueprint.”
Other likely reforms include issuing library users with loyalty cards that will reward them with a pair of cinema tickets for every 10 visits and a nationwide lending system.”I’ve long wanted library users to be able to borrow a book in Brent and return it in Birmingham.” Opening hours must be liberalised, Hodge says. “I want to be able to go to libraries at 8pm or later. I remember when Borders was open in Islington. You could got there and buy a paperback at 11pm after going to the cinema.” Fair enough, though it might not be wise to emulate the business strategy of a book chain that collapsed last year.
Hodge wants such reforms to revolutionise the library service without adding to the cost. “It isn’t enough to say, as some do, that all libraries need is more money to supply more books and have longer opening hours. The point is we have got to be more innovative, because the money ain’t there.” She cites the head of Norwich libraries as a success story. “She has reversed the national footfall trend. She told me that if she’s ever stuck for an idea on how to run libraries, she visits Tesco.” Hodge is also impressed by the ideas of Starbucks’ UK MD Darcy Willson-Rymer, who argues that the best way to save libraries is to put coffee shops in them, as they have in the US. “I like the idea of browsing books in a library with a coffee.” She is fearful for those libraries that won’t embrace such changes, describing them as “sleepwalking into the era of the iPhone, the ebook and the Xbox without a strategy”. Having no strategy, Hodge argues, runs the risk of turning libraries into “a curiosity of history, like telex machines or typewriters”.
Bat for Lashes – playing live
In Birmingham, Mike Whitby believes his library is on course to fulfil Hodge’s vision. Birmingham will, he says, buck the national trend for declining library usage: the Central Library is currently visited by 5,000 people a day; he believes double that number will visit the new library.
What is Birmingham’s strategy? Brian Gambles says, “It’s about moving from a service-driven economy to one that is about experiential learning.” And that means? “It may well mean having business workshops, political meetings, poetry readings, rather than simply doling out books. It will also mean engaging people who feel alienated by the current library provision, while making those who use it already feel better provided for. ” Lancashire county council already has a scheme that brings live music into libraries; so far, it has hosted Adele and Bat for Lashes. Whitby adds that Birmingham’s new library will properly display treasures such as the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623, currently kept in a back room, as well as being a better guide to Birmingham’s extraordinary history.
Exciting stuff, even if there is little emphasis on loaning books. But there is one problem. Birmingham needs to make savings of £69m in the next financial year, which could mean the loss of up to 2,000 council jobs. How dare Whitby bankroll a multimillion palazzo of human thought when he’s making binmen (including my brother-in-law) redundant? Whitby argues that the library will create thousands of jobs. “I see civic pride being underpinned by the new library. We understand the vicissitudes of an economic downturn, but we are confident of our ability to move on. The library will be a catalyst for regeneration. It will be a beacon of diversity – we’re a global city with a global resonance.”
Whitby’s assurances come at a time when swingeing local authority cuts are looming, and when libraries are perceived as soft targets. Super-libraries like his will probably be immune; it will be branch libraries that bear the brunt of the recession.
Of course some Britons couldn’t care less about saving their local library. When West Sussex county council recently announced it was planning to reduce opening hours for three out of four libraries, in order to save £200,000, several blog posts on the Brighton Evening Argus website suggested the cuts weren’t deep enough. “I haven’t been to the library for years,” wrote Arthur of Horsham. “I read papers online, get information from the internet and buy books from Amazon. The people who most ‘need’ them – are the least likely to use them – too busy watching rubbish on TV. They are essentially outdated and should morph into more of an online information service.”
Last year Wirral council considered closing 11 libraries and investing £13m in neighbourhood centres instead, arguing that the latter were what people wanted. But the plan was halted after a grassroots campaign prompted the then culture secretary Andy Burnham to order an inquiry; the closure plans were subsequently reversed.
For campaigners, Burnham’s intervention was an unexpectedly heartening moment. Burnham argued that libraries are “a rich source of information, wisdom and learning”, and that this was “all the more true in difficult economic times”. This last point seems especially important: as the economy shrinks, the social value of libraries will increase. When you’re newly redundant, you’re less likely to buy books or pay for home broadband.
But cuts seem inevitable. Along with arts and leisure (and roads), libraries are now most at risk of council cutbacks, according to a BBC survey last week. Campaigners warn that this will weaken libraries to the point where it’s hard to make a case for their survival. When Buckinghamshire county council recently considered a 10.4% cut to library services – by reducing opening hours, book stocks and replacing staff with volunteers – there was uproar. Councillor Niknam Hussain warned that the strategy would create a vicious circle: “In a few years, someone will say, ‘No one is using this place, let’s close it down.’”
Some public libraries have already reached that tipping point. In my neighbourhood in north Islington, the Arthur Simpson Library was bulldozed and replaced by flats a few years ago. It was small, understocked and open at inconvenient hours; residents were told they should now go to a new (not very good) library a mile away. But many locals, especially the elderly, didn’t bother. “I simply don’t go to a library any more,” says my neighbour Mary, who campaigned for the original library. I didn’t, but I wish I had. I didn’t use the library much when I was childless; now I wish I had a place around the corner where I could borrow books for my daughter or sit and read quietly to her.
Sorry, no macchiatos here
Last year, Swindon’s Old Town Library was in a similar position to the Arthur Simpson. The council planned to close it because they’d opened a spanking new library just up the road. Local resident Shirley Burnham led a campaign to keep it open, and won. “We were fighting people who have absolute contempt for the reading public and no respect for books or for what our ancestors did in opening public libraries,” she tells me. “That philistinism spurred one on.”
She accepts that the older library will never win an architectural award. It opens to the public only three mornings and two afternoons a week, and won’t be serving macchiatos and biscotti any time soon. “But we love it and value it and know that it is at the heart of our community. The Tory council’s argument was that we had a fancy new library up the road – we could just walk to it. We wanted to keep our own library, which we’d used for years.” This may not seem a strong argument, but there’s a picture of the walk to the new library on the Save the Old Town Library websitethat makes the issue plain: taken in winter, it shows a frozen, untreated, uphill pavement – just the kind of journey that would deter the elderly or anyone without access to transport.
And despite her win, Burnham says her work is not yet done. “The quality of service the library will provide in future is not at all clear,” she says. “Nor is there certainty about other branch libraries in Swindon.”
Why should we save local libraries? For me, it’s because they do something cherishable yet utterly incomprehensible to the cost-cutters. Like public parks, libraries are particularly valuable in capitalist cityscapes, where you are incessantly encouraged to keep moving, keep spending – and don’t even think about doing anything economically unproductive. (Figures released by the Valuation Office Agency last month showed that since 1997 there has been a 1,150% rise in the number of lap-dancing clubs in Britain, and a 6% decline in the number of libraries.)
Lesson of the LA Olympics
It’s true that today’s libraries are not always restful places; they can attract the unhappy and socially excluded. That’s no doubt one reason why middle-class ponces, among whom I sometimes number myself, prefer to frequent bookshops.
Consider this vignette. Last week I was angrily returning a book to Islington Central Library when I passed a woman in the foyer drinking beer and swearing at people going in and out. It was 9.45am. But it wasn’t her who made me livid. I was angry because when I read the book I had borrowed – the AA Guide to Los Angeles – it informed me that LA was looking forward to hosting the Olympic Games. Hold on: didn’t LA host the Olympics in 1984? And wasn’t that 26 years ago? It turned out that the book dated from the late 1970s. It’s perhaps unfair to point out that Margaret Hodge was Islington council’s leader from 1982 to 1992. But during that period someone, surely, should have thought of taking the AA Guide to LA out of service.
Out-of-date books, dodgy clientele: do libraries have to be this way? No and yes. They do need to reverse a reputation for being better at supplying cheap-to-rent CDs or DVDs than books. But I can’t begrudge a drunk a place in the warm. In my neighbourhood, every other heated building in the neighbourhood practises a form of cultural exclusion that shuns the unhappy or impecunious. In Birmingham, Brian Gambles recognises that the modern public library, no matter how hi-tech and future-forward, must resist this: “The library must be a place where you can go for free, sit and be quiet. There is hardly anywhere else in Birmingham city centre where you can do that.”
If there are fewer libraries today than there were 10 years ago, Margaret Hodge thinks “we shouldn’t fixate on the numbers. It’s the services they offer that are key. If you’re a local authority and four out of 10 people use the library, and 10 out of 10 people use your bins, and you’re thinking about choices, then it’s easy to understand why libraries might be cut. To prevent getting into that situation, we need to think creatively.”
As one chapter in the story of the public library comes to an end, it’s not yet clear if the next will prompt such powerful loyalties. Will Shirley Burnham and other campaigners like her mobilise to save the super-libraries of the future, with their coffee shops and business meetings and pop-up gigs? Should libraries stick to books, move all their resources online - or are they simply institutions on their way out? One thing’s for sure: whatever else Councillor Whitby does to Birmingham, he really shouldn’t go calling its new library a palazzo of human thought.
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