Libraries
A guest piece about five treasured public libraries, by Jago Rackham
A note from Isaac: I was really pleased with the reception to Wooden City’s first guest piece, by Kelly Pochyba. Today I’m proud to bring you one more by another cook and writer, Jago Rackham.
I got to know Jago after he replied to an Instagram story I shared about Jake’s Burgers in Ilford. He suggested we go for lunch together and we eventually ended up at a Galician restaurant in Harlesden. After a lovely afternoon chatting over plates of things like octopus, boquerones and Russian salad, we went for a walk around Kensal Green Cemetery.
One reason I like talking to Jago is that he’s unusually sensitive to the way London has changed. The more I’ve spoken to him, the more I’ve understood how much he cares about this city’s provision of free and inexpensive places too. When he asked me if I’d be up for a piece about his favourite public libraries, I instantly said yes.
Libraries
A Londoner’s favourite public libraries. By Jago Rackham
My first memory of a public library is toddling past Lewisham’s with my mother, and her sighing because it was closed, complaining that all the libraries were closing. This was the turn of the century, in a London with less of the neoliberal shine it has today. After that, I hardly interacted with public libraries until I was an adult.
Things could not have been more different for my mother, who grew up in a reasonably comfortable but not bookish family, in various commuter towns. Very much bookish herself, she borrowed rabidly from her local library. She quickly exhausted the children’s section and found herself, at 14, nose-deep in Chaucer, the Romantic poets and Dostoevsky. She often told me how the librarian in this or that suburban town would look suspiciously at her habits. The few books she spent all her pocket money on are special to me, and I grew up knowing the progress of her adolescent handwriting from their inscriptions.
Margaret Thatcher once may have said, “anyone on a bus over the age of 25 is a failure”. The gutting of public libraries followed a similar logic: buy your own books. This same logic pervades public services across the UK, and has done since before I was born. Over the last 45 years, 2.4m council homes have been sold off under right to buy, and today that social housing stock is being depleted more quickly than it is being replaced. Outside London, public transport is often a cruel joke, all while libraries fade away. Since 2016, more than 180 council-run libraries have either closed or been handed over to volunteer groups. Drive your own car, buy your own books.
My family was upwardly mobile, but still caught up in this shrinking of the state. After London, we moved to a tiny village in the South West of England, serviced twice a day by an expensive bus. I did not consider taking this bus to the closest library because I had all my mother’s books. I barely bought any until my late teens, when my own tastes began to emerge. And when this happened, the nearest town had four second-hand bookshops, selling books for a couple of pounds.
It was only years after I moved to London that public libraries became part of my life, and not because of books. It was a cold and damp winter, I remember because the journey was unpleasant and the warmth of Bow Library was striking. I had been advised to go there by my GP. Inside, a kind librarian helped me fill out some nightmarish form. All around people sat, read, were helped and helped others.
Here was the sort of communal space I could not imagine in London, that so many who move to the city don’t know how to find. And on top of it all there were the books: a lending agreement with many other London boroughs gave rise to a catalogue as good as any university’s. I told everyone I met of my discovery – that public libraries still existed – and was met with eye-rolls from a few, but with expressions of interest and surprise from many more.
During holidays and after school, libraries are safe spaces for kids and adolescents to sit. Their meeting rooms are given to community groups, AA and NA, knitting circles, English language classes. For those without access to the computer or the internet, they are an increasingly necessary link with technology. People fill out immigration paperwork, claim benefits and contest illegal evictions. I’ve seen people reading Wikipedia articles on flowers, looking at pictures of far away homes or simply talking to friends on Facebook.
Public libraries are gems in the foggy despair of contemporary life, places of utility and dreaming. They are the best of us and can be defended in one easy step: taking out a library card. Doing so is easy, costs nothing and requires only an address. To further persuade you, here are five of my favourite public libraries in London.
Westminster Reference Library
When I’m stuck somewhere for an hour or so, and want to use my time for good – emails, writing, rest – I’ll find the closest library. I prefer them to cafés, which can be noisy and cost money. These in-between moments are how I’ve come across many of my favourite libraries, Westminster included. It is an island of peace a stone’s throw from Leicester Square, cool in summer and warm in winter.
Quite small, it is neat inside and not of particular architectural fancy, but with good high windows and a great deal of light. The librarians are friendly and busy, and the collection is good, but the place’s real charm is as an escape, a shared and quiet space in one of central London’s most hectic areas. Upstairs is the reference library, where historians of the area will find much to read, alongside the Westminster Music Library and specialised collections of art and architecture.
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