What the public library means today

 

Highfield Branch Library, Sheffield, opened 1876

What do you think of when you hear the term “library”? Proud representatives of universal education for all; or dreary, soulless spaces where you were forced to study because you couldn’t get access to the books in any other way; or passports to a magical childhood world of imagination and discovery. Buildings with hardback copies of romantic fiction that could be borrowed in bulk, several books at a time.  I’ve seen or experienced all of these, but on balance, the term library still has optimistic associations for me. Libraries can be magical spaces, but that is difficult to reconcile with the phot above. 

The present-day appearance of many public libraries in urban areas can be something of a challenge. The sad, unloved façade of Highfield Library, in the suburbs of Sheffield, covered in graffiti, is an example of the contrast between the original vision and present-day reality. When it was built, in 1876, it must have represented a proud expression of civic pride, of belief in the transformative effect of reading available to everyone. There is even a sculpture over the entrance (which I didn’t manage to see) showing the benefits of reading. 

From the excellent Reading Sheffield blog, I was taken back to the opening ceremony of the library, on 1 August 1876, when Highfield Library was opened, the local MP stated: 

Twenty years hence there will be a new Sheffield – a population almost all of whom will be educated, and more or less delighting in the enjoyments and pursuits which education affords. 

Yet it looks like Highfield Library is providing essential services to the community, perhaps not quite in the way originally intended, but perhaps even more relevant today than ever. I see there is a family centre, a children’s reading section (there was no area dedicated to children’s books when the library was originally opened – the first children’s library in Sheffield dates from 1924). There are almost certainly fewer periodicals than when it originally opened – all the periodicals in my nearest branch library in Cambridge are provided by local donors. 

Of course, we no longer today believe that providing the most improving books (whichever they are) will mean they are read. That was one of the less exciting discoveries of Pettegree and der Weduwen’s The Library (2022) – the simple provision of books is usually insufficient. Plenty of libraries have been built, yet the public did not come. In fact, I would argue, although Pettegree and der Weduwen disagree, that an effective library need not have any books, or at least, the books are only one aspect of the library provision. Meeting rooms, PCs for those who don’t have access to them, a place to find out – these are all things a public library can provide. Pettegree and der Weduwen, both academics, praise the use of library spaces for meetings and events, but can’t bring themselves to detach the success of a library from the books in it: 

It is hard not to think that the health of the library will remain connected to the health of the book. [p413]

Their history of libraries, enjoyable as it is, fails, for me, to capture what the public library is all about. It is perhaps more difficult today than 150 years ago to keep a public library going. But for me, this sense of libraries persisting in their mission, despite their woeful and diminishing funding, is where the excitement lies. The sad decay exemplified by the façade of Highfield Library but the efforts of the staff to make use of the space available is an indicator, despite the very visible and shocking decline of civic investment in the UK, of the willingness and commitment to work for the community. Children can still find magic in the spaces there. The building might look sad, but what takes place there is vital.