Libraries of Light: British Public Library Design in the Long 1960s 9781472472946, 9781315592336

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Libraries of Light

For the first hundred years or so of their history, public libraries in Britain were built in an array of revivalist architectural styles. This backward-looking tradition was decisively broken in the long 1960s as many new libraries were erected up and down the country. In this new Routledge book, Alistair Black argues that the architectural modernism of the post-war years was symptomatic of the age’s spirit of renewal. In the 1960s, public libraries truly became ‘libraries of light’, and Black further explains how this phrase not only describes the shining new library designs – with their open-plan, decluttered, Scandinavian-inspired interiors – but also serves as a metaphor for the public library’s role as a beacon of social egalitarianism and cultural universalism. A sequel to Books, Buildings and Social Engineering (2009), Black’s new book takes his fascinating story of the design of British public libraries into the era of architectural modernism. Alistair Black is Professor in the School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He is author of A New History of the English Public Library (1996) and The Public Library in Britain 1914–2000 (2000). He is co-author of Understanding Community Librarianship (1997), The Early Information Society in Britain, 1900–1960 (2007) and Books, Buildings and Social Engineering (2009). He was Chair of the Library History Group of the Library Association, 1992–1999, and of the IFLA Section on Library History, 2003–2007. He was editor of the international journal Library History, 2004– 2008, and the North American editor of Library and Information History, 2009–2013. He is general editor of the journal Library Trends.

‘A thoroughly grounded, beautifully illustrated and superbly researched effort that connects the developments of the welfare state and civic architecture in postWorld War II Great Britain within a discussion of the construction of Sixties public library buildings. Black identifies the conflicts and compromises (most were successful, some not) struck between proponents of management efficiency and advocates for physical attraction that 60s’ librarians, ironically, often resisted.’ Wayne A. Wiegand, Florida State University, USA

Libraries of Light

British public library design in the long 1960s

Alistair Black

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Alistair Black The right of Alistair Black to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-472-47294-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-59233-6 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby

Contents

List of figures Preface and acknowledgements Introduction

vii xi 1

1

The long journey to libraries of light

21

2

Modernisation and modernism: the post-war public library and the revolution in its built-form

54

3

Style, siting and space

92

4

Flagship libraries: intersections of style, siting, space and light

141

5

Holborn Central Library: Scandinavian ‘light’

163

6

Hampstead Central Library: into the light

172

7

Bourne Hall Library: light from space

185

8

Birmingham Central Library: light from within

195

Conclusion Select bibliography Index

216 225 231

Figures

Cover: Hampstead Central Library, also known as Swiss Cottage Library (source: Camden Local History and Archives Centre; David Cockroft, photographer) 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14

Main reading hall, Birmingham Reference Library Beckenham Public Library Stockton-on-Tees Central Library Lending department, Allerton District Library, Liverpool Exterior of Allerton District Library, Liverpool Rear of Kensington Central Library Anti-Ugly Action demonstration Main Hall, Mitchell Library, Glasgow Reading room of the West Hill Library, Wandsworth Castlemilk District Library, Glasgow Alvar Aalto’s Viipuri (now Vyborg) Library Main reading room, Viipuri (now Vyborg) Library Roehampton Branch Library Lending department, Roehampton Branch Library Tang Hall Branch Library, York Main entrance of Norwich Central Library Acomb Branch Library, York Camberley Central Library Gillmoss Branch Library, Liverpool Hull Central Library Sketch of the proposed Bradford Central Library Blackhall Branch Library, Edinburgh Pram and bike shelter, Seacroft Branch Library, Leeds Fullwell Cross Library, Redbridge Pollock District Library, Glasgow Adult department, Pollock District Library, Glasgow Cardonald District Library, Glasgow Barking Central Library Adult department, Cardonald District Library, Glasgow Entrance control station, Southborough Library, Bromley

2 3 3 5 5 13 14 34 34 36 38 39 40 41 44 44 94 94 95 96 97 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105

viii Figures 3.15 3.16 3.17 3.18 3.19 3.20 3.21 3.22 3.23 3.24 3.25 3.26 3.27 3.28 3.29 3.30 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 7.1

Southborough Library, Bromley Example of curved shelving Govanhill Library, Glasgow Model of the unbuilt Coventry Central Library St Luke’s Branch Library, Finsbury Knightswood District Library, Glasgow Interior of Knightswood District Library, Glasgow Children’s area, Seacroft Branch Library, Leeds Plan of Ings Branch Library, Hull Garden patio, Horley Library Entrance hall and staff counter, Seacroft Branch Library, Leeds Children’s department, Manor Branch Library, Sheffield Pimlico Children’s Library, Churchill Gardens Estate, Westminster Exhibition area, Stockton-on-Tees Central Library Lecture hall, Stockton-on-Tees Central Library Coffee bar, Stockton-on-Tees Central Library Luton Central Library Lending department, Luton Central Library Norwich Central Library Commercial, Science and Technology Library, Bradford Central Library Entrance hall, Bradford Central Library Model of Newcastle-upon-Tyne Central Library Sketch of the proposed Bromley Central Library The old Finsbury (previously Clerkenwell) Public Library Finsbury Central Library Plan of ground floor of Finsbury Central Library Jesmond Branch Library, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Adult lending department, Jesmond Branch Library, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Bromley Road Branch Library, Lewisham Holborn Central Library Entrance canopy, Holborn Central Library Entrance hall, Holborn Central Library Adult lending department, Holborn Central Library Reference department, Holborn Central Library Hampstead Central Library Model of proposed Hampstead Civic Centre Transparent model of Hampstead Central Library Entrance to Hampstead Central Library View from first-floor exhibition area, Hampstead Central Library Twin spiral staircases, Hampstead Central Library Hampstead Central Library Bourne Hall Library

106 107 108 112 114 115 115 116 120 122 123 125 127 129 129 130 143 144 145 147 148 149 151 153 154 155 156 157 158 163 166 167 167 168 173 174 174 177 178 179 180 185

Figures 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7

Model of Bourne Hall Library and surrounding parkland Plan of ground floor of Bourne Hall Library Reference and study area, Bourne Hall Library Study carrels and central circular skylight, Bourne Hall Library Birmingham Central Library, with Chamberlain Memorial in foreground Plan of Paradise Circus, with Birmingham Central Library Model of Birmingham Civic Centre, with Birmingham Central Library centre stage Central open atrium, Birmingham Central Library Shakespeare Room, Birmingham Central Library Cross-section of Birmingham Central Library Birmingham Central Library nearing completion

ix 186 189 190 191 195 199 200 202 203 204 207

Every reasonable effort has been made to acknowledge the ownership of copyright images included in this volume. Any errors that may have occurred are inadvertent, and will be corrected in subsequent editions provided notification is sent in writing to the publisher.

Preface and acknowledgements

This book is the sequel to Books, Buildings and Social Engineering: Early Public Libraries in Britain from Past to Present (2009), which I co-authored with Simon Pepper and Kaye Bagshaw. Books, Buildings and Social Engineering was the first book-length treatment of the architecture of early British public libraries. The period it examined ended in 1939. The present book takes the story of public library design in Britain into the post-war era, into the age of mature architectural modernism. The temporal focus of the book begins, necessarily, in the mid-1950s because of the effective suspension of library building and planning during the war and in the years of austerity that followed it. My period of investigation ends in the mid-1970s, by which time modernism had begun to lose its sheen and a stuttering economy had begun to pull down the shutters on a golden age of public library development that had matched and, in many respects, surpassed that of the pre-1914 Carnegie era. I term this twenty-year period the long 1960s, hereafter shortened, for economy, to the ‘1960s’ or ‘Sixties’. Leaving behind the historical, revivalist styles that had dominated the first century of their building history, Sixties public libraries were clothed in modernist styles that, although wide-ranging, shared the common experience of being frequently described by contemporaries as ‘bright’ and ‘open’. The use of other descriptors of this kind – ‘airy’ springs to mind – not only referred to relaxing, spacious interiors but also connoted structures, notwithstanding certain brutalist compositions, that had the appearance of being ‘light’ (in the sense of weight) in design and construction. It is the combination of such perceived characteristics which has prompted me to brand these buildings libraries of light. Moving beyond the physical, this description is symbolic of the optimistic times in which ‘libraries of light’ appeared, in terms of the enlightened social progress and economic modernisation that it was hoped would flow from a new Britain, from a New Jerusalem, sustained by a powerful welfare state (the Sixties public library system, it is worth noting, was often conceptualised as a national health service for reading). The theme of light does not run throughout this book like the letters through a stick of seaside rock, but if the stick is broken the word, or theme, ‘light’ can often be seen, either clearly (the theme being addressed directly) or faintly (the theme’s significance made visible by inferences drawn from such built-form characteristics as openness and transparency or from social motives like cultural enlightenment).

xii Preface and acknowledgements This book is necessary first and foremost because to date no monograph has been produced on the subject. This is surprising, given the burgeoning field of architectural history and the energetic productivity of library historians. In seeking explanations for this oversight it might be suggested that library historians may have gravitated towards common-denominator perception of what a library is, or how it should look: that is, something exhibiting a historic, pre-modernist face in keeping with an era when the traditional book had a more secure future. Architectural historians, for their part, have on occasion examined Sixties library buildings, but this has mostly been done in the context of studies of particular architects who included libraries in their portfolios. The failure of architectural history to produce a book-length study of Sixties libraries in Britain is perhaps even more surprising than the failure of library history in this regard when one considers the former’s extensive interest in the design history of the ‘everyday’. One of the main aims of Books, Buildings and Social Engineering was to rehabilitate the early public library built-form, to restore faith in the rationality and inventiveness of pioneer librarians, library architects, and library planners by sounding a note of scepticism about the denigration of pre-1939 public library design. This was achieved by addressing the contexts, or causes, which gave rise to library design. The present book is also an exercise in rehabilitation and so the same methodology is adopted in respect of identifying and examining social determinants and explanations: buildings arise as much from ideas and aspirations as from physical needs. Like early public library buildings, those of the 1960s, especially extant buildings still used for library purposes, have been given – unjustifiably in the main – a ‘bad press’, criticised for exhibiting a dull, flat-roof, box-like, concretesteel-and-glass conformity (conversely, it is one of the aims of this book to reveal the variety of Sixties library styles). As I write, two iconic Sixties central libraries, Birmingham and Bradford, have recently been closed, never to open again as libraries (in fact Birmingham is slated for demolition). Such unfortunate stories engender an ‘I told you so’ attitude. I contend, however, that most negative perceptions of Sixties libraries are blinkered by a deficiency in historical perspective, the ‘collective memory’ hampered by a failure to situate itself in the history of the time. Arguably, the 1960s, contrary to the notion of a ‘failed’ decade, was coloured by considerable optimism and hope relative to today when, despite the proliferation of shiny information and communication technologies and the head-spinning cultural change accompanying them, Western society appears mired in uncertainty about the future. Thus, arising from a desire to position the 1960s in a fairer light, this book adds, albeit modestly, to revisionist assessments of Sixties Britain. By inserting itself into the ‘Sixties debate’, this book engages with the question of whether the welfare state and the planning that came with it – including the planning of the urban environment and the new library buildings that were a part of it – would enslave people or whether these developments would deliver greater happiness and emancipation by encouraging individuals to flourish because they could benefit from collective provision through institutions like libraries. This

Preface and acknowledgements xiii question arose at the end of the war and has endured ever since. One of the theoretical springboards in Books, Buildings and Social Engineering was Karl Popper’s notion of bottom-up, piecemeal – as opposed to top-down, authoritarian, ‘blueprint’ – social engineering. If throughout the history of the British public library before 1939, when over a thousand buildings were opened, the institution’s credentials as a successful, large-scale, consent-driven social-engineering project are considered impressive, these same credentials with regard to the post-war decades are surely emphatic. In the post-war years, respect for the public library grew significantly, and this goes a long way to explaining the energy that was expended in planning, designing, and constructing the hundreds of new buildings that helped fashion a golden age for the public library movement. Of course, whenever invoking the ‘golden age’ concept historians must be careful not to bathe in the warm waters of nostalgia, a temptation that intensifies when the economic climate cools. Today, as we continue to navigate our way through the post-2008 digital-age depression, the concept of the swinging Sixties offers an escape into such balmy climes. It is easy to look back nostalgically on Sixties public libraries and equate them with the pop-culture revolution of the day. But this would undersell the enduring complexity of the public library as a social institution. In truth, Sixties public libraries were more ‘square’ than ‘hip’ – and not just literally. Setting aside the break in library-design history that they constituted, I argue that the ‘squareness’ of Sixties libraries was not because they more often than not recycled the pre-1939 tradition of the predictable, rectangular box-like or slab-like – the analogy can extend to book-like – appearance. Rather, Sixties libraries were ‘square’ in terms of the attributes that a traditionally conservative library profession saw in them. Internally, the provision of non-book cultural spaces reflected librarians’ enthusiasm for ‘establishment’, elite culture, and their desire to disseminate such cultural forms to the masses. Also regarding internal space, librarians celebrated and promoted the open-plan nature of modernist libraries. This was underpinned by an impulse to make the public library, and its professionals, more relevant as well as by librarians’ customary affinity with machine-like sleekness in administration. This techno-bureaucratic machine mentality was complemented by Sixties libraries’ promise of efficiency and their clean lines and simplicity, as well as their ‘lightness’. The time allocated to the fieldwork for, and to the writing of, this book would have been greatly extended if not for the relief from teaching and the financial assistance I received from the University of Illinois, specifically from its Research Board and from my home unit, the School of Information Sciences. Much is made nowadays of the need to import research into teaching. The question of whether this is too ‘instrumental’ a way of looking at the purpose of historical research I’ll leave to another occasion. What I can say here, however, is that too little emphasis is placed on the reverse of the relationship: the importance of teaching as an informer of research. In this regard, I highlight the teaching I have undertaken in recent years under the rubric ‘Library Buildings and Society: From Past to Present’. This teaching has enabled me to enrich my knowledge of the history of library design in the centuries that preceded, and the decades that followed, the

xiv Preface and acknowledgements period I am examining in this book. I appreciate both the intellectual space I was given to develop and deliver this programme of teaching and the large amount I learned from the students who participated. The archivists and local history librarians to whom I am indebted are too numerous to mention. The institutions they represent, however, are visible in those endnotes to the text that contain archival references, while the list of major ‘fieldwork’ and ‘case-study’ libraries given towards the end of the Introduction sheds further light in this regard. I very much appreciate the service I received from the staff of The British Library (especially the ever-helpful assistants in the Reading Room of its Document Supply Centre, Boston Spa) and from staff in the outstanding University of Illinois (at Urbana-Champaign) Library. During the time I spent thinking about this book and committing my ideas to paper, I was helped by a number of individuals – as providers of invaluable information, as people whose work has inspired me, as mentors, as colleagues or as friends. These individuals include, in no special order of importance: Simon Pepper, Dan Schiller, Bonnie Mak, Ken Worpole, Dave Muddiman, Daniel Cho, David Hayes, Peter Hoare, Keith Manley, Toni Bunch, Margaret Hung, Boyd Rayward, Tony Bryant, John Wagstaff, Dick Foster, Sharon Irish, Michael Gorman, Frank Brophy, Kevin Hamilton, Franklin Kramer, Don Krummel, David Cockroft, Matthew Dobson, David Chasco, Fred Schlipf, Nan Dahlkild, Sue Reynolds, Mary Carroll, Paul Sellar, and Chris Murphy. I wish to express my special gratitude to Oriel Prizeman for introducing the theme of light into the literature of library/librarianship history in her book Philanthropy and Light: Carnegie Libraries and the Advent of Transatlantic Standards for Public Space (2012). The present book builds on this work but does so largely temporally, by examining later and earlier periods. It also prioritises the discourse of librarianship over that of architecture, rarely engaging with the technical language of the latter and avoiding the specialised vocabulary of lighting technology (foot-candles, brightness ratios, reflection factors, and so on). Focusing on the library world as a driver of design is not only logical, given my anchorage there, but is also justifiable intellectually, in that whereas in the post-war years the library profession was absorbed by library design and, moreover, gained much greater influence than they had enjoyed previously in the design process, architects rarely specialised in the library field (Basil Spence is one obvious exception). Certainly, there was little sign in the post-war era of the ‘serial’ library architect, a figure who can be identified readily in the pre-1914 period and whose work was revealed in Books, Buildings and Social Engineering. Alistair Black University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

Introduction

For the first hundred years of their history public libraries in Britain were draped in garb of the past.1 Until the beginning of what is conceptualised here as the long 1960s (see definition later in this chapter), the architectural treatment of Britain’s municipal public libraries – institutions which first appeared in the 1850s2 – was dominated by an eclecticism of revivalist styles, from Gothic, Classical and Georgian to Queen Anne, Renaissance and Tudorbethan, and sometimes freestyle permutations of these.3 Victorian and Edwardian architecture, including that of libraries, was addicted to the production of ‘period pieces’, to designs clothed in ‘elaborate historical dress’.4 The cathedral-like Birmingham Reference Library (1882), still providing accommodation for readers in 1973, was a striking manifestation of this addiction (Figure 0.1). The public library promoter Thomas Greenwood described it as ‘an edifice which worthily recalls the richest and finest effects of Italian art’.5 In a commentary on library architecture in 1897, the architect Beresford Pite stated that it was impossible to dictate the style of architecture to be employed for public buildings like public libraries because society was ‘in a position of perfect freedom, with every past architecture in a condition of renaissance’.6 Notwithstanding a move towards more simple historical styles, the historicisation of library design continued into the interwar period, the ‘simplified’ neo-Georgian look, chosen for the Beckenham Public Library, Kent (1939), proving particularly popular (Figure 0.2).7 This backward-looking tradition was eventually broken when, after 1960, hundreds of modernist-style libraries were erected in cities, suburbs and New Towns up and down the country.8 The first of this new kind of library was the Holborn Central Library (1960), which remains a working library and is the subject of a later chapter. Examples of provincial cityor town-centre libraries that adopted striking modernist styles included the Norwich Central Library (1962) (see Figure 4.3) and the Stockton-on-Tees Central Library (1969) (Figure 0.3), both of which contained aspects reminiscent of Mies van der Rohe’s designs for the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago in the 1950s. Hundreds of branch libraries were also brought into the modernist fold (see, for example, Figures 1.3, 1.6, 1.8, 3.19, 4.11).

Figure 0.1 Main reading hall of the Italianate late-Victorian Birmingham Reference Library, photographed in 1973, the year before its demolition. Source: Library of Birmingham Archives; Birmingham City Council.

Figure 0.2 The simplified neo-Georgian, Beckenham Public Library, opened in 1939. Source: London Borough of Bromley Local Studies and Archives.

Figure 0.3 The Miesian, steel-and-glass Stockton-on-Tees Central Library, photographed in 2012 following renovation. Source: Wikimedia Commons, photograph by ‘Petegal-half’.

4 Introduction Post-war public libraries were not, of course, forerunners of building-types that adopted modernism. After the war, modernism became ubiquitous. Approaches that were retardataire were banished, the revolutionary spirit summed up in Pevsner’s concise observation: ‘No columns, no pillars, no arches, no ornament, no contrived monumentality.’9 Thus, for public librarians and their clientele the application of modernism to libraries did not come as a shock. By the time postwar library development got fully underway, the public had already been widely exposed to modernism. In the era of post-war austerity, ‘life-chance’ buildings like hospitals, houses and schools were naturally first in line to be built and, therefore, to receive modernist treatment. More pressing social and economic issues meant that public library development, including the construction of new libraries, remained low on the political agenda for some time after the end of the war. Planning for new libraries did not commence in any meaningful way until the mid-1950s, while the unveiling of new facilities in the modernist style had to wait until the next decade. In retrospect, the post-war interregnum in new library design turned out to be no bad thing: it provided librarians with a chance to take stock, to reassess the past and to acclimatise to the rising culture of modernist design. It also gave them the chance, assisted by a new generation of architects, to plan accordingly – to plan practically and aesthetically, in fact. The architectural modernism of the post-war years was symptomatic of the age’s spirit of renewal. Post-war Britain was not only rebuilt, it was also redesigned.10 The optimism of the period was based in part on the growth of a strong welfare state which provided the financial and moral patronage for the large-scale provision of a range of new public buildings – including libraries – fashioned in a modernist style which in unison constituted a potent ‘social architecture’11 emblematic of a desire to redistribute opportunity and wealth. In this context, it is worth noting that in recent years extensive bodies of work have appeared dealing with the political sociology of the welfare state on the one hand and post-1945 architecture on the other. Each, however, it has been observed, has developed with little reference to the other.12 This study can thus be situated in the gap that has been formed by these two academic areas largely talking past one another. As beacons of enlightened policies promoting social egalitarianism and cultural universalism, the new public libraries that the 1960s brought forth can justifiably be termed libraries of light. This branding does not, however, rely on a ‘political’ metaphor alone; for the new, shining designs of the time, with their open-plan, decluttered, Scandinavian-inspired interiors, were also depicted as literally lighter. Building on earlier advances in lighting standards for libraries,13 Sixties libraries were much more luminous and translucent than their dimly lit predecessors. Many, like Allerton District Library, Liverpool (1965), were also lighter in terms of appearing less ‘weighty’ compared to the heavy architecture of their pre-war ancestors (Figures 0.4 and 0.5). The constant use of the word ‘airy’ in connection with new designs – Exeter’s lending department was described as ‘a wonderfully light, and despite many large areas of quite low ceilings, airy library’14 – contributed to this gravity-defying quality. Symbolically and in reality, therefore, Sixties libraries truly warrant the label libraries of light. Which brings us to the 1960s per se.

Figure 0.4 Lending department, Allerton District Library, Liverpool. Source: Liverpool Record Office.

Figure 0.5 Exterior of Allerton District Library, Liverpool. Source: Liverpool Record Office.

6 Introduction

The long 1960s: a failed age? Whereas the first half of the twentieth century was defined by the two world wars, the iconic period of the second half was, arguably, the decade of the 1960s.15 For a generation after 1950, capitalism enjoyed its longest boom. In the United States, output in 1970 was three times what it had been in 1940. Over the same three decades in France output quadrupled, leading commentators to brand the period there ‘the glorious thirty years’. With increases in production and productivity came rising real wages, lower unemployment and improved welfare provision. During this period it became orthodoxy on both Left and Right to assume that the contradictions in the capitalist economic system identified by Marx had been overcome.16 In Britain, a post-war political settlement brought about consensus in large areas of social and economic policy.17 It was in the period 1950–1973, Hobsbawm argued, that the world became post-industrial, post-imperial, post-Marxist and post-modern. This period saw ‘the greatest and most dramatic, rapid and universal social transformation in human history’; in short, by the mid-1970s it had become a ‘just-in-time’ as opposed to a ‘just-in-case’ world.18 Hobsbawm’s periodisation roughly coincides with the temporal focus of this study which employs the concept the ‘long 1960s’ – defined as the period between the mid-1950s (what Hennessy cites as the end of the ‘short post-war’19 when post-war austerity began to fade, when architectural modernism was in full flood and when meaningful planning for new library buildings finally got underway) and the mid-1970s (when criticism of architectural modernism became rife, when the full effects of the economic downturn ushered in by the 1973 oil crisis began to be felt and when hitherto relatively generous spending on libraries was severely curtailed). (Hereafter in this book, unless qualified, the term ‘1960s’ is used as an abbreviation for the ‘long 1960s’.)20 Although there is general agreement that the 1960s was a period of immense change, the effects of that change are contentious and have been much debated. For decades a battle has been fought over the ownership of the 1960s.21 Is it the property of socialists and libertarians who regard it as a watershed, a golden age, a time when utopia was within grasp but was eventually vanquished by reactionary forces? Or was it a decade of mayhem and disorder, which forged a society which conservatives had to later rescue? In the decades following the 1960s, neo-liberals began to frame the period as a kind of unfortunate episode, a mere blip in Britain’s longer ‘conservative’ history.22 Margaret Thatcher assessed the 1960s as an era when ‘fashionable theories and permissive claptrap’ destroyed ‘old values of discipline and restraint’, and when excessive government intervention propelled Britain’s democratic process in an authoritarian direction,23 sentiments endorsed by some commentators outside the world of politics.24 The Right has been consistent in decrying the decade’s hedonism, loose morals, profligacy in public expenditure and, generally, its abandonment of long-standing disciplines and values which escalated into ‘an orgy of self-indulgence supported on income which had not been earned’.25 The construction of the welfare state, it has been argued, represented an appeasement of the working class by their superiors,

Introduction

7

thereby undermining Britain’s competitiveness and status, rendering Britain, in the opinion of one historian, little more than ‘Italy with rockets’.26 Unsurprisingly, this negative perspective has prompted a reaction from those who reject the thesis of a failed ‘Sixties Britain’ (the debate surrounding the thesis echoes that concerning the Victorian age, views of which, as Joyce conceptualises it, have been distorted as if looking through a rear-view mirror).27 Especially in times of economic depression and social instability, such as that ushered in by the 2008 credit crisis, historians need to be mindful of the dangers of nostalgia (including perceptions of the 1960s as unwaveringly a period deserving of intense celebration), which effectively serves as an investment in the present rather than in good history.28 It is important that the 1960s not be set up as a sacred zone (the swinging Sixties), viewed through rose-tinted glasses that produce a reductive image of progress and ‘light’. Generally, however, revisionist assessments of the decade have not painted it as unequivocally ‘sun-drenched’. How could they, given the continued existence in the period of prejudice in terms of race, gender, disability, class, regional origin or religion (witness the tensions in Northern Ireland), the collapse of the 1964 National Economic Plan, the devaluation of the pound in 1967, persistent industrial strife and the stagflation which almost crippled the economy in 1974–1975? Far from rapidly becoming a New Jerusalem, postwar Britain, despite a progressive rhetoric, retained for some time certain characteristics of the Victorian age: empire, class conflict, slums, soot-laden buildings and, of course, hundreds of outdated libraries. However, whether one sees the 1960s as good or bad, revisions of the decade – and this is of considerable importance to this study – do point to the fact that many people at the time believed that they were living through a new era of hope characterised by a strong sense of social, cultural and economic renewal, even if, ultimately, this optimism may have turned out to be ‘false’.29

Sixties libraries: historiographical failure Like the 1960s generally, Sixties architecture too has polarised opinion. The librarian R.G.C. Desmond wrote disparagingly in 1957 of ‘inhuman glass cubes’ and the ‘sterile concrete and clinical geometry’ which, he observed, were sometimes unfortunate expressions of the functionalism of modern architecture.30 Even before the 1960s had come to a close, the view had begun to emerge that whereas pre-war modernism had many attributes and so could be considered as mostly ‘good’, post-war modernism had been mostly ‘bad’. Those in control of post-war urban design were cast as philistine barbarians: ‘a team of supervillains – planners, architects, academics … [who] had their corrupt, megalomaniac way with the country for thirty years’.31 Historians’ repainting of 1960s politics, culture and society in a better light, however, has made it easier to reassess the decade’s much maligned modernist buildings. Part of the rehabilitation of the 1960s has been the movement to reclaim architectural modernism, which wasn’t, it is argued, as ‘brutish’ as some had claimed.32 Such reassessments should include studies of public libraries. Indeed, just as one of the motives underpinning my work on

8 Introduction Victorian, Edwardian and interwar public library design was to argue for a more generous reassessment of the contribution of pre-Second World War architects, promoters and librarians in this regard, a prime concern of this book is to question the denigration of Sixties library buildings that has arisen out of a retrospective observation and a received image of what a library should look like, our notion of a library’s physical form being very much based on the grand, elaborate reading halls of the Baroque and the Enlightenment.33 Sixties architecture, including that of libraries, remains for many an acquired taste. For example, in a 2006 survey of attitudes about British public library buildings, undertaken by the Mass-Observation Archive, modernist designs of the 1960s were the subject of strong public criticism. Concrete, glass, and flat-roofed libraries were recalled by readers who used them at the time as being ‘soulless’, ‘boring and functional’ and ‘anonymous’. Others in the survey, however, expressed an admiration for modernist libraries, including one respondent who did so as much for the context in which they were constructed as for their style: ‘to me’, she wrote, ‘they represent an optimistic time with the start of the welfare state, a public service rather than the Boots [commercial, for-profit] libraries’.34 This sentiment resonates with a metaphor about public libraries much used in the 1960s: that as a body they constituted a national service for satisfying people’s reading and information requirements as potent in its own way as the work of the National Health Service in meeting citizens’ medical needs. There is no evidence to show that the first wave of modernist libraries that broke over Britain’s urban environment created any notable disquiet among the public (the years after around 1970 are possibly a different matter, as the study of the Birmingham Central Library later in the book implies). For certain, the wave was greeted with enthusiasm by librarians who immersed themselves in its powerful ‘undercurrent’ meaning. New library buildings of the 1960s were the most visible manifestation of librarians’ promotion of a rejuvenated public library movement. They symbolised what librarians believed was a golden age in the movement’s history, on a par with the pre-1914 Carnegie era.35 Indeed, albeit within the relatively narrow world of public librarianship, the sense of professional progress that pervaded the 1960s lends support to the dents that have been made in the aura of failure surrounding the decade. Considering the positive mood that librarians exhibited in the 1960s – reflected in their extensive celebration of new buildings in the library press and the energetic initiatives mounted by the Library Association in support of library-building programmes36 – it is a mystery that historians of libraries have paid so little attention to the decade, and virtually none whatsoever to its building achievements.37 The reasons for this deficiency is unclear. It could be that library historians have viewed the 1960s as too recent a period to study; a period, moreover, that was on the cusp of an information age that brought with it unwelcome predictions concerning the death of the book and the end of libraries. Equally mystifying is the absence of work by architectural historians on Sixties libraries, with the exception of a brief survey by English Heritage,38 the dozen pages devoted to the subject in Harwood’s monumental study of post-war modernism39 and occasional

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partial attention paid to the subject within the context of a wider study.40 After all, architectural historians, conscious of the notion that the unexceptional sometimes contains the richest possibilities for ‘decoding’, have been active in addressing other ‘everyday’ buildings.41 For some reason, however, the humble modernist public library of the 1960s has not been part of the strenuous efforts that have taken place to divert attention from the buildings of the powerful. As with library historians, the reasons for the lack of interest in Sixties libraries on the part of architectural historians is unclear, although it is conceivable that they have been deterred by the general disenchantment with the 1960s.

The dangers of presentism and the primacy of contemporary contexts Whatever the reason for the oversight, and without falling into the trap of presentism, it is important to emphasise that what is happening today offers a strong motive for investigating, analysing and discussing Sixties libraries. There is a remarkable parallel, for example, between the growth-followed-by-crisis complexion of the 1960s and the boom–bust nature of the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century. Over the past generation the design of public libraries – of all kinds of library, in fact – has undergone a renaissance.42 The most celebrated recent example of this renaissance in a British context is the new Library of Birmingham (2013), the largest public library in Europe.43 With recent achievements in library design in mind, therefore, it makes sense to refer back to the previous era of significant advance – the modernist Sixties. This is not because history always repeats itself, for it never does; contexts and human agency are never the same. Sixties public libraries, for example, did not face the same major barriers that confront their twenty-first century descendants, such as reduced support for public services generally and the threat to survival that arises from information-technology utopianism. In pursuing the instrumental rather than the poetic function of history, we learn from the past less in terms of specific mistakes previously made than the role the past plays in helping us assimilate certain principles. In the case of this study, the fundamental principle to be taken on board is that material culture has social causes. Thus, it is possible to argue that the process of identifying the social determinants of past design can encourage today’s designers to take full account of prevailing social factors and contexts. A primary contemporary context highlighted in this book is attitudes to cultural and scientific progress, including those of librarians. Resonating with the ‘two cultures’ debate initiated by C.P. Snow in 1959,44 public libraries had historically grappled with the problem of how much weight they should give to scientific, technical and practical knowledge, on the one hand, and to cultural and imaginative works and activities, on the other. By and large, however, despite the long-running controversy surrounding the provision of ‘trash’ novels from local taxes (the Fiction Debate), public libraries had historically accommodated the two rather well. Their success in doing this continued into the 1960s. In an age when leisure time and opportunities were believed to be expanding, librarians emphasised the

10 Introduction value of culture, and the part they could play in providing it. They also stressed, however, the need to keep pace with the ‘white heat’ of the technological revolution. A major aim of this book is to show how these twin objectives were reflected in the design of the buildings librarians endorsed and helped create. In both their built-forms and their branding, Sixties public libraries gravitated towards the ‘cultural centre’, the many and varied spaces allocated in them for non-book cultural purposes reflecting this. At the same time, however, they adopted a high-tech persona in the form of streamlined modernist designs, akin to what Guillén has termed ‘the Taylorized beauty of the mechanical’.45 Prioritising past contexts and the primary sources that created them guards against presentism (the mistake of looking at the past through the lens of the present). Presentism has been rife in historical thinking about public libraries. As early as the 1930s, Victorian and Edwardian libraries were being criticised for their artistic extravagance and commensurate poverty of utility. In reality, however, as I argued in the prequel to this book,46 pioneer public library planners were deeply concerned with efficiency. Just as Thomas Bodley, in 1698, had hoped his new library in Oxford would be as much for the ‘capacitie and strength and commoditie of students’ as for ‘shewe and statly forme’,47 the new library at Plaistow, in East London (1903) was said to be not only ‘beautifully fitted’ but also ‘usefully-arranged’.48 In 1897 the librarian F.J. Burgoyne told colleagues that: ‘A librarian naturally considers the question of library architecture from the utilitarian point of view rather than from the artistic’.49 This concern for utility is not something which we should allow to be masked by the artistry of the historic styles that were employed, styles which from our perspective can appear incongruous with the industrial age in which the libraries in question were created. The same injustice, I suggest, has befallen Sixties libraries, which are wrongly viewed from our vantage point half a century later as a ‘mistake’. This is not something that those who were creating them at the time would have understood, although it is worth noting the thoughts of the President of the Library Association, Tom Featherstone, who in 1965 astutely predicted that: We have roundly cursed our predecessors for the ornate, inconvenient Carnegie buildings which they bequeathed to us and yet I am convinced that future generations will have equally harsh things to say about the buildings which we are erecting today with such loving care and civic pride.50 While acknowledging that not all Sixties libraries could have stood the test of time, Sixties library planners truly believed they were breaking new ground, their designs propelling the public library service into a new age. They saw beauty in their new libraries, a beauty emanating in particular from their light-rich qualities. The aura of light that characterised Sixties libraries was born of the ‘technologies of brightness’ that were deployed. These were composed not just of electrical fittings and wide expanses of glass but also the open-plan and functional, lightweight and light-feel furniture. In combination these ingredients bestowed upon Sixties libraries distinctiveness, simplicity and lucidity – the word ‘lucidity’ being used here literally,

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in terms of the transparency of Sixties library buildings, and metaphorically, in terms of the fact that they were meant to be easy to understand.

Prelude: anti-ugly action, ‘new beauties’ and Kensington Central Library Questioning the beauty of Sixties libraries – of modernism generally – is not a recent pastime. Criticism of modernism began to appear even as it approached its zenith. In his essay ‘Of the standard of taste’ (1758), the philosopher David Hume argued that beauty was not intrinsic in things. Rather, he surmised: ‘It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them [things]; and each mind perceives a different beauty’.51 Applying this to the world of architecture, a building considered an eyesore by one person might be considered a work of art by another. Equally, an architectural beauty in one generation’s mind can become a monstrosity in the eyes of a later generation. This has certainly been the case with regard to buildings – including libraries – designed in the 1960s. Once heralding the birth of an optimistic new age, post-war modernism in architecture has for decades been in the stocks. In the 1960s, despite the stirrings of a conservation movement irritated by the steamroller redevelopment of urban Britain under the banner of the Modern, the stocks were occupied by historical styles. In the post-war years, neoclassical and neo-Georgian styles, which had only recently been so popular, became increasingly unwelcome. Frustration with traditionalists’ stubborn desire to hang on to history found expression in the formation of the architectural protest group Anti-Ugly Action (AUA). The group, comprising little more than thirty students at its outset, was formed in November 1958. Most were not architects but students from the Stained Glass Department of the Royal College of Art (RCA) in Kensington.52 Holding its meetings in the RCA, the group decided to mount a series of demonstrations targeting buildings that it considered ugly.53 For its first demonstration, on 10 December 1958, it chose to march on two buildings in the Knightsbridge area of London: Caltex House and Agricultural House, both completed in 1957. The former, a concrete and glass building, included certain modern elements in its design, but its entrance was adorned by a metal-covered concrete sculpture of three horses on the roof of its podium. While this was a suitable fanfare for the Prudential Assurance Company which occupied the building, in the opinion of critics such as members of AUA it was also a piece of superfluous ornamentation representing a throwback to past aesthetic atrocities. The group’s second target, Agricultural House, was the monumental neo-Georgian headquarters of the Farmers’ Union. On the way to these two sites the demonstration stopped outside the uncompromisingly modern Bowater House and gave three cheers in appreciation of its architecture. The following night representatives of AUA appeared on the culture-conscious, current affairs television programme Tonight. This was the start of a period of successful media exposure for the group, some of whose members achieved notable media profiles. One such member was the

12 Introduction group’s secretary, Pauline Boty, a founder of the British pop art movement, who moved in social circles that included Bob Dylan and David Hockney, her rebellious art and lifestyle later making her a cult figure for British feminists.54 One of AUA’s best publicised stunts was Boty’s scattering of rose petals on a wreathed coffin outside the new head office of Barclays Bank in the City of London, a building viewed by the group as ‘blindly’ designed, in a style described as ‘between contemporary and traditional’ but leaning towards the latter.55 AUA – which later evolved into the New Architecture Group – had little time for historic architecture (though this is not to say it favoured modernism in all its manifestations). It poured scorn on architectural conservatism and attacked architects who rejected the new orthodoxies of modernism. The group aimed to raise public interest in architecture. A common sight at AUA demonstrations were banners sporting the slogan ‘Outrage, Outrage, Outrage’. This was the group’s most frequently repeated mantra, and was probably borrowed from the title of Ian Nairn’s famous critique of urban development published in a 1955 issue of Architectural Review.56 Another example of environmental ugliness identified by AUA was the Air Ministry in Whitehall (later occupied by the Ministry of Defence). Its brazen neoclassical design was the creation of the veteran architect Vincent Harris. Part of a small but vocal group (including architects like Albert Richardson and H.S. Goodhart-Rendel) that remained unconvinced by the claims of modernism,57 Harris also designed a new but aesthetically ‘retrograde’ central library, opened in 1960, for the Royal London Borough of Kensington.58 A generation earlier he had sculpted the simplified-classical Manchester Central Library (1934). Continuing this tradition, he created for Kensington a substantial library in an ‘English Renaissance’ style, in keeping with the Borough’s esteemed status (Kensington had been dubbed ‘Royal’ in 1901, fulfilling a wish by Queen Victoria to honour her place of birth). At the time, the building, which Harris described as a work of rarely seen ‘architectural good manners’,59 was the largest public library in London. Although including certain modern facilities like a gramophone library, a photographic room and a chute taking returned books from the circulationcontrol point to the stacks below, the building appeared anachronistic at a time in history when people had begun to speak of the ‘space age’. Replete with alcoves, the large reference library aped the grand, hall libraries of the Baroque and the Enlightenment. Roundel busts of Chaucer and Caxton were placed over the main entrance porches and large Portland-stone lion and unicorn figures were mounted on powerful pylons on the south side of the site (Figure 0.6).60 Early in 1959, a year before its opening, an AUA protest, around 350-strong, had marched on Kensington’s soon-to-be-completed library, shouting their familiar war cry, ‘It’s an Outrage’, and wielding placards emblazoned with the same words. Other placards read: ‘FAKE BUILDINGS ARE A SIN’, ‘BRITAIN BUILDS BLINDLY’ and ‘RENAISSANCE MEANS REBIRTH NOT REHASH’ (Figure 0.7). The protesters held a public meeting at Kensington Town Hall to gain further support against the library’s pseudo-classical style.61 A few weeks later AUA involved itself in the campaign mounted to oppose the planned new

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Figure 0.6 Rear of Kensington Central Library, designed by Vincent Harris in an ‘English Renaissance’ style. Source: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Libraries.

city-centre library in Guildford, a stone-clad, neo-Georgian design – ‘the cause of no little controversy’62 – in keeping with nearby Jacobean buildings. The AUA criticised the Guildford Central Library as out of step with the new orthodoxy of modernism.63 Yet, illustrating that not everyone was a convert to modernism, the AUA itself became the subject of criticism by those who admired the Guildford Central Library plan and who lambasted the students’ preference for ‘acres of glass and concrete’.64 The design of Kensington Central Library was in marked contrast to the many contemporary libraries being built or planned at the time. The majority in the professional worlds of both libraries and architecture would have viewed the Kensington design as backward-looking, its ‘opulence and heaviness … suggest[ing] a wealth we have come to dissociate from the building of our affluent age’.65 Commentary on the new library was offered by the architectural correspondent of The Times who wrote, shortly after the library was opened, that it was ‘a manly type of building’. It was an example, he opined, of dignified architecture, its neoclassical idiom having been ‘forcefully handled’ by an experienced architect ‘who was designing important buildings in similar style almost half a century ago’. Hidden within this apparent compliment, however, lurked a slight. Indeed, the correspondent went on to comment that the dressing up of an admittedly well-planned, modern, steel-framed building was ‘somewhat ridiculous’, especially in light of how much contemporary architects had done ‘to evolve new beauties [my emphasis] out of new techniques and structures’.66

14 Introduction

Figure 0.7 Anti-Ugly Action demonstration in 1959, protesting against the design of Kensington Central Library. Source: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Libraries.

This study features a particular set of these modernist ‘new beauties’ of the postwar years: public library buildings. Breaking free from their Victorian and Edwardian design heritage, which as late as 1960 was in evidence in the form of Harris’ Kensington Central Library, the new public library buildings of the 1960s reflected an age of optimism and modernisation, when faith in the post-war welfare state was at its height and when the outlook of professional librarians was becoming more progressive. The future that Sixties librarians envisaged was bright, and this brightness was reflected in the most common physical characteristic attributed to new library buildings of the time – light. The luminosity – the sparkling look, indeed – of post-war libraries, fashioned by the liberal use of glass, the adoption of fluorescent lighting, the decluttering of interiors and the drawing of clean lines contrasted sharply with the gloom and heaviness of the pre-war public library, especially buildings dating from before the First World War.

Plan of the book References to the open, light-saturated post-war public library complemented both its credentials as a public-sphere institution and its anchorage in Britain’s welfare state. This symbolic relationship forms the basis of Chapter 1. The long journey to Sixties ‘libraries of light’ is initially comprehended by an exploration

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of the social and political (in the sense of power-mediated) history of light. Specifically, this history revolves around the emergence of an oligoptic society arising out of an Enlightenment whose facets map closely onto the philosophy of the post-war, welfare-state public library. It was a philosophy which chimed with the impulse to create a new Britain forged out of a war that was fought in the name of democracy and of freedom of thought and expression. Stages in the development of ‘library light’, from the era of the Enlightenment library onwards, are identified and described. The identification of long-term influences gives way to discussion of contemporary contexts in Chapter 2 which describes the post-war climate of cultural and economic modernisation, including the rise of architectural modernism. Attempts to modernise Britain were to a degree paralleled by developments in the library world, including the progress of the library profession. Attitudes to culture, innovations in technology and initiatives in economic policy were echoed in the discourse of public librarianship. However, hinting at the book’s concluding explanation of the built-form of Sixties libraries, attention is paid not just to librarians’ enthusiasm for change in post-war Britain but also a residual cultural conservatism in the library profession which prioritised traditional cultural activities and the development of techniques and systems. Librarians’ cultural conservatism in certain matters – shared by the broad Left – was not in keeping with the principle of comprehensiveness enshrined in the Public Libraries Act (1964). The intended modernisation of the library profession did much to stimulate, and was in turn stimulated by, the explosion of modernist libraries. Following an empirical account of this evolution, including policy initiatives on the part of the Library Association, attention is paid to the importation of ideas from Scandinavia, to which a number of librarians travelled in the 1950s and 1960s. Chapter 3 examines issues of style, siting and space. Notwithstanding the almost universal characteristics of openness and light in interiors – summed up by one commentator as offering library readers, at last, ‘room to breathe’67 – an attempt is made to formulate a taxonomy of modernist library styles comprising the categories ‘utility’, ‘no frills’, ‘Scandinavian light’, ‘glass-and-steel box’, ‘expressionist’ and ‘brutalist’.68 Regarding siting, Sixties library development was characterised by the construction of both large city/central, and smaller district and branch, libraries. Yet there is evidence to suggest that librarian patricians were especially interested in larger projects because these tended to reflect well on the status of the profession. Both grand and modest facilities, however, were the subject of a desire to fashion new libraries as ‘cultural centres’. New buildings, large and small, were fitted with a range of non-book cultural spaces such as exhibition areas, theatres and music departments. These spaces mostly echoed librarians’ interest in elite culture, although popular culture was at times catered for in the form of such facilities as coffee bars and, to a degree, meeting rooms. Chapter 4 examines a series of flagship buildings. The large, central library is represented by Luton (1962), Norwich (1962), Bradford (1967), Newcastle-uponTyne (1968) and Bromley (1977). Finsbury (1967) was a notable design of

16 Introduction medium size, while Bromley Road, Lewisham and Jesmond, Newcastle-uponTyne, both opened in 1963, are fine examples of the small branch library. In the context of these designs, issues of style, siting and space are again highlighted, but note is also made of the way these elements, and that of light, at times intersected in individual buildings. The book’s final chapters are devoted to case studies of four iconic Sixties libraries. The ‘Scandinavian light’ Holborn Central Library (1960) (Chapter 5), by Sydney Cook, was the first large-scale modernist library to be opened after the war. Basil Spence’s obloid-shaped Hampstead Public Library (1964) (Chapter 6) represented a bold effort to escape from the box-like monotony of over a century of library design, including designs that corresponded to a predictable, rectangular modernism. The domed, ‘flying-saucer’ Bourne Hall Public Library (1970) (Chapter 7), by another Festival-of-Britain architect, A.G. Sheppard Fidler, which shared premises with a museum and social facilities, was a striking example not only of ‘space-age’ modernism but also the Sixties library as ‘cultural centre’. John Madin’s Birmingham Central Library (1974) (Chapter 8) was the most notable – but for others the most notorious – example not only of library ‘brutalism’ but also of library planning as an integral part of modernist civic planning on a grand scale.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8

A. Black, S. Pepper and K. Bagshaw, Books, buildings and social engineering: Early public libraries in Britain 1850–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009). A. Black, A new history of the English public library: Social and intellectual contexts 1850–1914 (London: Leicester University Press, 1996); A. Black, The public library in Britain, 1914–2000 (London: The British Library, 2000). Some libraries were treated in styles that represented a transition between revivalism and modernism, such as art nouveau and art deco, but these were few in number. S. Giedion, Space, time and architecture: The growth of a new tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947), 115. T. Greenwood, Free public libraries (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1886), 70. B. Pite, Library architecture from the architect’s standpoint, Transactions and proceedings, of the Second International Library Conference held in London July 13–16, 1897 (London, 1898), 109. Beckenham Public Library had separate entrances for the junior and adult spaces. The junior library could be converted into a lecture hall. Rooms were positioned so that the reference and junior libraries could overlook the garden. The building was said to have been designed in a ‘well-proportioned modern style’, its appearance ‘enhanced by the wide grass plots and paved paths facing the main elevation’: Borough of Beckenham, Official opening of the central library (Beckenham, 1939). Unless stated otherwise, the terms ‘modernist’ and ‘modernism’ are used in this book in an architectural context. They are preferred to the term ‘modern’ – as in modern architecture – because of its connotations of something that is simply ‘existing now’, ‘new’, ‘improved’, ‘up-to-date’ or of ‘recent origin’. They are also indicative of a zeitgeist that goes beyond the work of the Modern Movement which specifically relates to the experimental art and writing of the fifty-year period before the Second World War. On the definition and history of ‘modern’, see R. Williams, Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society (London: Flamingo, 1983), 208–209.

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17

9 N. Pevsner, A history of building types (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976), 110. To be precise, this comment was aimed at the ‘International Style’ which had entered the architectural vocabulary before 1939. 10 A. Marwick, Culture in Britain since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 50–55. 11 A. Saint, Towards a social architecture: The role of school-building in post-war England (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1987). 12 M. Swenarton, T. Avermaete and D. van den Heuvel, Introduction, in M. Swenarton, T. Avermaete and D. van den Heuvel (eds), Architecture and the welfare state (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 1. 13 O. Prizeman, Philanthropy and light: Carnegie libraries and the advent of transatlantic standards for public space (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012). 14 Exeter: New central, in J.D. Reynolds (ed.), Library buildings 1965 (London: Library Association, 1966), 34. In the Exeter lending library the architect planned for maximum natural light, this being brought into the library through a south-facing wall of huge floor-to-ceiling windows. 15 A. Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States c.1958–c.1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 16 C. Harman, Zombie capitalism: Global crisis and the relevance of Marx (London: Bookmarks Publications, 2009), 161. 17 Some, however, have viewed the post-war consensus as an exaggeration. There may well have been a certain degree of consensus but not throughout the period (there was more agreement perhaps in the immediate post-war decades) nor in all areas (there was more common ground, for example, on unemployment than on nationalisation): H. Jones and M. Kandia (eds), The myth of consensus: New views on British history, 1945–64 (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1996). 18 E. Hobsbawm, The age of extremes: The short twentieth century, 1914–1991 (London: Abacus, 1995), 288, 404. 19 P. Hennessy, Having it so good: Britain in the Fifties (London: Penguin, 2007), 2. 20 Annual growth of per capita GDP averaged only 1.5 per cent, 1973–1979, compared to 2.9 per cent, 1968–1973. Inflation, 1973–1979 averaged 16 per cent. The mid-1970s brought an end to post-war economic optimism and the notion that mass unemployment had been defeated. See R. Pope, The British economy since 1914: A study in decline (London: Longman, 1998), 52, 62. Regarding architecture specifically, A. Powers, Britain: Modern architectures in history (London: Reaktion Books, 2007) has neatly characterised the period in question as being bounded by ‘White heat and burnout’ (title of Chapter 4). 21 G. DeGroot, The 60s unplugged: A kaleidoscopic history of a disorderly decade (London: Macmillan, 2008). 22 C. Barnett, The lost victory: British dreams, British realities 1945–1950 (London: Macmillan, 1995); C. Barnett, The audit of war: The illusion and reality of Britain as a great nation (London: Macmillan, 1996). 23 M. Thatcher, What has gone wrong? In D. Coates and J. Hillard (eds), The economic decline of modern Britain: The debate between Left and Right (Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1986), 64, 66. 24 Such as by the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, The de-moralization of society: From Victorian virtues to modern values (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1994). 25 Marwick, Culture in Britain since 1945, op. cit., 67. 26 A. Roberts, Eminent Churchillians (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994), 3. 27 Examples of Sixties re-evaluations include: A. Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States c.1958–c.1974, op. cit.; J. Agar, What happened in the Sixties? British Journal of the History of Science, 41/4 (2008), 567–600; D. Sandbrook, White heat: A story of Britain in the swinging Sixties (London: Abacus, 2006). On the reassessment of the Victorians, see S. Joyce, The Victorians in the rearview mirror (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007).

18 Introduction 28 T. Wollen, Over our shoulders: Nostalgic screen fictions for the 1980s, in J. Corner and J. Harvey, Enterprise and heritage (London: Routledge, 1991), 179–180. 29 Marwick, Culture in Britain since 1945, op. cit., 178–185. 30 R.G.C. Desmond, Some unquiet thoughts on public library architecture, Library Association Record, 59/3 (March 1957), 85. 31 J. Grindrod, Concretopia: A journey around the rebuilding of postwar Britain (Brecon: Old Street Publishing, 2013), 15. 32 E. Harwood, Space, hope and brutalism: English architecture 1945–1975 (London: Historic England, 2015); B. Calder, Raw concrete: The beauty of brutalism (London: Cornerstone, 2016); O. Hatherley, Militant modernism (Winchester: O Books, 2008); C. Beanland, Concrete concepts: Brutish buildings around the world (London: Frances Lincoln Publishers, 2016); R. Elwall, Building a better tomorrow: Architecture in Britain in the 1950s (Chichester: Wiley Academy, 2000); N. Bullock, Building the post-war world: Modern architecture and reconstruction in Britain (London: Routledge, 2002); Saint, Towards a social architecture, op. cit.; Grindrod, Concretopia, op. cit.; J. Meades, Bunkers, brutalism and bloodymindedness: Concrete poetry, broadcast by the BBC, 20 February 2014, retrieved 10 January 2016 from: www.bbc. co.uk/programmes/b03vrphc; J. Meades, The incredible hulks: Jonathan Meades’ A-Z of brutalism, The Guardian (13 February 2014), retrieved 10 January 2015 from: www. theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/13/jonathan-meades-brutalism-a-z. 33 Jeffrey Garrett, The legacy of the Baroque in virtual representations of library space, Library Quarterly, 74/1 (2004), 42–62. 34 The survey is summarised in A. Black, ‘We don’t do public libraries like we used to.’ Attitudes to public library buildings in the UK at the start of the twenty-first century, Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 43/1 (March 2011), 36. 35 On the methodological issues regarding library ‘golden age’ thinking see: G.K. Peatling, Discipline and the discipline: Histories of the British public library, Libraries & Culture, 38/2 (Spring 2003), 121–146; and A. Black and D. Muddiman, Myths of a golden age, Library Association Record, 99/5 (May 1997), 256. 36 E.g. in date order: Three new central libraries, Library Association Record, 62/11 (November 1960), 369–374; Library Association, Public library buildings: The way ahead (London, 1960); London and Home Counties Branch of the Library Association, Design in the library (London, 1960); S.G. Berriman and K.C. Harrison, British public library buildings (London: Andre Deutsch, 1966); J.D. Reynolds (ed.), Library buildings 1965 (London: Library Association, 1966); London and Home Counties Branch of the Library Association, Library buildings: Design and fulfilment (London, 1969); S.G. Berriman, Library buildings 1967–1968 (London: Library Association, 1969); London and Home Counties Branch of the Library Association, New London Libraries (London, 1969); H. Ward (ed.), Better library buildings: Architect/librarian co-operation in their design (London: Library Association London and Home Counties Branch, 1969); A. Longworth, British public library buildings, in H.A. Whatley (ed.), British librarianship and information science 1966–1970 (London: Library Association, 1972), 204–212; H. Ward and S. Odd (eds), Library buildings: 1972 issue (London Library Association, 1973); H. Ward (ed.), New library buildings: 1976 issue: Years 1973–1974 (London: Library Association, 1976). 37 Such work has been undertaken in Denmark: N. Dahlkild, Biblioteket I tid og rum: arkitektur, indretning og formidling [The library in time and space: Architecture, design and communication] (Copenhagen: Danmarks Biblioteksforening, 2011), 215–248. 38 English Heritage, The English public library 1945–1985 (London: English Heritage, 2013). 39 Harwood, Space, hope and brutalism, op. cit., 463–474. 40 E.g. regarding Birmingham Central Library, see A. Clawley, John Madin (London: RIBA, 2011).

Introduction

19

41 R. Evans, Translations from drawing to building and other essays (London: Architectural Association, 1997), 56, 89. Studies of a range of ‘everyday’ buildings are catalogued in Black et al., Books, buildings and social engineering, op. cit., 21, n. 38. 42 On the UK, see M. Dewe, Planning public library buildings: Concepts and issues for the librarian (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); A. Kahn, Better by design: An introduction to planning and designing a new library (London: Facet, 2009); and, especially, K. Worpole, Contemporary library architecture: A planning and design guide (London: Routledge, 2013). For design developments outside Britain, especially in Europe, see A. Black and N. Dahlkild (eds), Library design from past to present, special issue of Library Trends, 60/1 (Summer 2011); C. Höffer, Libraries (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005); J.H. Larson, Nordic public libraries 2.0 (Copenhagen: Danish Agency for Libraries and Media, 2010); K. Latimer and H. Niegaard, IFLA library building guidelines (Munich: K.G. Saur, 2007); Netherlands Architecture Institute, The architecture of knowledge: The future of the library (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2010); H. Niegaard, J. Lauridsen and K. Schulz (eds), Library space: Inspiration for builders and design (Copenhagen: Danish Library Association, 2009); K. Smith and J.A. Flannery, Library design (Kempen, Germany: teNeues Publishing, 2007); and J. Thorhauge, Nordic public libraries: The Nordic cultural sphere and its public libraries (Copenhagen: Danish National Library Authority, 2002). Regarding the USA, see S. Mattern, The new downtown library: Designing with communities (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Library design trends can be accessed through a number of websites, including: OpenBuildings/Libraries, retrieved 6 March 2015 from: http://openbuildings.com/buildings/grid?field_values%5Bprogramme%5D%5B0 %5D=885; and Designing Libraries, retrieved 27 February 2015 from www. designinglibraries.org.uk/. 43 H. Watson, Library of Birmingham, Architectural Design, 80/1 (2010), 142–143. 44 C.P. Snow, The two cultures and the scientific revolution: The Rede Lecture, 1959 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1961). 45 M.F. Guillén, The Taylorized beauty of the mechanical: Scientific management and the rise of modernist architecture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 46 Black et al., Books, buildings and social engineering, op. cit. 47 B.H. Streeter, The chained library: A survey of four centuries in the evolution of the English library (London: Macmillan, 1931), xiii. 48 A millionaire in the East, South Essex Mail (16 May 1903). 49 F.J. Burgoyne, Public library architecture from the librarian’s standpoint, Transactions and proceedings of the Second International Library Conference held in London July 13–16, 1897, op. cit., 103. 50 T.M. Featherstone, An end and a beginning, Assistant Librarian, 58/10 (October 1965), 194. 51 D. Hume, Of the standard of taste, in English essays from Sir Philip Sidney to Macaulay: With introductions, notes, and illustrations, 27 (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1910), 218. 52 G. Stamp, Anti-ugly: Excursions in English architecture and design (London: Aurum, 2013), 9. 53 It is likely that the minority of these students were architects, the majority artists; there were some architects at the RCA at the time, but the postgraduate course in architecture had not yet been started: correspondence from Simon Pepper (21 October 2013). 54 Men of the year, Architects’ Journal (21 January 1960), 104–106; Pauline Boty, the Anti-Uglies and Bowater House in Knightsbridge (20 February 2013), retrieved 4 October 2013 from www.nickelinthemachine.com/2013/02/pauline-boty-the-antiuglies-and-bowater-house-in-knightsbridge-2/. 55 Home for Barclay squares, The Architects’ Journal (22 January 1959), 130, 131. 56 I. Nairn, Outrage, Architectural Review (June 1955), 365–456. In the article, Nairn coined the term ‘Subtopia’, by which he meant ‘the universal sub-urbanization not

20 Introduction

57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68

merely of the country, or of the town, but of town-and-country’ (366). Subtopias were neither purely town nor purely country. Rather, they were wasteful and dreary ‘intermediate’ landscapes, banal and lacking in individuality, littered with such detritus as wire fences, traffic roundabouts, advertising hoardings, car parks, electricity pylons, and abandoned aerodromes and military installations from the Second World War. Subtopia, wrote Nairn, brought ‘poles, wires, shacks and signs from the fringe of one town and scatters them all the way to the next’ (374). Powers, Britain: Modern architectures in history, op. cit., 231. Kensington Central Library, Official Architecture and Planning (November 1960), 506–509. Daily Telegraph (26 January 1959, 5 February 1959). Kensington Central Library, Official Architecture and Planning (November 1960), 506. Daily Telegraph (26 January 1959, 5 February 1959); Manchester Guardian (5 February 1959). New library opens, Guildford Today (September 1962), 5. Guildford Central Library was part of a larger scheme which included the restoration of a seventeenth-century building that was made into a cultural centre and renamed Guildford House. This played a part in determining the style, narrowness and tallness of the library: Guildford Central Library: Comments, Library Association Record, 65/12 (December 1963), 495. Letter from G. Mervyn, Daily Telegraph (4 April 1959). B. Platts, Patronage and pattern at the library, Country Life (2 March 1967), 475. New library an architectural curiosity, The Times (13 July 1960). Editorial, Library Association Record, 62/12 (December 1960), 345. This taxonomy has been formulated in part by having consulted general discussions of modernist styles, including: E. Relph, The modern urban landscape (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1987), 198–203; O. Hopkins, Architectural styles: A visual guide (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2014).

1

The long journey to libraries of light

The ‘libraries of light’ described and discussed in this book were the result of centuries of progress in the physical illumination of library space and, through the books libraries provided, in intellectual enlightenment also. Effectively, Sixties libraries were the culmination of a three-hundred-year journey, across the age of modernity, from darkness and shadow to openness and light.

The welfare-state public library and its Enlightenment roots The journey towards Sixties ‘libraries of light’ originated in the Enlightenment. Summed up by the challenge ‘dare to know’, and encompassing the aim of banishing fear, ignorance and superstition by means of reason and ‘scientific’ knowledge, the term ‘Enlightenment’ stands for the idea of a ‘new sense of a light flooding into hitherto darkened places’.1 Light provides the means to ‘see’ which, as a metaphor for understanding, places it at the heart of modernity.2 The intellectual developments and changed attitude of mind which the Enlightenment brought moulded the principles that informed the post-war, welfare-state public library. They also created a new template for library design which found its most radical expression in the light-rich, open-plan modernist libraries of the long 1960s. In the era of the welfare-state public library, the provision of books and associated cultural activities grew sharply and a new ethos of service appeared. The period also witnessed a large programme of renewal in the physical infrastructure of the public library system. Contemplating the pre-1960 history of public libraries, the Library Association’s review of new library buildings for 1973–1974 declared that: ‘Too many monumental white elephants litter our towns and cities’; but, the review continued, times had changed, and in evaluating the buildings of the 1960s and early 1970s it suggested that this period ‘may well prove to be something of a golden era of library buildings to rival that which led … to Carnegie libraries, which must at that time have seemed miraculous’.3 Public libraries became an integral part of the welfare state. A 1960s text promoting careers in librarianship noted: Just as the idea that a citizen has a right to security, health and a livelihood has developed into the present ‘welfare state,’ so the idea that man also needs

22 The long journey to libraries of light sustenance for the mind has developed into the intellectual welfare state in which the public-library system plays an important role.4 The welfare-state credentials of the Sixties public library were underlined by the frequent associations made at the time with the flagship of the welfare state, the National Health Service (NHS). The public library was often metaphorically described as ‘an NHS of the mind’, an image which built on the long-standing mantra that a library was the ‘dispensary for the healing of the soul’,5 and which continues to be broadcast today.6 The road to the welfare state that so nurtured public libraries after the war, in terms of both their purpose and physical form, can be traced back – albeit in a line that in places is inevitably crooked and discontinuous – to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Libraries first appeared in antiquity, but what one can call the ‘modern’ library, exhibiting an ethos of progress linked to self-realisation and rational discovery, is a product of the Enlightenment. In the eighteenth century, alongside libraries embedded in historic educational and ecclesiastical institutions, social libraries, both the commercial and subscription kinds, became one of the major, sacred spaces of modernity and a core element in what is now referred to as the ‘Habermasian public sphere’.7 Providing an open marketplace for ideas, public-sphere libraries were institutions of ‘democratic communication’ and a ‘public good’.8 The ethos of public-sphere libraries was founded on the philosophical and political principles of the European Enlightenment which emphasised the link between improvement and progress and the ‘scientific’ investigation of nature and society. The ultimate purpose of such libraries was summed up in the opening paragraph of a late-seventeenth-century pamphlet promoting the library movement in Scotland, An Overture for Founding and Maintaining of Bibliothecks in Every Paroch Throughout the Kingdom (1699): It is as essential to the nature of Mankind to be desirous of Knowledge as it is for them to be rational Creatures, for we see no other end or use for our Reason but to seek out and search for Knowledge of all these things of which we are Ignorant.9 Over a century and a half the public library has continued this noble tradition, coming to embody the principles of human rights, liberty, equality and freedom of thought, expression and association.10 We can frame the contribution of public libraries to society in Enlightenment thinking. Since its inception in the middle of the nineteenth century, the municipal public library in Britain has developed as part of a social policy infused with Enlightenment principles, both idealist-rational and utilitarian-empirical.11 Public libraries have been public goods that epitomise the public sphere. They have been defined by selfless service on the part of the professionals who run them and by geographical and social universality. Their identity is that of a safe public place (or public square) insulated from the logic of the market and welcoming of free and critical expression.12

The long journey to libraries of light

23

In order to establish the precise nature of the relationship between the public library and the welfare state it is important to establish the latter’s philosophical origins. The lineage of the welfare state flows back through liberalism and socialism, both of which emerged out of Enlightenment thinking and shared certain beliefs and assumptions about social and economic progress, such as the importance of providing ‘security’ for individuals and increasing their opportunities. In Britain, liberal philosophy was imbued with political power from the middle of the nineteenth century. Characterised in a schizoid fashion by both laissez-faire principles and social reform (the latter seeping into social conservatism), liberalism constructed the foundations of the welfare state in a series of reforms in the decade preceding the First World War, including old age pensions, national insurance and free school meals. A generation later, it was a liberal intellectual, William Beveridge, who built on these foundations and, in his famous report in the Second World War,13 helped pave the way towards a fully fledged post-war welfare state, the contours of which eventually stretched well beyond the mere provision of welfare, reaching up into the heights of economic management and even education and culture, including public libraries. By contrast, socialist thought in Britain – infused with Marxism but driven largely by a pragmatic, trade-union-led struggle for improved worker rights, wages and conditions – did not achieve significant political influence for three-quarters of a century after liberalism’s rise to power. Arguably, however, it made the larger contribution to the establishment of the post-war welfare state.14 Although agreeing on the need for social progress and emancipation, liberalism and socialism grated against each other on many issues, including the redistribution of wealth and the ownership of means of production. They also diverged regarding the motivation behind support for the welfare state, liberals seeing social reform as a means of dampening discontent and improving the imperial race, socialists preaching a discourse of innate rights to a life free from poverty and oppression. These differences aside, however, in the micro-realm of the public library there was a strong tradition of liberal–socialist consensus. Politically, the public library in Britain has been, enduringly, a liberal–socialist, or Lib–Lab, project. It was this ideological anchorage which gave the post-war public library, once economic conditions had improved, such a secure position in British social and cultural life. Because the welfare state found its ‘condition of possibility’ essentially in the ‘egalitarian vocation’ of Enlightenment thinking,15 the welfare-state public library, imbued as it was with an ethos – if not necessarily always a heritage – of equality of access, was able to thrive in a post-war world that promised a fairer distribution of wealth and power. Underpinning post-war public library philosophy, notwithstanding the suspicions expressed by some of the ‘planning’ and centralised aspects of the welfare state, was the public-sphere notion of the informed, critical citizen, the absence of which in various European societies had led to interwar authoritarianism and, ultimately, to war. The notion of the critical citizen was at the heart of Enlightenment thought. In asking ‘What is Enlightenment’, Kant, in 1784, explained that the more people engaged in literacy, the more ‘mature’ they became. Enlightenment, he wrote, helped humanity ‘exit from its self-incurred

24 The long journey to libraries of light immaturity [my emphasis]’, which he defined as the inability to make use of one’s understanding without the guidance of another. ‘Immaturity’, said Kant, was the ‘state under which dependent vassals lived’, whereas independent thinkers were the basis of a free society. ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding’ was for Kant the motto of the Enlightenment.16 Although it is true that as the twentieth century progressed society’s critical function came under pressure from a political public sphere increasingly reliant on public relations (or, to use the modern vernacular, spin),17 it can be argued that the war, and the welfare state to which it gave rise, strengthened social criticism and encouraged free thought, thereby delivering, in Enlightenment vocabulary, ‘a larger number of voices jostling to be heard’.18 This change of social tone was reflected in the librarian Lionel McColvin’s wartime report on the condition and future of the public library system in Britain, in which he promoted libraries as ‘a great instrument and bulwark of democracy’. Civilisation and free access to books, both of which the Axis powers had abandoned, were, in McColvin’s view, closely intertwined. Books and libraries, said McColvin, were essential to the ‘real democratic conditions of living’; they were ‘the tools and the symbols of true freedom’.19 Marking the centenary of the public library in 1950, McColvin also celebrated the fact that Britain had kept its libraries ‘free from any kind of bias or ulterior motive’, maintaining them as ‘a free opportunity and thus hospitable to all varieties of creed and opinion’.20 For J.H. Wellard, another librarian writing at about the same time, the significance of the public library, which he believed had come of age in the war, was in its ‘contribution to the general welfare of democracy’. In common with the free church, free school and free press, public libraries were ‘the instruments of those democratic ideas which Fascism abhors’. The ‘ultimate work’ of libraries, wrote Wellard, was ‘making free knowledge available to free men’.21 In the same vein, the architect E.H. Ashburner (who in the 1930s had designed Huddersfield Public Library and had also been heavily involved in designing Sheffield Central Library) proclaimed the public library to be the ‘university of a democratic people’. The proper functioning of a democracy, he argued, depended on the intelligence of the people, and building libraries supported these democratic strivings.22 Further, aside from the desire to create citizens attuned to rational debate and to critical thought, other grand narratives of the Enlightenment were harnessed by the welfare-state public library: tolerance; non-sectarianism; the encouraging of general, as opposed to particular, interests; universal provision; zero or near-zero cost of access to institutions; and inclusiveness (although this final grand narrative needs to be qualified by the fact that the definition and ‘shape’ of inclusiveness in connection with the public library was to be vigorously challenged in the 1970s).23 In the post-war years it became even clearer that libraries and modernity were inseparable. The accumulation of new knowledge was seen as the core function of the library: ‘Nothing is newer than a library’, claimed the American librarian William Randall.24 In 1950 the publisher Raymond Unwin equated the role and philosophy of libraries with the individual freedoms and rights encapsulated in the ethos of the welfare state. The purpose of libraries in a democratic society was, he

The long journey to libraries of light

25

wrote, ‘to encourage individual citizens to learn how to think things out for themselves … to live a full creative life of their own’.25 It was believed that the Sixties public library had the power, in the words of the library educator Ken Jones, to ‘open the mind of the rational, truth-seeking citizen to a whole range of opinion, giving him both sound judgement and tolerance’.26 It was believed that governments and municipalities had a duty, as F.G.B. Hutchings stated, ‘to provide their residents with information and access to ideas, just as they have a duty to provide water, street lighting and the three Rs’.27 Public libraries, said one government report, would help people ‘get a better understanding of their own culture and of the cultures of other communities’.28 In the tradition of Enlightenment thinking, the acquisition of common, or public, knowledge through public libraries was seen as a means of building a cooperative life. If Enlightenment thinking culminated in a golden age of public library provision and purpose, it also resulted in an optimisation of openness in library design. In the context of the post-war public library, democratic enlightenment (improving opportunities for the absorption of ‘intellectual light’ by mass society) and physical enlightenment (the actual increase in the luminosity of buildings) became closely and symbolically linked. This is a thesis which echoes Manguel’s poetic observations that ‘the words on a page call out for light’ and in turn create ‘light’, libraries permitting their readers to vanquish time and space by summoning up knowledge out of the darkness, from the literary and intellectual ‘spirits of the ages’,29 or as John Milton put it regarding this metaphor, ‘a good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master-spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d upon a purpose to a life beyond life’.30 The quest for a new cultural enlightenment and openness that post-war librarians began to announce (although, as we shall see, this requires sensitive qualification) was symbolised in, and accentuated by, a move towards an enhanced lucidity in library designs, secured by open-plan layouts and complemented by floods of light emanating from large windows and from a new form of artificial illumination, notably fluorescent lighting. This story of ‘library light’ was, however, just one of many episodes in the history of light.

The ‘political’ history of light: the emergence of oligoptic society Light has a ‘political’ history. It is integral to the operation and experience of power.31 As Otter has commented, ‘who can see what, whom, when, where and how’ is inherently political. Light has had a critical role to play in surveillance and discipline, in display and spectacle, and in emancipation and freedom. Mythically radiant and a radical departure from the ‘gloom’ of societies that were static, superstitious, absolute and closed, modernity has nonetheless evinced a darker side. Light has been central to the panoptic project and the resultant invasion of personal privacy. It has also contributed to the floodlit overpowering nature of commodity capitalism – from round-the-clock production to the illuminated shopping arcade – under whose influence societies have fallen over the past two centuries. In this context, it is not surprising that William Morris believed there was

26 The long journey to libraries of light something vulgar about gas and electricity. Regarding modernity’s positive side, ‘show’ has formed an important element in the emergence of urban brilliance, people being liberated by the flooding of urban centres with light and by the opening up of cities and towns through street widening, the wider provision of urban spaces and the sweeping away of the pernicious, secluded courts and ‘blind’ alleys of the poor. Modernity has brought with it a flourishing of cultural enlightenment, featuring ‘public sphere’ places – theatres, exhibition spaces, museums, art galleries, libraries among them – where observation has been less about surveillance and more to do with mutual oversight. This behaviour has been theorised as a function of ‘oligoptic space’ – space in which individuals freely monitor each other; where the ‘viewed’ are at liberty to return a glance and there is freedom not only to look and be looked at but also to withdraw into privacy at will.32 Feeding into Sixties ‘libraries of light’ was a flourishing oligoptic civilisation that had been emerging since the Enlightenment. Latour’s notion of oligoptic society – reductively termed the ‘oligopticon’ – was the antithesis of Foucault’s conceptualisation of modern society as ‘panoptic’ society.33 Whereas Bentham’s panopticon prison, as interpreted by Foucault, operated an omniscientific, absolute, universal and centralised oversight, the gaze of the oligopticon was dispersed and democratic, operating through multiple surveillance nodes in a network which Latour referred to as the connectique. Social actors in the oligopticon didn’t observe full panoramas of social life; rather they spied small amounts of a lot of things, or narrow views of the connected whole. Employing this methodology, it would be possible, for example, to draw a map depicting how a certain theory or idea travels through society, immaterial ideas being physically transported through materiality of media. Analysing the formulation of knowledge by studying the interactions of actors and networks would involve the noting not only of social ties, but also associations made of non-social ties, where individuals are connected via intermediary media, whether databases, scholarly journals or more ephemeral means.34 A vivid example of this approach is Darnton’s account of informal news networks in pre-revolutionary Paris, where a vibrant, countercensorship public-sphere culture was formed by the activities of newsmongers transferring oral reports of the news onto ephemeral pieces of paper for sharing and dissemination.35 The ‘lighting up’ of the social, through public-sphere institutions like libraries, salons and journals inflated the oligopticon. In the Enlightenment, oligoptic spaces multiplied in line with the growth of public-sphere institutions but, paradoxically, given their metaphorical association with open, transparent and ‘enlightened’ society, they drew sustenance not just from daylight but also from the night. In the second half of the seventeenth century Europe underwent a process which Koslofsky has termed ‘nocturnalization’, that is, an expansion of ‘legitimate social and symbolic uses of the night’. In the decades after 1650, a number of everyday activities moved several hours later in the day: meals; the locking of city gates; theatrical performances; the closing of taverns. Increasingly curfews were abandoned. New forms of evening pastimes appeared, including the coffee house, club and printshop where late hours were transformed into ‘a time of polite

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sociability and conversation’. Although fear of the night did not disappear, it now mingled with a new nocturnal public sphere of leisure and culture. In this new ‘critical’ public sphere, darkness was decoupled from the night: ‘the light of reason and the torch of civilization’ being carried into the night by citizens determined to explore new ideas as well as question authority.36 The development of a nocturnal public sphere meant a huge expansion in the deployment of artificial lighting, constituting more a cultural than a technological revolution in illumination. It was a revolution very much defined by the illumination of transactions and relationships between citizens in new and enlarging urban settings where new forms of cooperation and social interaction – the social library among them – came about. The Enlightenment notion of the self was predicated on individuals’ propensity to see themselves through the eyes of others.37 ‘Watching’ others has been a component of urban living since the dawn of civilisation. However, it is only in the past few hundred years, as people were able to move beyond subsistence living and become consumers, that the ‘urban spectatorship’ of lifestyle and of ‘spectacular consumption’, as Joyce puts it, has arisen. With the emergence of the ‘massified gaze’ of consumer society, commencing in the eighteenth century, the city became an ‘oligopticon’, and eventually a ‘demotic omniopticon’. The city became a place where one ‘watched and was watched’, in public spaces like parks, museums, art galleries – and libraries. Towns and cities, especially their centres, took on the quality of ‘theatre’, their citizens becoming actors on the urban stage. Just as actors of necessity work together in a troupe, citizens of new urbanised towns automatically found ways of getting on with each other, to overcome the ‘friction’ that accompanied the agglomeration of large numbers of people in areas of high density. These developments in social interaction were enhanced by developments in artificial lighting. By 1823, over two hundred miles of London’s streets were lit by gas. The establishment of ‘oligoptic’ society, Joyce argues, was reflected in increased social transparency, political legibility and freedom of knowledge. These public-sphere characteristics were nowhere more present than in the ethos and operations of the public library, in which there thrived a community of culture-seekers transparent to one another and desirous of the ‘light of truth’ and the enlightenment of discovery.38 The nature of oligoptic space resonates with the history of the public library. As a mass institution, it is not surprising that the public library has always espoused surveillance and regulation, or, to invoke a euphemism much used by librarians of the past, ‘supervision’. It was reported that the new library at Plaistow, for example, was ‘so constructed that a perfect supervision is obtained, from one central point, over all departments’.39 However, public libraries have always been places where, in accordance with pioneering theories of social control in the early twentieth century, policing has depended on self-policing; that is, they have been places where the crowd has monitored itself. In other words, the ‘public eye’ of the public library has been characterised by a ‘democratic panopticism’, the moralising gaze being largely self-activated, not imposed or coercive in nature.

28 The long journey to libraries of light

The triumph of Enlightenment library design: from seclusion and darkness to openness and light The oligoptic nature of library design – that is, its ‘democratic panopticism’, its openness and, as Skelton has put it, its ‘intelligibility’ – was not a new concept in the 1960s. In fact, it was the culmination of an evolving process that had its origins in the late Renaissance and reached full speed in the Enlightenment that followed.40 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the gentleman’s study assumed its modern appearance, the storage of books in chests or merely on table tops becoming less common.41 These orderly, and in some cases ornately decorated, private libraries gave impetus to the provision of quasi-public reading rooms. Reading in secluded closets or studies in private homes was supplemented by access to books in open reading rooms, which began to replace confined and constraining stall-system chained libraries.42 The great book-lined rooms of the Renaissance and Enlightenment were in many ways a return to the Graeco-Roman library prototype. The library in the royal palace of El Escorial (1584), outside Madrid, was the first aisleless large library since antiquity, marking a clear break with the medieval plan.43 Hall libraries also made use of larger expanses of glass in windows. Glazed windows had made their first appearance in Imperial Rome but large glass sheets and the wide windows openings and vastly improved natural light they afforded was a late-sixteenth-century development.44 At this time, the question of light began to interest library planners much more. An early example of a focused consideration of the light issue was manifest in the designs of late-medieval and early-modern college libraries in Cambridge. Here, early designs favoured an east–west siting because this favoured early morning and minimised decay. As the comfort of readers became more important, north–south configurations commanding greater warmth began to appear. Wren’s Trinity College Library in Cambridge was fitted with large windows facilitated by increased sill and ceiling heights, thereby increasing the amount of (efficient) vertical light.45 On the subject of north–south/ east–west orientation issue, Wheeler and Githens, who devoted a large section of their book on the modern library in 1941 to library lighting, had this to say: North light is acknowledged best, east next, then south, then west; for in the early morning there are few readers and at noon the sun is so near overhead that it is not very troublesome, but the horizontal rays of late afternoon make reading difficult.46 Consideration of location and orientation was also important for Gabriel Naudé, author of the first text on librarianship, Avis pour dresser une Bibliothèque [Advice on Establishing a Library] (1627), in which he offered this advice on the ideal location of a library: ‘situate it, if that is possible, between some spacious court and a pleasant garden from which it may enjoy good light, a wide and agreeable prospect … [and] pure air’.47

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The openness of the Renaissance-hall, or grand-hall, library – such as the El Escorial Library, the remodelled Bodleian Library, Oxford (1602) and the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan (1609) – was not accepted, however, without initial suspicion.48 Full acceptance of such open spaces took another century. In the wake of the flood of books generated by the printing revolution, scholars became worried about the risk of undisciplined reading, not trusting readers to be able to sift ‘good’ knowledge from ‘bad’. There were also anxieties regarding the lack of concentration that might be induced by panoramas of books and the increased visibility and freedom of movement of other readers. As time passed, however, it became clear that instead of offering distraction, open reading rooms induced a sense of calm and critical purpose, that is, an atmosphere as serene, if not more so, as that obtained in a private space. Arising from the empiricist strain of Enlightenment thought, sight became the premier sense. Sight, it was proposed, was all-encompassing, in contrast to the specificity of touch (objects viewed had a changeable size, objects touched had a constant size). Sight was believed to be a potent force in the association of ideas and in furnishing the mind with them. This had implications for libraries, in which pleasing vistas were encouraged. These vistas took the form of the grand open space as well as aphorisms, statues, busts, paintings and murals (celebrating the ‘great and the good’ and sound morality), all aimed at inducing motivation and progress. In the Enlightenment library, sunlight – the effects maximised when clutter and obstruction were at a minimum – streamed in through large windows, cleansing the mind, improving mood and invigorating the mental faculties. By the middle of the eighteenth century, scepticism about the open reading room had receded. In their open monumentality, the vast hall libraries of the Enlightenment confidently paid homage to the new ideals of education and reason.49 The open library became the dominant design for colleges and private homes alike; mostly gone were the niche reading spaces of the medieval library where, it was believed, the spirit, like the body, had been corralled.50 In fact, readers found themselves even more at ease because they could wander at will, gaze in wonderment upon the storehouse of knowledge represented by books and locate themselves readily in the ‘imagined community’ that was a library. In addition, in the Enlightenment library, unlike in the chained library, readers could juxtapose and compare texts. They could observe the multiplicity of disciplines and discourses displayed on the shelves (and miniaturised in the catalogues librarians produced), and in doing so came increasingly to recognise the notion and importance of progress. Natural light was a critical component of the open, grand-hall libraries of the Enlightenment, reaching a pinnacle with the planned (but never constructed) French National Library envisioned by Boullée in 1785, a gargantuan open space, lit by both a skylight and large arched windows at each end.51 Candles were rarely used in libraries due to the risk of fire. Fireplaces too were deemed similarly dangerous, meaning that many libraries throughout history went unheated. Absence of fire created damp and musty atmospheres, alleviated to a degree by placing libraries above ground level, a practice seen as early as 1373 in the library of Merton College, Oxford.52 It also deprived readers of the light that came from

30 The long journey to libraries of light a roaring fireplace (in many pre-First World War public libraries, of course, fireplaces were frequently installed but they functioned essentially as symbols of ‘social warmth’, heating for the building being provided by other, more modern means). Before the nineteenth century, therefore, there was a reliance on natural light, which reduced accessibility considerably in the winter months.

The nineteenth century: new standards of lighting As the importance of public and scientific knowledge grew, grand-hall libraries sought to present all knowledge in one space. However, the unrelenting expansion of recorded knowledge eventually rendered this aim impractical. Although the grand-hall style survived into the nineteenth century, it was paralleled by the development of the alcove library, a hybrid of the hall library and the medieval stall-system library, a classic example being the ‘Long Room’ in Trinity College, Dublin (1732).53 Alcove libraries substantially increased the number of books on display, but such was the growth in publications that eventually collections had to be placed in separate, space-saving rooms closed to readers. In this arrangement, knowledge, divorced visually from the reader, was in a figurative sense extracted from the light of the library’s public space and relegated to its dark recesses. In large libraries, this demotion was introduced, paradoxically, in order to promote enlightenment: modern libraries could only serve as an efficient helpmate to modern learning if its stock was segregated and made compact. In public libraries also, in the early decades of their history, closed-access was universal, with the exception of occasional stocks of quick-reference materials placed on open shelves. Not until the 1890s did libraries begin to make their lending collections open-access.54 The move to greater openness was complemented and facilitated by the adoption of new standards of lighting, as reported by Prizeman in the context of the electrical revolution in Carnegie libraries in the decades approaching 1914.55 Building on lessons learnt about the value of good light in schools, Carnegie’s philanthropy was responsible for introducing new, higher standards for lighting in libraries at a time, indeed, when standards of delivery of electric power varied widely. The issue of library lighting began to feature in professional preparation for librarianship. In his lectures at the Columbia Library School, which he founded in 1887, Melvil Dewey addressed the issue of light in libraries, alongside other ‘environmental’ issues like ventilation, furniture and fire safety.56 A prime design concern for Carnegie’s ‘scientifically’ planned libraries was the provision of effective lighting – natural and artificial – commensurate with his ethos of popular access, though not shorn of a surveillance function. This fits with the proposition – which I have stated previously – that early library planners were concerned with building libraries that weren’t just aesthetically appealing but also functional and, a word used frequently at the time, convenient. For example, the aim of those who planned the West Ham Central Library, opened in 1898 following receipt of a gift from the library philanthropist John Passmore Edwards, was to erect a building which ‘while answering all utilitarian demands, should [also]

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possess beauty and character’.57 Behind the scenes also, in gloomy stacks closed to the public, improved lighting increased utility.58 Enlightenment-style, grand-hall libraries were mostly side-lit, with large windows placed above expanses of wall shelving, flooding uninterrupted space with light. In the nineteenth century, however, as society and culture ‘massified’, library designs began to incorporate top lighting, both natural and artificial. This suited the political economy of the modern public library: that is, an institution open to all but operating, because of their funding from taxation, under the discipline of efficiency and economy. Side windows required much more surface space than skylighting to achieve the same level of illumination. Also, in the unplanned and hurried industrial environment windows providing horizontal light gave too much exposure to what could be a noisy and aesthetically unappealing outside world (thus, it was not uncommon to see advice that libraries be built adjacent to green or open spaces, something that in crowded town and city centres was rarely possible, of course). Vertical lighting, however, had no such drawbacks and had the added advantage of lighting all parts of the room equally, throwing fewer shadows over what was being read.59 Top-down lighting also had a symbolic value, representing the notion of ‘public’, in the tradition of the domed pantheon of ancient Rome.60 The classical, domed Carnegie libraries of the pre-First World War years, though not something insisted on by the public-minded Carnegie, was nonetheless a symbolic reminder of the public nature of these buildings (though domes did have a practical dimension in that they improved ventilation and diffused light). Situated beneath the dome, the librarian’s station was the ‘locus of public enlightenment’, the light from the skylights which domes often housed representing less an anointing of the power of the librarian (though this may have been one of the meanings internalised by readers) than a message of free access to learning and culture.61 Being centrally located, however, the librarian’s station could also operate, naturally, as a surveillance device. Revolutionary improvements in lighting in the nineteenth century boosted the public provision of knowledge through libraries as well as public visibility within libraries, thereby enhancing the public sphere and contributing to an increasingly oligoptic society characterised by public spectacle. The initial vehicle for this revolution in lighting was gas, which started to be used in libraries in the first half of the nineteenth century (it became popular in the home after around 1840).62 Gas enabled libraries to extend their closing times beyond the fall of darkness. But gas brought its own problems. It added to the stuffiness of the atmosphere in crowded reading rooms already exposed to the smell of the ill-washed and to the disinfectant required in liberal amounts, it was thought, to counter contagion.63 Gas brought the danger of fire. This danger could even manifest itself indirectly. The fire that destroyed Birmingham’s central library in 1879, for example, was caused by sparks from a blow torch used by a worker attempting to thaw frozen gas pipes.64 Iron was in part used in gas-lit libraries to reduce the risk of fire, although it interfaced with light in other ways too: Labrouste preached that iron increased the amount of light in libraries, due to its more slender, holistic and less imposing structural forms.65

32 The long journey to libraries of light In 1869 Edward Edwards, Britain’s first ‘professional’ librarian, and author of a number of treatises on the librarian’s craft, produced a list of recommendations for good library design, including one in respect of gas lighting: The windows should be more numerous, in proportion to the size of the edifice, than those of ordinary buildings and the arrangements for artificial light, so far as respects the halls or rooms containing books, should wholly exclude gas from the interior. If gas be used at all, it should be applied externally. The reading room should be lighted by side windows, not by skylights or glazed domes.66 Such wariness concerning gas meant that when electric lighting arrived on the scene its advantages were clear to see – ‘The best artificial light for a library is the electric’, lectured Frank Burgoyne in 1897.67 There were significant infrastructure costs, however, associated with switching from one source of illumination to another. The uptake of electricity did not happen overnight, therefore. By 1914 only around a million households had electricity.68 Despite the gradual adoption of electric light, library use was revolutionised by it. In 1879 the Reading Room of the British Museum was fitted with arc lamps, prompting The Times to exclaim that the room had been illuminated ‘as by a magic ray of sunshine’.69 Arc lighting yielded an intense, harsh light that was prone to flicker, but despite teething problems the new technology of electric light, which developed more quickly due to the invention of the incandescent (filament) bulb, catapulted libraries into a new age.70 Also in 1879, in Liverpool, the Picton Library (the main reading room of the Liverpool Central Library) was the first public building in the city to be lit by electricity. In the hours of darkness, or when daylight from the roof’s large skylight was insufficient, four electric arc lamps, screened by an inverted umbrella of opal glass, lit the large rotunda. These arrangements assisted readers in the pursuit of what William Picton, the library’s benefactor, termed the ‘light of knowledge and truth’.71 Picton was one of many library enthusiasts who employed ‘light’ as a promotional and justificatory device. Early public libraries in Britain were frequently the subject of figurative, including metaphorical, description by contemporaries. For example, regarding their public-sphere status, it was common for public libraries to be labelled as ‘jewels in the crown’ of civic society. Reflecting a democratic ethos, readers in public libraries, or ‘universities of the people’ as they were often termed, were treated, it was claimed, to a spectrum of political and social opinion: libraries were thus said to be places where the ‘wolf could lie down with the lamb’. They were places where readers could access works that summoned up the ‘spirits of the ages’, as we’ve seen. Promoting their utilitarian ethos, libraries were often badged as ‘workshops’ and ‘laboratories’. Light also featured in the avalanche of figurative language. Carnegie promoted his monumental programme with the dictum ‘Let There Be Light’, translated from the Latin ‘Fiat Lux’, a term which had been widely used by institutions of learning to convey their mission of enlightenment. Like schools, libraries were depicted as

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‘lighthouses of learning’.72 The library promoter, Thomas Greenwood, having explained that in public libraries ‘representatives of every class find their way hither in search of much-needed information’, asserted that: ‘These libraries are centres of light’.73 At the stone-laying ceremony of the Everton Public Library, eventually opened in 1896, the Chairman of the Library Committee, William Forwood, reminded his audience that on the site to be occupied by the building light from a navigation beacon had once guided vessels on the River Mersey; now, he predicted, the library would similarly light the way to ‘rich stores of knowledge’.74 To illuminate the path to knowledge libraries couldn’t afford to be aesthetically dull. Rather, their designs had to impress; they had to ‘shine’. Contemporaries knew this. In the 1870s, Birmingham’s Librarian, J.D. Mullins, asked ‘if gin palaces and the like are brilliant and handsome, why should the opposition [those opposed to libraries] be enamoured of the dingy and the mean?’ He thus called, amongst other things, for handsome entrances that were ‘well lighted’.75

The discourse of Victorian gloom Notwithstanding the awareness of early library providers and managers regarding the need for libraries to emit light, physically as well as intellectually, and despite the notable advances that were made in lighting technology in the nineteenth century, even before the First World War libraries were gaining a reputation for being places of ineffective gloom. This was less the case during daylight hours when large multi-paned skylights, sometimes covering virtually the entire roof space, as in the case of the Main Hall of the Mitchell Library, Glasgow (1911) (Figure 1.1), often provided a very high standard of illumination, at least on bright days. Gloom was more likely to descend after dark, despite the provision of gas or electricity. This perhaps explains why photographs of library interiors were rarely taken during the hours of darkness. The kind of after-dark photograph of the reading room of West Hill Library, Wandsworth (c.1905), presented here as Figure 1.2, doesn’t occur frequently in the historical record. A certain level of gloom endured, and was endured, perhaps because of the understanding that light, along with readers, fire, humidity and vermin, was a traditional enemy of libraries.76 Compared to gas, electric lighting had made for brighter interiors and had afforded greater protection to books, but the technology was not without its problems. Cash-strapped library authorities economised on the number of fittings, while for decorative reasons architects liked to arrange fittings symmetrically and uniformly, the arrangement not necessarily matching the library layout below. Librarians and architects were prompted to think more carefully about optimal light pathways and how misplaced fittings might cast unwanted shadows. Local lighting on desks and reading slopes had its advantages but rewiring proved tricky when furniture needed to be moved.77 Whatever improvements in lighting were achieved, however, could not compensate for the general dinginess of many libraries. An inspection of Sheffield Central Library by the Leeds Chief Librarian, T.W. Hand, just before the First World War found that the building, including the outside lamps, which he reckoned had not been cleaned for years, was ‘revoltingly dirty’.78

Figure 1.1 Main Hall, Mitchell Library, Glasgow (opened in 1911), photographed in 1965. A full-width skylight provided abundant natural light during daytime. Source: Special Collections, Mitchell Library, Glasgow.

Figure 1.2 Reading room of the West Hill Library, Wandsworth, lit by gas, photographed in 1905. Source: Wandsworth Heritage Service.

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Perceptions of gloom and dinginess continued into the interwar period. In 1929, just fifty years after it opened, the design of Derby Central Library was heavily criticised by a local newspaper for being badly planned, cramped and, significantly, ‘dark’, a view no doubt cemented by the building’s (by then) unfashionable Gothic design.79 In the 1930s, A.S. Cooke, the female County Librarian of Kent, visited libraries in south-west Scotland and Northern Ireland. Many of the buildings she saw had, in her words, a ‘stuffy staleness and an odious smell of scented disinfectants. One had the feeling that … air and sunlight were never admitted’.80 In the Second World War, as planners sought to jettison the past and look to the future, the ‘world of cobwebs’ that for many depicted the public library came in for uncompromising criticism. In 1942, Lionel McColvin launched a powerful attack on pre-First World War public library design, an attack made all the more potent by its succinctness (at the time, of course, a great many Victorian and Edwardian libraries were still in use). In his influential wartime survey on the state of public libraries he declared late-Victorian libraries to be by and large not only ‘ugly’ but also ‘dreary’ and ‘badly lit’, their gloom deepened by ‘windows of ornate stone designs which do not admit light’ and by ‘excessively high rooms’ which were not only difficult to heat but also difficult to light. Even if these libraries had been ‘bright and attractive’ when new, because they were not amenable to redecoration they had inevitably grown dull. Most libraries, asserted McColvin, were ‘uncomfortable, drab, uninviting and institutional’. They were ‘undecoratable’ monuments. Being ‘unsavoury places’, they attracted tramps, loafers and undesirables of various other kinds. He observed that ‘bad premises encourage bad users’, whereas these ‘bad’ users, he suggested, were deterred from the modern libraries that had appeared in recent years.81 Here, McColvin was no doubt thinking of new landmark buildings like the central libraries opened in Sheffield and Manchester, both in 1934, as well as a host of branch libraries in simplified historical styles. Within a generation, however, even this kind of library had begun to be painted with a critical, gloomloaded brush, the librarian Frank Gardner referring to the typical library interior of the interwar decades as a kind of ‘menacing’ and ‘petrified forest’, readers being enveloped by overpowering masonry and ‘formidable’ furniture.82

Interwar improvements Yet, running alongside the discourse of Victorian and, indeed, Edwardian gloom, was a feeling that the future of library design appeared bright – literally. The interiors of a new generation of public library buildings, many designed in neoclassical and neo-Georgian styles (the latter, especially, featuring large windows), were celebrated for their decluttered lucidity. By 1933 one lighting engineer was able to declare that artificial lighting, having passed through several phases of scientific development, was no longer a ‘second-rate substitute for daylight’.83 The electrification of Britain between the wars led the librarian R.D. Hilton Smith, in a treatise on lighting in public libraries in 1938, to lecture that: ‘Nowadays, there is no excuse for poor lighting anywhere’. He stressed the importance of applying scientific thinking to the provision of electric lighting in

36 The long journey to libraries of light libraries. In his opinion good lighting increased efficiency and work rate. Every wise librarian, he explained, understood the ‘drawing power of light’.84 This interwar confidence in the bright future for light in libraries was translated into reality in some libraries. The Petts Wood Branch Library, opened in 1939 in the middle of a shopping centre, sported a synthetic floor finished in a ‘light biscuit colour’, giving the interior not only a cheerful appearance but also allowing artificial light to reflect onto the lower shelves of the book presses. It was said that the extra work needed to clean the floor was compensated by the added brightness it gave to the library. Brightness in the Petts Wood Branch was said to be enhanced by the décor: ‘All interior walls are distempered in cream, and the woodwork is painted in a bright green. The windows in all the public rooms are fitted with bright orange curtains’.85 Light continued to be used as a symbol to promote the public library ideal. In 1928 the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, which since the war had turned its attention to supporting libraries in rural areas, began providing all libraries in county library systems with a library sign. It was eventually installed outside 15,000 library centres, many of them humble buildings not primarily used as libraries. Measuring thirteen inches by seventeen inches, and with a cream enamelled-iron background, it featured a ‘torch of learning’ and a red cartouche with white lettering bearing the words ‘County Library’.86 The image was also used as a bookplate pasted onto the inside front covers of millions of county library books.87 In 1946 an image of the torch, as if to symbolise a fresh start and a bright future for the country, was used on the front cover of the British Council’s pamphlet Libraries in Britain.88 As late as 1965 the torch was used to adorn the functional Castlemilk District Library, Glasgow (Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3 Castlemilk District Library, Glasgow, with ‘torch of learning’ sign on the building’s side gable. Source: Special Collections, Mitchell Library, Glasgow.

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Lessons regarding good library lighting were learnt by studying developments in the United States. Readers of the library press were informed that: ‘Adequate daylight was the first thought in the arrangement of the Library of Swift and Company’.89 The librarian Arthur Bostwick urged his fellow professionals to contribute ideas on such matters as artificial lighting so as to ‘humanise’ libraries: technical and scientific approaches to these matters, he posited, too often seen as the domain of the architect and determined by standards stipulating candlepower per square foot, needed to be complemented by the ‘human touch’.90 Building on the example of the swathe of Carnegie branch libraries constructed in New York in the early twentieth century – characterised by street-level entrances (no flights of steps) and large windows directly overlooking the pedestrian pavement, affording the passer-by easy views into interiors91 – new ground was broken with the design, by Edward Tilton and Alfred Githens, of a new city-centre facility for Baltimore, the Enoch Pratt Free Library (1933). In this library there were no front steps, thereby forming a ‘democratic’ level entrance. In addition, a series of generous art-deco shop-like windows allowed the public to see directly into the library.92 Lessons also came from Scandinavia. One of these arrived in the form of the iconic Viipuri Library in Finland (1935) designed by the great Finnish architect Alvar Aalto (the town of Viipuri is now in Russia and has been renamed Vyborg).93 The Viipuri Library had a great impact on library design in Britain: ‘We have nothing yet to match the Viipuri Library in Finland’, wrote the librarian R.G.C. Desmond in 1957.94 The Viipuri Library was made up of two rectangular blocks. All library services were situated in the larger mass. The smaller block housed librarians’ offices, a basement for book storage and a lecture hall. The long side of the lecture hall was a window wall in its entirety, symbolising this cultural space’s welcoming openness. It also facilitated a panoramic view of the park in which the library was situated. Harmony with the natural environment was a hallmark of Aalto’s architecture, including his Viipuri Library.95 For him, nature, not the machine, offered the most important model for architecture.96 Aalto’s buildings sought to engage the light, climate and topography of their sites.97 This principle was clearly demonstrated in his design for the Paimio Tuberculosis Sanatorium (1933) where larger ‘common’ rooms were orientated directly to the south, where a long high-level balcony served as a suntrap and where the windows of patients’ individual rooms were positioned to catch ample morning sunlight but less afternoon sun.98 The Paimio project was acclaimed worldwide. So too would be his Viipuri Library, the first of five libraries he designed. The initial designs for the Viipuri Library were traditional in nature, influenced by Gunnar Asplund’s Stockholm City Library (1928) which combined neoclassical references with the simple, modernist volumetric elements of cube and cylinder.99 Aalto’s final design, however, owed much to the Bauhaus. Aalto nonetheless retained some ideas gathered from Asplund’s library. Readers entered the Stockholm City Library’s central rotunda reading space through a long, dark stairway-corridor that punctured the cylinder wall. It was a means of access that echoed the passageways leading to the burial chamber in an Egyptian pyramid;

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Figure 1.4 Alvar Aalto’s Viipuri (now Vyborg) Library (opened in 1935), photographed in 2014, shortly after restoration. Source: Wikimedia Commons, photograph by ‘Ninaraas’.

but whereas these offered a journey into a world of darkness and death, Asplund’s passageway provided a rising pathway into the ‘life’ and light of the library. In his Viipuri plan, Aalto gave access to his reading rooms via a similar dark, internal staircase that released the reader into a brightly illuminated space. The main reading room, a sunken pit – an intimate space connoting a refuge or haven – recalled, although on a much smaller scale, Boullée’s grand tiered-stack reading hall. Its sunken position gave the impression of descending into a ‘deeper’ bookbound world, more spiritual than the everyday world outside (Figure 1.5).100 Aalto believed readers wanted to be taken ‘Out of the world’.101 Unlike Boullée’s design, Aalto’s Viipuri reading room was top-lit only. However, the ubiquitous multi-paned glass skylights of the nineteenth century were abandoned in favour of fifty-seven circular, domed skylights, each 1.8 metres in diameter. Aalto termed his roof lights a ‘daylight lighting system’. Each skylight threw down a cone of light, the circumference of which was sufficient to overlap the cones of light projected by other skylights. Artificial light was provided by reflectors concealed in the base of the outer rows of skylights and directed against the white surrounding walls so as to give an even distribution over all shelving and tables.102 Symbolically, the skylights represented a blaze of minisuns, which alongside radiating heating elements embedded in the roof rendered the ceiling an ‘architectonic sky’.103 Influenced by Le Corbusier’s fascination with ‘sun, space and greenery’, the first of these concerns, sun, was for Aalto, like his mentor, symbolic of rational thought as well as joyous emotion.104 On a practical level, domed sun tunnels were technically capable of capturing Finland’s weak winter sun (the further north one goes, of course, the appeal of sunlight increases).

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Figure 1.5 Main reading room, Viipuri (now Vyborg) Library (opened in 1935), photographed in 2014, shortly after restoration. Aalto’s ‘daylight lighting system’ comprised an array of circular skylights representing a blaze of mini-suns. Source: Wikimedia Commons, photograph by ‘Ninaraas’.

Aalto employed an innovative heating, cooling and ventilation system. Ducts were embedded in thick exterior masonry walls.105 Aalto’s aim was to bring light and air directly into the interior of buildings.106 The light that was admitted, however, was controlled and targeted. His reading rooms were windowless. The large number of skylights reduced shadows considerably, casting fewer shadows than artificial lighting; and they were deep enough to vastly reduce the incidence of direct light and glare. Aalto’s radiant suns were perhaps not entirely revolutionary – a progenitor might be considered to be the numerous oculi that were positioned around the bottom of the dome of Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (1868) – but they did seem to set a trend that was taken up in other library designs in years to come, as in the case of the Roehampton Branch Library, south-west London (1963), which served a London County Council housing estate comprising modest high-rise blocks and giant Le Corbusier slabs. The library’s multiple domes (six on both of the two mirror-image segments of the library located on either side of the housing block) each housed dozens of circular glass lenses, each six inches in diameter (Figures 1.6 and 1.7).107 Similar skylights were employed in the design of the Norwich Central Library (1962) (see Figure 4.3). Someone who acknowledged the influence of Aalto in his work was the architect of the new British Library (1997), Colin St John Wilson, whose

Figure 1.6 Roehampton Branch Library, beneath Le Corbusier-style slab-block. Source: Wandsworth Heritage Service.

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Figure 1.7 Lending department, Roehampton Branch Library, before final fitting out. Source: Wandsworth Heritage Service.

biographers argue that libraries, more than most building types, given the emotional value of the books they contain, have a propensity to display a mood, or feel – that is, an aura. An aura is derived from non-visual factors like temperature, movement, acoustics, odour, touch and even the propensity to lose track of time.108 As St John Wilson put it: ‘We touch, hear and smell a building as much as we see it’.109 Aura is also a function of visual factors, including perceptions of weight, density and transparency.110 Lighting has been judged a powerful manipulator of mood in a library.111 A new appreciation of light, enhanced by open layouts, was imported into Britain’s Sixties libraries from Scandinavia, Aalto’s Viipuri creation being one of the first of many buildings in that part of the world that entranced British librarians.

The 1960s: libraries of light, libraries for ‘seeing’ In 1951 the Librarian of the Royal Institution, while accepting that the technical details of lighting were best left to lighting engineers, urged librarians to become more ‘light-conscious’, not least because a well-lit room made for more cheerful readers.112 In 1954, another librarian expressed anxiety that light, and indeed colour, would continue to be the Cinderella of library literature.113 After the war, E.H. Ashburner, the designer of the interwar Huddersfield Central Library,

42 The long journey to libraries of light advised librarians to consult the publications of the Lighting Services Bureau. In these could be found, amongst other things, methods for calculating the proportion of lumens produced by a particular lamp that would reach the plane of work and formulae for ascertaining the proportion of light reflected by various colours of walls and ceilings.114 In the 1940s and 1950s, the Bureau produced a range of publications, including a journal (Lighting Service, which ran between 1947 and 1957) which addressed the latest developments in lighting technology in a wide variety of contexts, including shops, schools and the home.115 Poor lighting produced visual and mental fatigue. Good lighting was understood to be essential for intense mental activity, concentration and creativity. It was also seen as good for surveillance, good visibility deterring antisocial acts (which cheerful brightness did also).116 Light had another moral connotation. Combined with openness and good ventilation it was evocative of ‘cleanliness’, something which public libraries had been pursuing since their inception: ‘Dirty books and unclean chairs and tables do more harm than all the publicity methods combined will do good’, the librarian W.G. Fry had remarked in 1924.117 Modernist influences also came from across the Atlantic. In the United States in 1931, Angus Snead Macdonald, before he began promoting the modular system for libraries (more about this in Chapter 3), had expounded the critical importance of good artificial lighting, even in daylight when dust and smoke in increasingly urbanised and overcrowded towns and cities were reducing natural light. He reported that a recent survey of librarians had revealed 42 per cent of them thought standards of library lighting to be simply ‘fair’, while 48 per cent thought them to be ‘inadequate’. Good lighting, he explained, saved space because skylights, courtyards and open wells would no longer be necessary.118 Integral to Macdonald’s modular system, where readers could easily find themselves deep within a floor area and a long way from any windows (if there were any), was the supply of an abundance of super-efficient lighting. Such lighting was made possible by the fluorescent tube. In 1948, virtually a full century after the appearance of public libraries in Britain, it was observed by a librarian reviewing the state of library buildings that: ‘The lighting of libraries is still a problem that has not been completely solved’. He noted with optimism, however, that a recent experiment in the lending department of Chesterfield Public Library, where traditional lamps had been entirely replaced by fluorescent strips, had shown that an 85 per cent saving in the consumption of electricity could be achieved.119 The question of fluorescent lighting had created considerable controversy concerning its merits and demerits. Initial installation costs were said to be higher than that of the ordinary incandescent-bulb lighting but this cost was offset by lower running costs.120 It was reported that an eighty-watt, five-foot fluorescent tube gave three times more light than a tungsten filament lamp of the same wattage; and that the reduction in light fittings that this permitted removed a great deal of distraction to readers.121 The development, and hence adoption, of fluorescent lighting was delayed by conflicts in the United States over competing forms of the technology as well as between lighting manufacturers, on the one hand, and utility companies, on the

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other, the latter naturally preferring old-technology lighting because it used more power and thus boosted revenue.122 In Britain, fluorescent lighting had been successfully used in new railway stations in the late 1930s and its appeal grew in the era of post-war reconstruction.123 By the 1960s, however, the all-round benefits of fluorescent lighting had become clear. The technology had by this time become entrenched in public buildings like libraries, and was making inroads into the home as well. This did not mean that the fluorescent tube, or strip, rather too ‘industrial’ for some, became ubiquitous. In Stepney Central Library fluorescent tubes were deemed inappropriate for its ornate ceilings. Hence, German-made ‘starfish’ fluorescent fittings were installed instead.124 Tungsten lighting had a more varied range of fittings and thus improved interior aesthetics. It also produced a better kind of light, less harsh than that produced by fluorescent tubes. Tungsten lighting was, however, much more expensive than the fluorescent alternative and was thus used less. By the late 1950s, one librarian could justifiably claim that ‘fluorescent lighting seems now to be winning the field’.125 The fluorescent tube nonetheless came into its own in the case of shelving. Much consideration was given to brightening book browsing. It was advocated that shelving should have generous pelmets to accommodate fluorescent strips, thereby illuminating lower as well as upper shelves. Light-coloured flooring, enhancing reflected light from the fluorescent tubes, would help illuminate lower shelves. Also, some book stacks offered slanted lower shelves, allowing light from within pelmets to flow directly over otherwise obscure lettering on book spines.126 At the same time, Sixties libraries invested heavily in natural light to affect the aura of the library. Librarians came to appreciate the benefits of large windows in terms not only of delivering large amounts of natural light but also their psychological value in terms of, first, expanded panoramas of the outside world, and second, giving publicity to increasingly attractive interiors.127 Permitting the outside to peer in was a core characteristic of the Sixties library. It was reported that in the Tang Hall Library, York (1962) the ‘whole of the hall, staircase and first-floor landing area have glass frontage to the road, designed to give a light, airy and attractively inviting appearance’ (Figure 1.8).128 A publicity dynamic was also in evidence in Crosby Public Library (1968) which had a circular tower, the cupola of which was floodlit after dark.129 Particularly at night the greater use of glass in many designs opened up the library to inspection from outside, as in the case of Norwich Central Library (1962) (Figure 1.9). Large areas of glazing were not without negative side effects, such as those associated with glare, heat loss, solar gain, cleaning and noise transmission. Devices such as overhangs, louvres and specially treated glass were employed to reduce glare and heat caused by large expanses of glass but were not universal. Regarding noise transmission, double-glazing became more common but was far from ubiquitous. Some, therefore, argued that consideration should be given to lighting libraries largely by artificial means; absence of windows, other than those needed for psychological reasons, it was said, permitted greater flexibility of layout and maximum wall surface for book-shelves.130

Figure 1.8 Tang Hall Branch Library, York. Source: Explore York Libraries and Archives.

Figure 1.9 Main entrance of Norwich Central Library. At night the glass wall acted as a bright ‘publicity window’. Source: Norwich City Council; Norfolk County Council Library and Information Service.

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Brightness in Sixties libraries was not just a question of light; openness, colour and new standards of comfort also played their part. The new library in Sutton Coldfield (1974) was described as ‘light, airy, colourful and comfortable’, with cosy armchairs.131 Regarding colour, the appearance in the 1960s of transparent, plastic, protective sheaths for books allowed their increasingly attractive jackets to be retained. There was resistance by some, however, to gaudy covers, especially those that aped American paperbacks; Penguin paperback covers, by contrast, were seen as sober and less ‘commodified’.132 Paperbacks (colourful or not) were not in any case bought in large numbers by libraries because hardbacks naturally lasted longer and it was these, in their transparent covers, which pushed out the dull monochrome (usually brown, red or green) leather and cloth bindings from the library scene. ‘Many librarians regarded this as the greatest revolution in their working lives, and it certainly contributed to making the modern library a gay and attractive place’, argued Thomas Kelly.133 Although librarians had long advocated the use of light colours for walls and ceilings to reflect light better, in the 1960s the practice became commonplace. Warm-coloured hardwood floors, replacing dark linoleum, performed much the same job. In this ‘sterile’ environment, brightly jacketed collections of books housed in acres of shelving stood out even more. Easy chairs and carpeting lifted and lightened the mood, as did spindlelegged furniture, which was not only light in weight but also productive of light visually because it did not obstruct.134 The open plan helped facilitate the shift to brighter interiors. Suggestions to make library plans more open were not new in the 1960s. The American librarian John Cotton Dana had advised in 1899: ‘Don’t cut up your library with partitions unless you are sure they are absolutely necessary. Leave everything as open as possible’. Carnegie’s notes on library design, issued in 1911, had advocated open plan for small libraries.135 In Sixties libraries of all sizes open plan became virtually de rigueur. Open plan provided flexibility in the administration of space, and was deemed to be aesthetically attractive to readers also. Streamlined, minimalist interiors with unhindered vistas contributed to increased levels of light, maximising the value of the shift towards more window openings, large windows and glass walls. The foyer of the Barking Central Library (1974) contained an open area ‘designed to bring light both to the centre of the building and to departments and services on the first floor’. In addition, outside, floodlit running water, along with a fishpond and trees, provided a pleasant outlook for casual readers.136 Not all Sixties libraries could boast oligoptic qualities, however. The Pimlico Library (1975) in Westminster, perhaps indicative of a shift to post-modernist design, was a case in point. A late addition to the Lillington Street housing scheme, the design of the Pimlico Library, especially in respect of its interior spatial arrangements, appears to have suffered as a result. The exterior brick-brutalism of the Pimlico Library was reflected in the rather subdued lighting and atmosphere within. Buried under a block of municipal flats, the reader descended from the street by ramp. Immediately upon entry, the feel, according to one architectural observer, was ‘booky’, the overall atmosphere ‘reminiscent of dusty bookshops in

46 The long journey to libraries of light country towns’. The tenor of the interior – ‘a bit of Jacobean with a touch of Mackintosh’ – was hardly lifted by black-stained timber and the buff-coloured carpet. The artificial lighting was said to be ‘restrained’, proving inadequate to overcome the dark timber of the columns, staircase and balustrades. Users had to ‘peer at anything that needs reading’.137 Notwithstanding such occasional examples of lacklustre design, post-war library planners believed that the library buildings they were providing were qualitatively better than, and substantially different from, those of the past. In no area of design was this claim more apparent than in the area of light. The lightsoaked materiality of Sixties public libraries – in 1964 the library buildings expert Anthony Thompson believed ‘standards of lighting are still rising’138 – represented a radical departure from past standards not just in terms of the amount of light admitted into, and emitted from, buildings but also, symbolically, a much enhanced public-sphere realm of public interaction, knowledge-seeking and cultural openness. The ‘democratic’ lighting technologies of gas and electricity that hastened the spread of the early ‘democratic’ public library, as discussed by Prizeman,139 was supplemented in the post-war era by a new concern for light that accompanied an intensification of democracy entailing the quest for freethinking and egalitarianism born in the war and carried forward after it in a brave new Britain. Sixties public libraries thus became, in an oligoptic sense, libraries ‘for seeing’. This was true in two senses: one intellectual, the other physical. The philosophy underpinning public libraries provided increased opportunity for people to ‘see’, or understand, the world, the library serving as a ‘lamp’ lighting the way to greater knowledge and cultural awareness. Second, the new buildings offered a heightened visibility of fellow citizens in a more open, brighter environment.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

J.M. Roberts, The triumph of the West (London: BBC, 1985), 236. M.A. Steane, The architecture of light: Recent approaches to designing with natural light (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 2–4. H. Ward, New library buildings 1976 issue: Years 1973–1974 (London: Library Association, 1976), 3. B.R.F. Kyle, Teach yourself librarianship (London: English Universities Press, 1964), 84. Harrogate library supporters were reminded of this in ‘1906 – then and now – 1956’, Harrogate Advertiser (28 January 1956). It’s not all about the books at Shettleston Library, The Scotsman (20 December 2013). ‘Sacred spaces of modernity’ is the term used to describe libraries of the Enlightenment by K. Worpole, Contemporary library architecture: A planning and design guide (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 31. On ‘spaces of modernity’, see M. Ogden, Spaces of modernity: London’s geographies, 1680–1780 (New York: Guilford Press, 1998) who doesn’t, however, discuss libraries, concentrating instead on such public places as the street, hospital and pleasure garden. On social libraries of the time, see J. Van Horn Melton, The rise of the public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 104–109; K. Manley, Books, borrowers and shareholders: Scottish circulating and subscription libraries before 1825: A survey and listing

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8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27

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(Edinburgh: Edinburgh Bibliographical Society and The National Library of Scotland, 2012); D.W. Allan, A nation of readers: The lending library in Georgian England (London: The British Library, 2007). For a succinct explanation of the public sphere, see J. Habermas, The public sphere: An encyclopedia article, in M. Durham and D. Kellner (eds), Media and cultural studies: Keyworks (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 73–78. P.M. Valentine, A social history of books and libraries from cuneiform to bytes (Lanham: Scarecrow, 2012), 88–89. Retrieved 9 January 2015 from: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo2/ A87794.0001.001?view=toc. W. Bivens-Tatum, Libraries and the Enlightenment (Los Angeles, CA: Library Juice Press, 2012). A. Black, A new history of the English public library: Social and intellectual contexts 1850–1914 (London: Leicester University Press, 1996); A. Black and D. Muddiman, The public library: Policy and purpose (Bournes Green: Comedia, 1993). G. Mulgan, The public service ethos and public libraries (Bournes Green: Comedia, 1993). W. Beveridge, Social insurance and allied services (London: HMSO, 1942). M. O’Brien and S. Penna, Theorizing welfare: Enlightenment and modern society (London: Sage, 1998). It must be said, however, that the intellectual and philosophical influence of socialism during the war and after needs to be seen in the context of the exigencies of wartime, when reconstruction, and the promise of it, became a practical necessity and a pragmatic policy, as opposed to an ideological project. On wartime influences on the construction of the welfare state, see P. Addison, The road to 1945: British politics and the Second World War (London: Cape, 1975). H. Lindahl, Welfare and enlightenment: An enquiry into the rational foundations of the welfare state (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1995). I. Kant, An answer to the question: What is Enlightenment? (1784), retrieved 3 March 2015 from: www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/enlightenment.htm. J. Habermas, The public sphere: An encyclopedia article, in Durham and Kellner, Media and cultural studies: Keyworks, op. cit., 77. K. O’Hara, The Enlightenment: A beginner’s guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2010), 3. L.R. McColvin, The public library system of Great Britain: A report on its present condition with proposals for post-war reorganization (London: The Library Association, 1942), 1, 5, 195. L. McColvin, Public libraries today, Library Association Record, 52/9 (September 1950), 331. J.H. Wellard, The public library comes of age (London: Grafton, 1940), i, 3, 13, 196. E.H. Ashburner, Modern public libraries: Their planning and design (London: Grafton, 1946), 133. L. Greenhalgh, K. Worpole and C. Landry, Libraries in a world of cultural change (London: UCL Press, 1995), 19–29. The challenge in question came from the rise of community librarianship in the 1970s: see A. Black and D. Muddiman, Understanding community librarianship: The public library in post-modern Britain (Aldershot: Avebury, 1997). W. Randall, Some principles for library planning, College and Research Libraries, 7/4 (October 1946), 320. R. Unwin, The library service in the welfare state, in D. Gerard (ed.), Libraries in society (London, 1978), 24; originally published in Library World, 53/8 (August/ September, 1950). K.H. Jones, Towards a re-interpretation of public library purpose, New Library World, 73/855 (September 1971), 76. City of Leeds, Annual report of the Libraries and Arts Committee (1962).

48 The long journey to libraries of light 28 Department of Education and Science, Public libraries and their cultural activities (London: HMSO, 1975), 9. 29 A. Manguel, The library at night (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 19, 270. 30 Quoted in J.A. Langford, The Birmingham Free Library, the Shakespeare Memorial Library and the Art Gallery (Birmingham: Hall & English, 1871), 1. 31 For example, light and literacy, which have intersected in a number of ways throughout history, can be analysed through the lens of class and power relations. The high cost of good lighting for home reading was for centuries a problem for the poor. This was the case even in terms of basic technologies like the candle (expensive in premodern times compared to plebeian sources of light such as rushlights and tallows) or firelight (the cost of which was lowered through the installation of small windows to improve insulation, thereby reducing natural light for reading). On the history of light in the home, see M. Dillon, Artificial sunshine: A history of domestic lighting (London: The National Trust, 2002). Even for those with the good fortune to have access to a library, light was also an issue. Before the arrival of gas and electricity, libraries were able to open only in daylight hours, the danger of fire from lit candles being too great. Naturally, daytime use of libraries favoured men and women of leisure and disadvantaged the working poor. The history of lighting in its social context was addressed by W.T. O’Day, The social history of lighting (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958). For a technological history of lighting, see B. Bowers, Lengthening the day: A history of lighting technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 32 Chris Otter, The Victorian eye: A political history of light and vision in Britain, 1800– 1910 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 1, 9, 74–75. 33 B. Latour, Re-assembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 181–183; M. Foucault, Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (London: Penguin, 1991). 34 C. Calhoun, The infrastructure of modernity: Indirect social relationships, information technology, and social integration, in H. Haferkamp and N.J. Smelser (eds) Social change and modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 205–236. 35 R. Darnton, An early information society, American Historical Review, 105 (2000), 1–35. 36 Craig Koslofsky, Evening’s empire: A history of the night in early modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 2, 276, 280. 37 E. Goffman, The presentation of self in everyday life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959). 38 P. Joyce, The rule of freedom: Liberalism and the modern city (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 109–110, 147–148, 190–199. 39 A souvenir of the opening of the Passmore Edwards Public Library at Plaistow … (West Ham Public Libraries, 1903), 55. 40 K. Skelton, The malleable early modern reader: Display and discipline in the open reading room, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 73/2 (June 2014), 183–203. 41 Quoted in R. Irwin, The English library: Sources and history (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966), 204. 42 On the medieval closet library, see B. Mak, On the myths of libraries, in J.E. Buschman and G.J. Leckie (eds), The library as place: History, community, and culture (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2006), 209–220. The closet study-library did not, of course, disappear: see L. Gwynn, The design of the English domestic library in the seventeenth century: Readers and their book-rooms, Library Trends 60/1 (2011), 43–53. Samuel Pepys was not satisfied with the lighting in his closet library which had ‘light enough – though indeed it would be better to have a little more light’: quoted in Irwin, The English library, op. cit., 164.

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43 M. Brawne, Libraries: Architecture and equipment (New York: Praeger, 1970), 12. 44 Quoted in Irwin, The English library, op. cit., 152. 45 A. Datta, Daylighting in Cambridge libraries: Shifting focus over time, retrieved 30 April 2015 from: www.sbse.org/awards/docs/023pDatta.pdf. The lighting in Trinity College Cambridge differed from that engineered in Trinity College Library, Dublin (1732) where in the Long Room floor-level windows lit forty alcoves, or stalls: V. Kinane and A. Walsh, Essays on the history of Trinity College Library, Dublin (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 74–75. 46 J.L. Wheeler and A.M. Githens, The American public library building: Its planning and design with special reference to its administration and service (Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 1941), 394. 47 G. Naudé, Advice on establishing a library (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, [1627] 1950), 60. 48 It should be noted, however, that even in the Bodleian’s open, wall-system the books remained chained. Chaining at some Oxford colleges, like elsewhere, lasted even into the eighteenth century: B.H. Streeter, The chained library: A survey of four centuries in the evolution of the English library (London: Macmillan, 1931), xiii, 72–76. 49 N. Pevsner, Libraries 1: Nutrimentum spiritus, Architectural Review, 130/776 (October 1961), 243. 50 On domestic libraries, see M.H. Port, Library architecture and interiors, in G. Mandelbrote and K.A. Manley (eds), The Cambridge history of libraries in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 459–478. 51 J.W.P. Campbell, The library: A world history (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 203–205; N. Spiegel, The Enlightenment and grand library design, University of Chicago Library News (26 April 2011), retrieved 9 January 2015 from http://news.lib.uchicago.edu/blog/2011/04/26/the-enlightenment-and-grandlibrary-design/. 52 P. Morrish, Baroque librarianship, in G. Mandelbrote and K.A. Manley (eds), The Cambridge history of libraries in Britain and Ireland. Volume II: 1640–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 212–237. Merton College Library markets itself as the oldest continuously functioning library for university academics and students in the world, retrieved 29 January 2014 from www.merton.ox.ac.uk/ library-and-archives. 53 J. Boll, Library architecture 1800–1875 (unpublished PhD thesis, Graduate School of Librarianship, University of Illinois, 1961), 44–45. 54 A. Black, S. Pepper and K. Bagshaw, Books, buildings and social engineering: Early public libraries in Britain 1850–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 211–240; J.D. Stewart, O.E. Clarke, H.T. Coutts, A.J. Jones, W. McGill and J.D. Brown, Open access libraries: Their planning, equipment and organisation (London: Grafton & Co., 1915), especially 11–15, 216–223. 55 O. Prizeman, Philanthropy and light: Carnegie libraries and the advent of transatlantic standards for public space (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012). 56 F. Miksa, Melvil Dewey: The professional educator and his heirs, Library Trends, 34/3 (Winter 1986), 373. 57 A souvenir … to J. Passmore Edwards, in commemoration of his opening of the West Ham Technical Institute and Central Public Library … (West Ham, 1898), 10. 58 E.g. from the 1880s onwards in the United States glass floors were employed in closed stacks. It is not clear how common this practice was in Britain where there was certainly a tradition of perforated metal flooring permitting light to seep from one level to another. 59 Stewart et al., Open access libraries, op. cit., 41, 42. 60 Prizeman, Philanthropy and light, op. cit., 30–31. 61 A. Van Slyck, Free to all: Carnegie libraries and American culture 1890–1920 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 28–29.

50 The long journey to libraries of light 62 Symbolically, gas light was installed in the chamber of the House of Commons in 1838: Bowers, Lengthening the day, op. cit., 53. 63 M.A. Bloomfield, Sir John Ballinger: Librarian and educator, Library History, 3/1 (Spring 1973), 3. 64 T. Kelly, A history of public libraries in Britain, 1845–1975 (London: Library Association, 1977), 289. 65 Campbell, The library, op. cit., 312. 66 E. Edwards, Free town libraries (London: Trübner, 1869), 41; although he advised skylights in his Memoirs of libraries: Volume II (London: Trübner, 1859), 731. 67 F.J. Burgoyne, Public library architecture from the librarian’s standpoint, Transactions and proceedings of the Second International Library Conference held in London July 13–16, 1897 (London, 1898), 105. 68 Bowers, Lengthening the day, op. cit., 162. 69 Dillon, Artificial sunshine, op. cit., 163. 70 Electric lighting would have developed more quickly had common standards been adopted earlier. A ‘national grid’ demanding standardisation did not appear until the interwar period, the first public electrical supply station in Britain having been established in Godalming as early as 1881: Dillon, Artificial sunshine, op. cit., 165. 71 Quoted in P. Cowell, Liverpool public libraries: A history of fifty years (Liverpool: Free Public Library, 1903), 129. 72 Travelling by train through London’s inner suburbs, Sherlock Holmes, observing one of the high-rise London Board Schools that had begun to appear after the 1870 Education Act, exclaimed to Dr Watson: ‘Lighthouses … Beacons of the future! Capsules … out of which will spring the wiser, better England’: quoted in G. Stamp and C. Amery, Victorian buildings of London 1837–1887: An illustrated guide (London: Architectural Press, 1980), 131. 73 T. Greenwood, Public libraries, 3rd edition (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1890), 29–30. 74 Cowell, Liverpool public libraries, op. cit., 161. 75 J.D. Mullins, Free libraries and newsrooms: Their formation and management, 3rd edition (London: Henry Southerton, 1879), 6, 11. 76 G. Thompson, Buildings, equipment and conservation, in L.J. Taylor (ed.), British librarianship and information work 1976–1980. Volume 1 (London: Library Association, 1983), 33. 77 J.D. Brown, The artificial lighting of libraries, in K. Metcalf (ed.), Library lighting (London: Atheneum Press, 1911), 2–3. 78 The city libraries of Sheffield, 1856–1956 (Sheffield: Libraries Arts and Museums Committee, 1956), 53. 79 Rising tide of borrowers (16 October 1929), Derby Public Library Newscuttings, Derby Public Library. 80 Quoted in P. Whiteman, Public libraries since 1945: The impact of the McColvin Report (London: Clive Bingley, 1986), 8. 81 McColvin, The public library system of Great Britain, op. cit., 81–82. 82 F. Gardner, The Anglo-Scandinavian Library Conference, Halmstad, 1953, Library Association Record, 55/11 (November 1953), 354; F. Gardner, Architect/librarian co-operation, in H. Ward (ed.), Better library buildings: Architect/librarian co-operation in their design (London: Library Association London and Home Counties Branch), 11. On more than one occasion I have personally heard librarians recite the unwritten law that the only furniture worth having in a library is the type that can be thrown out of a first-floor window and survive the fall. 83 H. Lingard, The artificial lighting of libraries, in R.D.H. Smith (ed.), Library buildings: Their heating, lighting and decoration (London: Library Association, 1933), 43. 84 R.D. Hilton Smith, Public library lighting. Volume II: Artificial lighting (Gravesend: Alex J. Philip, 1938), 9, 10, 37. In the early 1930s the Library Association and the

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85 86 87

88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107

108 109 110 111

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Illuminating Engineering Society had produced a joint report on library lighting, published as R.D.H. Smith (ed.), Library buildings, op. cit. and reported to The Library Association and the Illuminating Engineering Society, The artificial lighting of libraries, Illuminating Engineer (July 1931), 159–161. Petts Wood Branch Library, Library Association Record, 71/2 (2 February 1939), 69. A.S. Cooke (ed.), County libraries manual (London: Library Association, 1935), 8–9. The design of the sign was the result of a competition organised by the Trust, won by a boy of fifteen studying at the Bradford College of Arts and Crafts. The use of the torch as a symbol seems to have been used widely, by Brooklyn Public Libraries in the United States, for example: see Bklyn [sic] Public Library: On bookplates, retrieved 16 February 2015 from http://brooklynology.brooklynpublic library.org/post/2009/09/24/On-Bookplates.aspx. L.R. McColvin and J. Revie, British libraries (London: British Council, 1946). Swift and Company Library, Special Libraries (December 1921), 231. A.E. Bostwick, The librarian’s idea of library design, The Architectural Forum, XLVII (December 1927), 534–536. Van Slyck, Free to all, op. cit., 117–118. Black et al., Books, buildings and social engineering, op. cit., 131; W.S. Yenawine, Contemporary library design (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1958), 1. M. Spens, Viipuri Library (London: Academy Editions, 1994); R. McCarter, Aalto (London: Phaidon, 2014), 70–76. R.G.C. Desmond, Some unquiet thoughts on public library architecture, Library Association Record, 59/3 (March 1957), 87. G. Schildt, The architectural drawings of Alvar Aalto, 1917–1939 (New York and London: Garland Architectural Archives, 1992). G. Schildt, Alvar Aalto: The decisive years (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1986), 216–218. McCarter, Aalto, op. cit., 8. Alvar Aalto: Points of contact (Helsinki: Alvar Aalto Museum, 1994), 51. W.C. Miller, Asplund, Erik Gunnar, in R.S. Sennot, Encyclopedia of twentiethcentury architecture (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), 82. Schildt, Alvar Aalto, op. cit., 251. F. Gardner, Alvar Aalto’s new library, Library Association Record, 65/2 (February 1963), 67. Steane, The architecture of light, op. cit., 77–104; E.H. Ashburner, Modern public libraries, op. cit., 156. M. Trencher, The Alvar Aalto guide (New York: Princeton University Press, 1996), 212. S. Menin and F. Samuel, Nature and space: Aalto and Le Corbusier (London and New York, 2003), 73. P. Stoakes, U. Passe and F. Battaghia, Predicting natural ventilation flows in whole buildings. Part 1: The Viipuri Library, Building Simulation, 4/3 (2011), 263–276. Menin and Samuel, Nature and space, op. cit., 73. The library was eventually fitted with hardwood floors; a reading area was fitted with carpet and supplied with ‘Race’ easy chairs and occasional tables, the ceiling in this area lowered to create an air of intimacy: E.V. Corbett, Roehampton Library [official opening brochure] (1961). B. Hammer, Foreword, in Libraries (Dublin: Roads Publishing, 2014), iv. Quoted in R. Stonehouse and G. Stromberg, The architecture of the British Library at St Pancras (London: Spon Press, 2004), 19. Colin St John Wilson, The design and construction of the British Library (London: The British Library, 1998), 18. E. Mason, Mason on library buildings (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1980), 25.

52 The long journey to libraries of light 112 K.D.C. Vernon, Lighting and colour in libraries, Library Association Record, 53/4 (April 1951), 119–125. 113 T. MacCallum Walker, Library lighting: An introduction, Library Association Record, 56/12 (December 1954), 462–471. 114 Ashburner, Modern public libraries, op. cit., 111. 115 The Bureau’s publications included Light in schools (London, c.1950); Light in the home (London, 1952); Electric lamps (London, 1949); and Shop lighting (London, c.1952). 116 R.T. Jordan, Lighting in university libraries, Unesco Bulletin for Libraries, XVII/6 (November–December 1963), 326. 117 W.G. Fry, The future of libraries, The Manchester Librarian, 2/7 (July 1924), 76. 118 A.S. Macdonald, Library lighting, The Library Journal, 56/4 (1 March 1931), 203– 210. Interestingly, to advertise libraries to the public he advocated floodlit exteriors, as occurred with other institutions like banks. 119 E.F. Patterson, Library buildings, in J.H.P. Pafford (ed.), The year’s work in librarianship, XIII (London: Library Association), 131. 120 Roneo, Planning the library (London, 1950), 68–69. 121 Ashburner, Modern public libraries, op. cit., 109–110. 122 W.E. Bijker, The social construction of fluorescent lighting, or how an artifact was invented in its diffusion stage, in W.E. Bijker and J. Law (eds), Shaping technology, building society (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1992), 75–102. 123 Bowers, Lengthening the day, op. cit., 185–186. 124 Metropolitan Borough of Stepney, Annual report of the borough librarian (1961– 1962), 21. 125 A. Thompson, Library buildings, in P.H. Sewell (ed.), Five year’s work in librarianship 1951–1955 (London: Library Association, 1958), 279. 126 Library lighting, Architects’ Journal (16 July 1969), 130. 127 G. Jefferson, Public library administration: An examination guidebook (London: Clive Bingley, 1965), 60. The 1980s Western Australian (Alexander) State Library, Perth – a pyramid-like, terraced structure – had a darkly glazed exterior which presented opaqueness during the day (signalling inaccessibility) but acted as a lightemitting membrane at night (though the library’s opening hours corresponded more with daylight hours): G.S. Wagner, Public libraries as agents of communication (Metuchen, NJ and London: Scarecrow Press, 1992), 178–179. 128 Tang Hall Branch Library: Opened … 29 November 1962 (City of York); North Yorkshire County Libraries, D Division service points (1981). After it was opened, the Tang Hall Branch Library became very popular very quickly. It was reported that readers were travelling from far afield to use the library, attracted by the excellent stock and ample car parking; and there was a large spike in borrowing from the children’s library: City of York Public Libraries, Report of the year 1962–3, 6, and Report of the year 1963–4, 5. 129 K.C. Harrison, Central public library buildings, in H.A. Whatley (ed.), British librarianship and information science 1966–1970 (London: Library Association, 1972), 194. 130 Branch library at Beaconsfield, Architects’ Journal (10 March 1965), 627. 131 Sutton’s new library last word in comfort, Erdington News (5 November 1974). Regarding this same library, there was simultaneous criticism of a lack of natural light and an over-reliance on artificial light, one librarian critic explaining how in such a deep building the use of dark anodised aluminium frames failed, unlike in the case of Victorian windows, to modulate the light and provide a varied progression from the dark of the room to the light of the sky: Sutton Coldfield, in H. Ward (ed.), New library buildings: 1976 issue: Years 1973–1974, op. cit., 9. 132 R. Hornsey, The sexual geographies of reading in post-war London, Gender, Place and Culture, 9/4 (2002), 375.

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133 T. Kelly, A history of public libraries in Britain, op. cit., 375. 134 J. Grindrod, Concretopia: A journey around the rebuilding of postwar Britain (Brecon: Old Street Publishing, 2013), 130. 135 Notes on the erection of library buildings (1911), reprinted in A. Van Slyck, Free to all, op. cit., Appendix 1. The Notes were prepared by Carnegie’s secretary, James Bertram. 136 An introduction to the Central Library (London Borough of Barking, 1974), 4. 137 Two London libraries, Architects’ Journal (23 April 1975), 873–874. 138 A. Thompson, Library buildings, in P.H. Sewell (ed.), Five year’s work in librarianship 1956–1960 (London: Library Association, 1964), 269. 139 O. Prizeman, Philanthropy and light, op. cit., 50.

2

Modernisation and modernism The post-war public library and the revolution in its built-form

‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again … The birthday of a new world is at hand’.1 Tom Paine’s famous Enlightenment call to arms would not have appeared out of place after the war if it had been invoked by those who envisioned a new, modernised Britain. What Raymond Williams called the ‘long revolution’ – a two-hundred-year transformation in industry, democracy, culture and communications – was by the start of the 1960s being ratcheted up, or as he put it ‘revised and extended’.2 While displaying certain conservative continuities in its cultural outlook, the Sixties public library drew on the nation’s modernising spirit. A major aspect of Britain’s efforts to modernise was its investment in modernist architecture, something that the public library movement duplicated in its programme of library buildings renewal. It is not the intention in this chapter to provide a comprehensive account of Britain’s post-war modernisation project. Rather, the discussion is focused on the twin historic aspects of the public library’s mission: the material and the intellectual. This invites brief discussions of economic and technological development, the revolution in social attitudes and behaviour, the formulation of cultural policy and the rise of a new architecture. Into this framework is fitted, in the second half of the chapter, examples from the discourse of librarianship that not only resonate with the aforementioned meta contexts but also help explain the precise reasons why librarians endorsed Sixties library design so enthusiastically.

A new Britain? Out of the cauldron of war was forged a widespread hope for a ‘new Britain’. The election of a radical Labour government in 1945 resulted from the ‘equality of sacrifice’ of the war years, the promise of egalitarian reconstruction that accompanied it and a determination not to return to the despair of the ‘unemployed’ 1930s.3 A welfare state, fashioned initially out of the pragmatic needs of a warfare state, became an iconic feature of a post-war political settlement.4 In 1945 the housing expert A.D. Simon expressed the belief that in twenty years Britain could be rebuilt: ‘Let us determine to plan and build healthy and pleasant cities, the finest the world has known, and a monument to the ideals and to the efficiency of British democracy’.5 This optimism surrounding a literal rebuilding of Britain was

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extended to its economy as well as to its social and cultural institutions including, eventually, its public libraries. Public libraries developed in the long 1960s against a background of, and with the assistance of, a benign macroeconomic environment. Economic growth in the period being studied was historically high. Between 1951 and 1964, growth in GDP averaged 2.3 per cent, rising to 2.6 per cent between 1964 and 1973. These rates, though lower than those achieved by European competitors, compared very favourably with the earlier period 1927–1951 when annual growth averaged 1 per cent. Britain’s economic performance in the 1960s was a tale of two halves. With rationing coming to an end in 1954 and consumer spending picking up, in 1957, a few months after becoming prime minister, Harold Macmillan felt confident in telling the British public: ‘Let’s be frank about it; most of our people have never had it so good’.6 Within a decade, however, in the wake of several balance-ofpayments crises, the pound had been devalued (the 1967 devaluation was the first since 1948) and talk of modernisation and the shift to a high-tech economy had begun to look foolish. A tightening of the purse strings followed, and inflation began to creep up. A short-lived boom in the early 1970s was brought to a shuddering halt by the 1973 international oil crisis. Across the developed economies, the post-war boom – advanced capitalism’s golden age – faltered. Britain was hit especially hard, however, with growth in GDP falling away from a historically impressive 7.4 per cent in 1973, to a decline of 1.5 in 1974 and a meagre rise of 0.8 per cent in 1975. Economic malfunction naturally placed pressure on public expenditure, public services like libraries suffering accordingly.7 Hopes for economic modernisation rested partly on plans for technological innovation and new methods of ‘scientific’, technocratic planning. In 1963, Harold Wilson, who became prime minister the following year, declared that his Labour Party was restating its socialism ‘in terms of the scientific revolution’, and a new Britain would be ‘forged in the white heat of this revolution’.8 This technological optimism was followed in 1965 by the Wilson government’s National Plan which aimed at a 25 per cent growth in GDP between 1964 and 1970.9 At times it appeared that plans for economic and technological renewal might have some substance, as Britain scored a number of technological ‘firsts’, among them the hovercraft, vertical take-off (Harrier) jet, and, in association with the French, Concorde, a supersonic passenger jet (for a while after the war Britain led the world in aircraft development and manufacturing).10 Britain built its last steam engine in 1960, and by 1965 many regions on the rail network were steam-free. In 1959 the country’s first full-length motorway – the M1 – was opened, leading north out of London. A communications revolution got under way. Television, overlaying earlier technologies of film and the photograph, became a potent rival, as Marshall McLuhan put it, ‘to the insatiable cultural conquest of the phonetic alphabet’.11 One of the most iconic technologies of the 1960s was a building: the six-hundred-foot tall Post Office Tower in London (opened in 1965), the ‘centrepiece of Britain’s brand new communications network, and an uncompromising statement of technological modernism’.12 Modernist buildings of all kinds, in fact, added to a sense of advancing technological and economic modernity.

56 Modernisation and modernism If an authentic economic and technological revolution proved elusive, the opposite can be said about society and culture. As ‘austerity Britain’ faded, a cluster of attitudinal and social ‘dam bursts’, as Hennessy has described them, took place, whereby ‘the respectable and the traditional were subjected to a rising clamour of criticism and challenge’.13 For Marwick, the 1960s witnessed nothing short of a cultural revolution. It was a revolution formed by the confluence of numerous profound changes and developments, from the formation of new subcultures and movements, new concerns for social rights (regarding abortion, homosexuality and equal pay for women) and the emergence of a multicultural society, to a general opening up of social mores, increased sexual permissiveness, emancipatory fashion, a decline in deference to the professions and to authority generally and the rise of a vibrant youth culture spearheaded by an innovative ‘pop’ music tsunami.14 Welcomed by some, this revolution engendered anxiety in others. The ‘culture and civilisation’ tradition, which originated in the nineteenth century with fears surrounding the rise of mass culture, remained strong into the middle of the twentieth century. The concern with mass culture spread over into criticism of popular cultural forms, including many of the forms of everyday life in industrial society.15 In the interwar years the ‘culture and civilisation’ banner had been picked up by the literary critic F.R. Leavis who attacked ‘commercialised communication’, from cinema to popular magazines and fiction. For Leavis the great enemy was ‘standardisation’ – not of commodities, which was acceptable, but of individuals, because this produced a levelling-down of culture.16 The cultural critic Richard Hoggart gave fresh momentum to the ‘culture and civilisation’ tradition in his commentary The uses of literacy (1958).17 Massproduced culture, Hoggart warned, was threatening organic working-class culture with extinction. Famously, he described the new milk-bar ‘juke-box’ cafés that had become so popular among Britain’s working-class youth aged roughly fifteen to twenty – ‘young men with drape-suits, picture ties and an American slouch’ – as exuding a ‘spiritual dry-rot amid the odour of boiled milk’. As cinema-goers such individuals fulfilled the role of ‘hedonistic … [and] passive barbarians’. What reading such youngsters did comprised, Hoggart imagined, crime, science fiction and sex novelettes purchased in cheap magazine-shops. Hoggart decried the fact that three-quarters of the books issued by public libraries were of worthless fiction. Hoggart was also of the opinion that by the 1960s a great deal of workingclass identity had been swept away, leaving the vast majority of British people occupying ‘an almost flat plain, the plain of the lower middle- to middle-classes’ – the emergent core ‘public’, as we’ll see, of the public library.18 More accepting of mass culture, especially new media, Raymond Williams warned against the dangers of Leavisite ‘minority culture’ dogma. He noted that ‘the general tendency of modern development’ had been ‘to bring many more levels of culture within the general context of literacy than was ever previously the case’, and that ‘a majority culture is not necessarily low in taste’.19 Williams argued for a common culture – an ‘ordinary’ culture – based on socialist principles. In terms of cultural activity he distinguished this culture from the elite, conventional, traditional arts, music and literature.20

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Williams was of the opinion, which he first expressed in Communications (1962), written for the Penguin series ‘Britain in the Sixties’, that even in the midst of the pop-culture revolution, the defence of high culture had not disappeared but was stubbornly ‘residual’. Williams believed that the main struggle of the day was between the paternalistic system of culture and communication (in which cultural ‘guardians’ protected elite culture and guided its trajectory) and the commercial system (where capital was the dominant feature and the only ‘good’ culture was that which could be sold). Translating this distinction into the conflict between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, Williams appeared puzzled that this conflict continued to exist in what was an increasingly inclusive (compared to the pre-war years) social democracy in which communication media were becoming much more important; the modern citizen, he observed, could be found going to the theatre or to a concert one day, but to the circus or a football match the next. Although conceding that control of the media had narrowed and concentration of ownership had increased, Williams felt able to announce that ‘the extension of communication has been part of the extension of democracy’. For Williams, politics needed to be about culture as well as about the political and economic order. Indeed, he was glad to report that by the early 1960s issues of culture and communication had ‘reached the level of open and conventional politics’. In terms of the aims of the Left in Britain, in the post-war years there emerged a debate as to how much energy should be spent on fighting for the traditional cause of material improvement and a redistribution of wealth, on the one hand, and increasing access to culture and other ‘quality of life’ issues. The New Left, of which Williams was a part, declared itself interested not only in the reform of existing cultural institutions but also in ‘the discovery of newly possible institutions for a democratic culture’.21 This was not the position of the traditional Left. Aneurin Bevan, for example, in a Leavisite tone, argued that ‘only the best was good enough for the workers’ and was thus determined ‘to smash open the great houses, their libraries and wine cellars’ for the enjoyment of the people.22 Contained within this declaration was an understanding that there should be a clear demarcation between culture for learning and moral uplift and culture that was mere entertainment and frivolity. The consistent theme of post-war British cultural policy, it has been argued, was the continuation of its exclusivity, involving, first, the backing (financially and intellectually) of traditional art forms and, second, a hostility towards any kind of culture that might be seen as ‘popular’. The consumption of ‘good’ culture would inculcate the civilised and democratic values that Britain had defended in the war. It was hoped that by backing the great national, metropolitan institutions – art galleries, museums, orchestras, opera houses and theatres – ‘good’ culture would trickle down to a wider public: ‘Where the distributive state was meant to take from the rich and give to the poor, in the arts it did the opposite’.23 Effectively, Left-culturalism ‘amplified the ideology of welfare-capitalism announced in the 1940s: that everyone should have opportunity to share the good things that the upper classes had customarily enjoyed. These included economic security, education, health-care, decent housing – and “good” culture’.24

58 Modernisation and modernism The Left saw cultural enrichment of the masses as one of its aims, but that enrichment was to happen along traditional lines. Aware of the ‘democratic’ strivings within the sphere of culture, politicians were happy to see the issue of the arts climb the political agenda. A Labour Party policy statement on leisure and the arts released in 1959, Leisure for Living, in recognising the shift towards greater leisure time for the population, asserted that provision should be made for the highbrow and the lowbrow alike: ‘anything from an opera-house to a swimmingbath’.25 The Party sought to bridge the gap between ‘serious’ culture for the educated minority and ‘mass’ culture for the majority: between broadsheet and the popular newspapers; on television between the BBC and ITV; and on radio between the Third and Light programmes.26 In 1964 an Arts Minister, Jennie Lee, wife of Aneurin Bevan (who had died four years earlier), was appointed for the first time. A White Paper, entitled A Policy for the Arts: The First Steps, authored by Lee, was released the following year. Lee’s White Paper predicted a leisure revolution as society reaped the benefits of scientific progress. The Paper stated that: ‘In any civilized community the arts and associated amenities, serious or comic, light or demanding, must occupy a central place’; and recommended the development of centres that provided a friendly meeting ground where ‘both light entertainment and cultural projects’ could be enjoyed. However, the White Paper’s subtitle, The First Steps, is indicative of Labour’s hesitancy in the area of cultural policy, and its reluctance to move away from the attachment it had shown to ‘high’ culture. Ultimately it appeared that what was being advocated in aiming to make Britain a ‘gayer and more cultivated country’, was simply the provision of wider access to elite culture. ‘Too many working people’, announced the White Paper, ‘have been conditioned by their education and environment to consider the best in music, painting, sculpture and literature [to be] outside their reach’.27 The Flintshire Miners’ Institute didn’t quite see it that way, however, sending Lee the following message in 1968: ‘We in Wales have not benefited [from arts policy] … don’t patronize us by sending a company to play a Greek tragedy here at the Miners’ Institute’.28 In many respects, therefore, even after ‘Marwick’s’ cultural revolution had been in full swing for a decade and a half, ‘minority culture’ still effectively meant ‘elite culture’, as opposed to the culture of minorities at the margins of society. Even local authorities had failed to provide adequately for grass-roots cultural ambitions. Their spending on the arts had remained extremely low, the permissive and potentially enriching clauses of the 1948 Act having been largely ignored. Culture of the public, not just for the public, did not arrive until well into the 1970s, when funding was finally forthcoming for community-based arts projects, local music festivals and the like (the type of activities promoted by the Greater London Council before its abolition under Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1986).29 In the 1960s there was a great deal of energy in ethnic-minority arts, but in relative terms participants represented a struggling subculture, generally neglected and receiving little encouragement and support. There was a lack of exposure for ethnic-minority arts and a lack of acceptance within the overall arts structure. Ethnic arts were suffered rather than welcomed. Local authorities only

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occasionally acted as sponsors of arts events, such as the Notting Hill Festival or the Cardiff Nigerian Sculpture Exhibition.30 As we shall see, the conservative complexion of the Left’s policy on culture was replicated in attitudes to culture displayed by librarians, the allegiances of the majority of whom were positioned towards the Lib–Lab end of the political spectrum. Librarians’ attitude to culture was not ‘comprehensive’. This clashed with the declared aim of the 1964 Public Libraries Act to offer the public a library service that was comprehensive. The aim of being comprehensive naturally paralleled the growth of non-selective, comprehensive education in Britain. Ultimately, the comprehensive experiment in education did not live up to expectations. Some argue this was less to do with its universalism than its adoption of progressive, child-centred approaches to teaching, endorsed officially in the Plowden Report in 1967.31 Others cite the lack of support, including financial, for the comprehensive push. Accusations of ‘failure’ are arguably exaggerations and have inevitably been driven by political agendas, but whatever shortcomings in the comprehensive education project existed these were to a degree ameliorated by the public library. In 1973 the Russell Report on adult education, the most thorough-going review of the subject for half a century, pointed to a ‘Darwinian situation’ in the education of children, where the fittest survived but those in most need lost out. In these circumstances, it was proposed, help needed to be given to the ‘late developer’, to individuals who had gained little from formal education but still expressed a desire to advance educationally and culturally. Further, provision for such individuals should not simply be ‘instrumental’ in intent. The report argued that adult education, as the word ‘adult’ implied, should venture into controversies that were political, sociological, industrial, religious or moral in nature. It stressed the importance of non-technical education to fashion the rounded citizen. Unfortunately, due to economic pressures central government was unable to act on the approach suggested in the Russell Report,32 but in the form of the public library there existed an agency with a formidable track record in providing opportunities for ‘continuing education’.

A new architecture A prime aspect of the planned modernisation of post-war Britain was architectural modernism. This modernism did not appear overnight, however. Its roots are multiple, long and tangled.33 Modernism has been viewed as the logical outcome of the second phase of the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of corporate capitalism. It was made possible by certain technological advances – in the form of rolled steel, reinforced concrete, plate glass, laminated wood, plastics and artificial lighting.34 Its rise in the early twentieth century dovetailed with the spread of scientific management, sharing its ethos and adapting its methods – standardisation, specialisation and the ‘scientific’ planning and analysis of behaviour, including time-and-motion study. In the tradition of Taylor and Ford, modernist architects came to conceptualise buildings as machines (and cities as

60 Modernisation and modernism systems). Like a machine, a building subjected to modernist principles made for precise control of human behaviour (the equivalent of output) and, consequently, increased productive living (the equivalent of efficiency). During the post-war period British modernism bought into the modern Taylorist–Fordist underpinning of advanced, corporate capitalism, despite the fact that this ‘production’ ideology had been nowhere near as influential in Britain as it had been in the United States.35 Whatever its origins and specific form, the Modern Movement generally, including architectural modernism, rested, as Hobsbawm has put it, on the rejection of nineteenth-century bourgeois-liberal conventions in both society and art, and on the perceived need to create an art in some way suited to the technologically and socially revolutionary twentieth century, to which the arts and lifestyle of Queen Victoria, the Emperor [Kaiser] William and President Theodore Roosevelt were so plainly unsuited.36 Architectural modernism stood for a clean break with a past in which the main concern was the imitation of styles from previous centuries. For answers to architectural and social problems it looked forwards, not backwards. Modernists pointed to the ‘waste of revivalism’ and to its ‘monstrous’ and ‘sickly’ traditionalism.37 In 1963, the social historian Harry Hopkins made the assessment that by the late 1950s the ‘fog’ that had shrouded Britain’s social landscape since Victorian times had begun to lift: striped umbrellas and the ‘un-English’ espresso bar had arrived, and in London, he observed, people could even be seen, ‘not too self-consciously’, sitting at pavement tables. And then there was the architecture. ‘Everywhere one looks’, wrote Hopkins, ‘the new architectural language, patently a language as universal as blue-jeans and the juke-box, … asserted its idiom, stark and strong, over the time-honoured observances of cornice and moulding, pediment and column’.38 Even the sacred, traditional classical red telephone box of the interwar years, by Giles Gilbert Scott, was fair game for a modernist makeover.39 Furniture design too was revolutionised. After the war, designs created under the umbrella of the wartime Utility Furniture Scheme – ‘straight edged, plain and unembellished’ – fused with examples of lightweight, slender furniture from Scandinavia.40 This change in design sensibilities was registered and enhanced by the Festival of Britain in 1951.41 Serving as a ‘tonic for the nation’,42 the Festival represented an optimistic and very public start to a distinctive British modernism.43 Modernist architecture was characterised by experimentation and pluralism. Regarding styles, contrary to popular opinion, it took many forms (these are outlined in the next chapter in describing a taxonomy of library styles). Despite modernism’s variations, however, some basic principles, or features, which define it can be identified. Eight are noted here. ●

First, frivolity and elaboration were avoided. A main facet of modernism was the denuding of buildings and objects of ornament. Surfaces were to be

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undecorated. Like nature, modernist buildings were to be ‘honest’. Materials and structures were not to be hidden behind sham decoration, and the design of a building was to be appropriate to its needs and its surroundings. ‘Buildings, like people, must first of all be sincere … Decoration should be of the surface, never on it’, declared Frank Lloyd Wright.44 Second, design was ordered through regularity and repetition rather than symmetry (in this respect it had links to nineteenth-century freestyle Gothic). Uniformity, reflective of a desire for social universalism and egalitarianism, characterised the modernist plan. Enthusiasm for this component of modernism was symbolised by the mass provision of tower-block, high-rise public housing, or communal ‘streets in the sky’. High-rise living was originally seen as organic, an antidote to the arid nature of suburban life.45 High-rise residential blocks were not just a practical matter, an economical, space-saving means of sweeping away the slums; they were also highly symbolic: ‘reaching upwards in clean, straight lines [they] seemed to typify the nation’s mood’ – in essence, potent emblems of the quest for greater equality by virtue of their monumental uniformity.46 Third, there was an emphasis on volume as opposed to mass. Space was enclosed by thin planes, such as glass curtain, or daylight, walls.47 Clean lines and edges came to dominate. ‘Less is more’ became the new orthodoxy. Minimalism entered the architectural lexicon, many modernist structures displaying lightness, stripped surfaces and transparency. In the imagination, certain modernist structures assumed the ability to float. The ‘streamlined’ aesthetic became prominent. The Festival of Britain, for example, provided a potent ‘streamlined vision of the future’.48 Fourth, in contrast to the ‘clutter and fussiness’ of the pre-1914 interior, especially the domestic living room,49 modernism made considerable use of the open plan, sometimes called the ‘free plan’ or ‘fluid plan’. Architects, especially those engaged in housing design, began to break free from traditional spatial constraints. The open plan was a key element in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie-style houses. The elimination of self-contained rooms was also a feature of Le Corbusier’s work. Free-flowing floor plans were later combined with large expanses of glass wall that replaced windows and had the effect of blurring the distinction between inside and outside.50 After the Second World War, in addition to the context of the home, the open plan was also incorporated into the designs of large office blocks. Post-war modernism saw the emergence of the ‘open office’ with floor space only broken up by fabric-covered screens, desks, filing cabinets, plants and other ‘barrier’ devices. Layout was defined by the desired flow of people and activities through the building rather than by rigidly defined work hierarchies.51 Open plan also had an effect on the design of furniture and fixtures. In keeping with architectural modernism, heavy, ‘boxy’ furniture was replaced by designs with light, elongated lines; in the home, free-standing, easily moveable, and sometimes double-sided, units with shelves and cupboards were used to divide space, such as that between the kitchen and living room.52

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Fifth, modernism embraced nature and healthy living, claiming to offer ‘clinical’ solutions to the grime of urban life. The centrality of nature to modernism came to be expressed in its vision of ‘sun, space and greenery’, as seen in the large open decks of Alvar Aalto’s Paimio Tuberculosis Sanatorium in Finland (1929).53 In his ‘Five Points of New Architecture’ and his house design Le Corbusier prioritised roof gardens for fresh air and exercise, long horizontal windows to admit even, generous and life-enhancing light, and structures raised off the ground by pilotis, thereby eradicating the unhealthy basement and allowing for the free flow of people, cars and air.54 His solution to urban squalor was the large apartment block, set in extensive parkland where citizens could partake of healthy exercise in life-giving sunlight. Modernism also claimed the simplicity found in nature (in terms of it being organic rather than contrived, as revivalist designs had been). Modernist social architecture was an architecture of life-enhancing light. Before the war certain social buildings began to be opened up to light. The modernist credo of exposure to nature, sunlight and fresh air was central to projects like Owen Williams’ Peckham Pioneer Health and Community Centre (1935), Berthold Lubetkin’s Finsbury Health Centre (1938), E. Maxwell Fry’s Kensal House Nursery (1937) and the batch of schools around the country designed by Oliver Hill.55 Sixth, linked to its concern for health and nature, modernism was a moral, as much as an aesthetic, movement.56 It was bound up with the search for improved justice and equality – ‘a new architectural style for a new social order’.57 Its adherents claimed modernism was an architecture of liberation, participation and egalitarianism. Better buildings were part of the dream of achieving substantial improvements to people’s lives. The revolution in architecture was intensified by, and complemented, the creation of a welfare state.58 The more ‘democratic’ look of modernism drew on the example of Sweden where the contemporary style had been adopted as the official architecture of an established welfare state.59 Further, in the post-war years, when an embryonic welfare state needed all the resources it could muster and when imperial decline demanded less boastful architecture, monumental expression in architecture appeared out of place. Slim-lined, uncomplicated and humble modernism, in contrast, seemed to better fit the spirit of the age. Seventh, in their quest to modernise Britain, Sixties planners committed themselves to a cleansing of Victorian (and earlier) overcrowded urban environments immersed in what they viewed as squalor. The planning of Britain’s towns and cities was to be more interventionist and more engineered than in the past, through a combination of modernism and scientific humanism.60 ‘Let us soak ourselves in this idea: total city-planning for the good and dignity of all’, Le Corbusier had proclaimed in 1933.61 A prominent aspect of post-war planning was the development of New Towns (selfcontained, medium-size cities) largely in virgin countryside, arising from the New Towns Act (1946), which represented, in effect, a social engineering of community and citizenship. The Act sought the creation of balanced

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communities containing multiple social class layers, with housing, factories, shops, schools, colleges and leisure facilities fashioned in a modernist style. Eighth, standardisation and prefabrication became major features of modernism. In the tradition of the hundreds of thousands of prefabricated homes (Churchill villas) built after the war as a temporary solution to the housing crisis, a number of companies – including Terrapin, Derwent and Vic Hallam – manufactured off-the-shelf demountable buildings for non-housing purposes. At the same time, standardisation of components for permanent buildings became widespread. To save money, the use of standardised elements – industrialised building – became common, its efficacy championed, amongst others, by the Modular Society, established in 1953.62 ‘Systems building’ used standardised parts almost entirely. ‘Methods building’ combined the use of some standardised elements with traditional construction techniques.

If the narrative surrounding the triumphal rise of modernism is intriguing, that relating to its abrupt decline is captivating. As early as 1963, some were viewing the ‘much vaunted new architectural materials, the vast gleaming curtain-walls of glass and aluminium, the alloys and the plastics, bright, sterile, precision machined’ as at best ‘ungentlemanly’ or at worst ‘brutal and shameless’.63 Increasingly, it was recognised that for buildings to look functional and be functional were two different things.64 By the late 1960s, if not earlier, there was a crisis of confidence in modernist architecture and its architects. Technical and aesthetic criticisms of modernism were plentiful: the inadequacy of flat roofs not conducive to weatherproofing in a British climate; dampness generated by the massing of concrete; poor insulation arising from the large-scale use of glass; the inbuilt dangers in terms of fire risk; high alumina cement failures; and the overplay of Brutalism.65 In addition, systems building – construction facilitated by the use of prefabricated standardised parts – although seemingly economical, was ultimately costly. Modular assembly often required considerable remedial work by expensive craft labour because a precise standardisation of prefabricated parts was not always achieved.66 A major turning point in the development of modernism was the collapse in 1968 of an entire corner of Ronan Point, a high-rise public-housing tower block in London’s East End. More than in any other area, it was in mass housing that the cheery self-confidence of modernism was punctured. In 1967, a special issue of Architectural Review devoted to ‘Housing and the environment’ threw light on the failed – as some saw it – experiment in high-rise public housing. Modernist housing projects had imposed inflexible patterns of living. Many projects had sprawled outside existing urban areas, creating isolation and alienation. High-rise estates that had quickly become vandalised slums were exposed.67 High-rise came to stand for ‘egg-box’ architecture, shaped for ‘battery living’.68 In Britain the issue of multistorey housing had always been a contentious one. It had never won solid support from tenants and has polarised opinion amongst architects and providers. It gained traction after the war, however, in part because of aesthetic arguments: designers and planners rejected the ‘carpets’ of uniform terraced

64 Modernisation and modernism housing that had characterised industrial cities, talking up, instead, the ‘beauty’ of high-rise blocks interspersed with medium-rise structures.69 Once a triumph and symbol of modernism and the welfare state, the public-housing tower block had within a generation of its appearance become the target of widespread condemnation;70 it came to represent what Robert Goodman called the ‘architecture of repression’.71 For some, the high-rise office block – what Betjeman called ‘the new white cliffs of the city’72 – was also repressive. On the one hand modernism was shot through with moral concerns about inequality and powerlessness, on the other hand it was the architecture of anonymous state power and big business, or as Banham put it, ‘the great conglomerate corporations and bureaucracies of the world imitated its glass-tower style in their own headquarters and branches’.73 Yet modernism in the corporate context found itself out of step with the changing nature of advanced economies. Because it envisioned a world of social and territorial fixity it failed to anticipate the emergence of flexible, post-Fordist capitalism and the constant state of movement and changing tastes this entailed.74 The reaction against modernism – people’s belief that modernist buildings were alien and cold, austere and ugly, the whimsical creations of out-of-touch and sometimes corrupt architects, planners and developers – should not, however, hide the fact that, despite the revival of an interest in preservation and in premodern styles, its influence continued into the so-called postmodern era.

A new public library? In 1959 the head of the National Central Library, S.P.L. Filon, predicted that the decade of the 1960s would be ‘a new era for libraries’.75 The 1960s did indeed turn out to be a time of considerable change for the public library movement. Looking back on the decade in 1977, William Munford, the historian of the Library Association, viewed it as a ‘time of spectacular growth and ever increasing expectation’.76 A series of enquiries in the late 1950s and early 1960s demonstrated a renewed interest in public libraries on the part of government,77 culminating in fresh legislation for public libraries in 1964. The new Public Libraries Act compelled – rather than simply allowed, as had been the case since the first Public Libraries Act in 1850 – local authorities to provide what was termed in the legislation a ‘comprehensive and efficient’ library service. The Act also formally permitted public libraries to provide non-book formats and services. Here, then, was a cultural embodiment of the universalism that characterised Britain’s welfare state. The 1964 Act unquestionably opened the way, as The Guardian newspaper noted at the time, for a ‘stronger library service’.78 From 1963 to 1973, taking population increase into account, expenditure on English and Welsh public libraries increased threefold; and in the same period both stock and issues nearly doubled.79 The wartime and immediate post-war expansion in book borrowing continued into the 1960s. In Edinburgh, for example, the number of items (books and non-book materials) issued to the public increased from 4.5 million in 1953–1954 to six million in 1964–1965.80 Between 1961 and

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1968, according to the Department of Education and Science, the ‘rate of use of books’ increased by 60 per cent, constituting a ‘massive expansion’ in public library service.81 Having been identified in the 1944 Education Act as being important places for study,82 in the 1960s public libraries saw a large increase in use by students whose own college facilities had not been modernised or expanded nearly enough to match the massive development in further and higher education.83 Up and down the country public reference departments, especially those in ageing accommodation, reported a shortage of seats for readers.84 To cater for increased demand there was a dramatic expansion in the training of librarians: between 1960 and 1968 the number of library schools and the number of full-time students in them increased, respectively, from ten to fifteen and from 300 to 2,800.85 Part of the modernisation of the library network was the imposition of national standards of service. Standardisation was discussed energetically and became the focus of a government enquiry in 1962,86 a necessary prelude to the 1964 Act. Standardisation was also brought about by the creation of much larger library authorities. At the start of the 1960s more than six hundred library authorities were serving populations ranging from less than a thousand to hundreds of thousands. Provision by small (sometimes single-library) authorities was hugely inefficient, and for years a debate had raged between those who wished to sweep away the system for reasons of economy and those who wished to retain it to maintain autonomy in the face of the forces of ‘giantism’. The debate on size was eventually overtaken by events. Changes in the structure of local government outside the sphere of influence of the library world forced the issue. Local government reorganisation came first to London. From 1965, the London County Council was replaced by the Greater London Council, comprising thirty-two boroughs (plus the City of London) and covering a much wider geographical area. Many smaller boroughs disappeared, absorbed into larger newly created boroughs. Reorganisation followed in the rest of England and Wales with effect from 1974, and in Scotland with effect from 1975. The structure of library authorities fell in behind this reorganisation. The net result of reorganisation in England and Wales, for example, reduced the number of separate library authorities from 385 to 121.87 Standardisation was also furthered by the computerisation of, initially, catalogues, and of the circulation of materials in the second instance. Some library authorities automated on the basis of results obtained from organisational management (OM) investigation.88 Computers in libraries made sense: the new technology lent itself well to the repetitive, routine tasks characteristic of library work. The development of computerised catalogues was hastened by the amalgamation of London library authorities noted above; for computerisation was an attractive proposition for those seeking to combine the catalogues of previously separate library systems.89 After catalogue computerisation came the automation of circulation control. Imported from the United States and appearing in Britain in the mid-1950s, photocharging – an innovative book issuing system involving the use of microfilming of flyleaves and sorting by punched-card machine – brought great gains in efficiency.90 Though an improvement, photocharging could not compete

66 Modernisation and modernism with the efficiency of the computer, which was exploited for the recording of issues and returns from the late 1960s onwards. Although the push-button library that some envisaged, with readers sitting at a console conducting a dialogue with a computer by means of a keyboard and television screen, was a long way off,91 in the 1960s it became apparent that computers would increasingly play an important role in library operations and that physical environments had to be planned accordingly. Automation was complemented in libraries by the adoption of other information technologies. Photocopying services became fairly widespread. Telex was heralded as a wonderfully innovative technology for library services, connecting library with library and library with distant users making serious enquiries.92 Libraries’ take up of new technology was matched by a renewal of interest in the provision of services productive of economic value. Post-war libraries continued to build on their tradition as serious providers of technical and commercial information for a modernising economy, acknowledging that ‘commerce and industry thrive on information’.93 By the late 1950s, commercial and technical provision had become a serious component of public library work and a reflection of the public library’s commitment to economic modernisation. The leading exponent of commercial and technical services, J.P. Lamb, librarian of Sheffield, viewed that their future would be ‘profoundly affected by the emphasis now being placed on scientific and technical education and practice’.94 Librarians believed their collections appealed to a wide variety of economic sectors in any given locality and also made up for the overspecialisation of library provision by the industrial research associations which had been inaugurated during the First World War. Public technical and commercial libraries were also said to be important because libraries in many firms, especially those of small and medium size, were still underdeveloped. By 1970 the technical library in Manchester was recording over half a million visits each year, many for the purpose of accessing technical journals.95 In 1974 the Minister for the Arts told librarians that ‘a sound information system is essential to modern industrial society’.96 But it wasn’t just the pure technical and commercial information provided by libraries that had economic value. Libraries also offered places for study and thus contributed to the more educated workforce essential to a modernising economy. Reference libraries experienced overcrowding when space was not expanded or reworked. In Leeds long queues formed in the mornings at various times of year to enter the reference and science and technology libraries, many readers merely using the facilities as spaces for quiet study.97 In keeping with the shift to a modern, consumer-driven economy, librarians began to recognise the importance of good public relations (PR) as the ‘projective’ philosophy that it was. ‘Librarians of the future must become more PR conscious, and more expert in using PR techniques’, advised K.C. Harrison.98 In 1960, the Library Association noted that various innovations in library service had received good publicity from time to time on television and radio and in the press.99 In 1961 a list of librarians prepared by the Library Association was given to the BBC’s

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news department and to ITN (Independent Television News).100 Aware of their ‘cloistered’ public image, librarians were keen to stress their engagement with local communities and the institutions of the welfare state. A survey in 1960 by the Library Association’s London and Home Counties Branch found many librarians doubling as officers in Citizens’ Advice Bureaux, civil defence officers, food officers, civic information and PR officers, editors of civic news publications, authors of town guides and givers of talks to local organisations.101 Borrowing from the work undertaken in modern advertising and market research, librarians began researching users with much greater sociological rigour.102 Becoming more PR-conscious did not, however, make the public library truly popular. The public library continued to be seen as having a middle-class bias. Post-war studies showed that the middle classes – people in non-manual occupations and in the professions – made above average use of public libraries, especially when their incidence in the population is taken into account.103 Commonly, many working-class non-members simply said the institution was ‘not for me’.104 It was observed that the culture and class orientation of librarians – ‘the way they speak, the assumptions they hold, the way they emphasise their separateness and apartness … [and their] many prohibitions’105 – deterred bluecollar workers. Libraries remained partly hidden behind a ‘cultural curtain’. This was evident in the modes of behaviour required to use them. Libraries continued to demand ‘an uncomfortable level of functional education and social poise’.106 Librarians in the 1960s could be found invoking one of the main conclusions drawn by Bernard Berelson in his 1949 study of public libraries in the United States, The Library’s Public – namely, that the serious user of the public library was drawn from a narrow stratum on the social scale. One such librarian was David Gerard who observed that ‘public libraries never penetrate beyond that small minority of people somewhere in the middle of the middle class’.107 With the coming of the welfare state, the middle classes began to enjoy a disproportionate share of universal services like health and education, and even housing where generous mortgage relief was provided. Similarly, increased spending on public libraries in the era of the classic welfare state reinforced middle-class interest in, and influence on, the public library. Libraries benefited from the growing interest in education generally but it was an interest that was skewed towards the middle classes. In 1964, the number of pupils taking A-levels in comprehensive schools was one-thirtieth of those in public schools, yet 72 per cent of children over the age of eleven attended the former.108 Members of this majority were much less likely than children in grammar schools to use a public library. The public library did, however, act as a support to the opening up of higher education to previously excluded sections of the population, this entailing the inauguration of the Open University (the ‘university of the air’), the rise of the polytechnic sector and growth of numbers going to university. In 1967, the sociologist Peter Worsley told an audience of librarians that the public library had two basic choices to move forward. It could invest even more in what had become the public library’s mainstay, the ‘communication elite’. Alternatively, it could adopt a relativist pose which dismissed the distinction

68 Modernisation and modernism between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. The Beatles should not be measured against the yardstick of Beethoven, he argued.109 In fact, librarians were very reluctant to gravitate towards the relativist option: ‘Public libraries are still too “highbrow” – they do not appeal to the “ordinary” man’, wrote one populist voice in 1973.110 Public librarians’ highbrow stance was reflected in a growing interest shown in extension activities revolving around the arts. A section of the Local Government Act (1948) gave local authorities power to spend money on arts and entertainment, thus removing the need for public libraries to justify any event with a promise of the externalities it might bring in terms of increasing book reading. This reignited the old controversy surrounding the legitimacy of library extension activities, including the argument that if library services strayed too far from their core responsibilities other professions might legitimately claim the library domain for themselves.111 In places, work in the arts organised under the 1948 Local Government Act was enthusiastically carried out by the public library, leaders in the field being library authorities in Islington, Dudley, Leyton, St Pancras and Swindon.112 Subsequently, the 1964 Public Libraries Act allowed provision for cultural entertainment, which had previously been provided for only under the 1948 Local Government Act and by obtaining local powers, which library authorities like those in Swindon had had to do. The post-war years saw librarians urging increased engagement with locally run arts festivals, arts councils and arts clubs. In their arts work libraries offered an alternative to commercial culture because it could experiment and offer culture not determined by profits. Although some librarians felt that arranging arts events wasn’t a part of librarianship, some libraries were very successful in running local arts festivals. Library leadership in this regard was not only often the main means of promoting an arts programme in a city, town or borough, it also added prestige to the library service.113 Librarians serving in the role of arts administration officer began to appear in places, especially in London (for example, in Camden, Hackney, Lambeth, Redbridge and Westminster). In Liverpool and Manchester, the title ‘theatre manager’ was also usurped. Sometimes librarians served as secretaries, or as board members, of local arts councils.114 A leading proponent of the librarian as arts, or cultural, director was Alexander Wilson. He was not only a chief librarian (of Dudley) but also head of his borough’s museums and arts department. The Dudley Arts Council was formed in 1959, the Borough Librarian serving as its secretary. The interests of twenty-four affiliated local societies were represented, from festivals, radio and chamber music to philately, archaeology and numismatics. Its minutes were sent to both the Education Committee and the Libraries, Museums and Arts Committee. Wilson was convinced that a public librarian could appropriately take the initiative in acting as a channel of communication between a local authority’s various cultural departments, broadcasting organisations and journalists, the regional arts council and local cultural and educational societies.115 The arts and new cultural services provided by public libraries were not slanted towards the ‘popular’. The St Pancras Arts Festival in 1960 featured various classical music performances; the plays The Tide (Boris Blacher) and The Sorrow of Orpheus (Darius Milhaud); an evening of poetry and music; and the film Don

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Giovanni. The Swindon Arts Festival the same year showcased a reading of the play The House By the Lake (Hugh Mills); a conversation about the essence of good writing; a discussion on favourite paintings; and a reading of John Milton’s poem Samson Agonistes. More popularly, there was a viewing of amateur films and a debate on the value of the comprehensive school.116 The 1960s saw the beginning of picture loans. To brighten their homes, library members suddenly found themselves able to borrow paintings (and on rare occasions sculpture) over periods of time much greater than they were allowed to keep books. Paintings were sometimes by local artists, but were mostly reproductions of the major classics.117 The ‘high’ road was also taken in the provision of gramophone music. Public libraries not only reflected but also reinforced attitudes to the gramophone. Viewed initially by followers of high culture as a threatening technology – a conveyor of corrupting musical genres such as jazz which was believed to arouse base instincts – the gramophone eventually became an accepted conduit for serious music. Serious recorded music was promoted in the 1920s and 1930s by magazines like Gramophone in the same way that public libraries promoted it through gramophone recitals and wireless listening clubs. Just as the controversial technology of the gramophone was assimilated into elite culture, public libraries, in some areas, were more readily endorsed by the middling sort.118 The first record service was organised by Eric Leyland in Chingford in 1946. When he went to work in Walthamstow the following year, he started a service there also. Also in 1947, record services were set up by Hampstead and Sutton Coldfield. Some librarians, especially those in branches, regarded record collections as a special, or supplementary service, rather than as part of basic, essential library work.119 By 1965 around a quarter of library authorities purchased gramophone records.120 The gramophone, or record, library went through a period of transition in the twenty-year period covered by this study, but the arrival of a truly popular note to them came late in the day. Luton Central Library introduced jazz in 1963, soon after it opened, but it was made clear that it was to remain in the shadow of the library’s large classical collection.121 According to one music librarian, the ideal record collection should contain: ‘classical music … light music, musical plays, jazz and folk material … drama, poetry … documentary and instructional records, as well as numerous language courses’.122 By 1968 there were over two hundred gramophone record lending libraries, but these were mostly stocked, it was reported, with ‘the classical repertoire, light classical music, jazz, speech records, and discs for language learning’.123 Popular music, arguably the defining feature of the 1960s, was conspicuous by its absence in public libraries; yet a majority of the public – 75 per cent in one study – believed ‘pop’ should be included in music collections.124 Films shown by Stepney Libraries, in its central library and Limehouse branch, were relatively highbrow. In the 1956–1957 season an average attendance of ninety-five people saw several ‘Continental films’ and, to promote the gramophone library, film biographies of Chopin, Strauss and Caruso (their music was played before performances). Typical of the lectures given during the season were

70 Modernisation and modernism ‘London and the Thames’ and ‘The Land of the Pharaohs’. Meeting rooms were hired by ‘establishment’ groups like trades unions, political parties, friendly societies, sports clubs and a budgerigar society.125 Exhibitions held at the new Luton Central Library indicated a continuing enthusiasm for establishment and ‘neutral’ culture. Events ranged from the History of the Stage (1963) and Music at Home (1964) to Insects in the Garden (1967) and Model and Toymaking (1968), although reflecting the political sensibilities of the Librarian, David Gerard, there were exhibitions on the Vietnam War (1964), Human Rights (1968) and, reflecting the wave of immigration Luton experienced, on India (1966), the Caribbean (1966) and Pakistan (1967). Some librarians were able to reflect on the cultural imbalance that had been created in cultural services. Harold Jolliffe, the champion of extension activities, recognised that one of the complaints levelled at extension activity was that ‘often it appeals only to a limited number of people and frequently, also, to certain specific sections only of the community such as the “highbrow”, the “arty” and the specialist’. There was an awareness that activities needed to be broadened in their appeal to avoid people feeling ‘excluded’. In other words, activity should parallel the broad appeal of the public library itself. However, the current narrow appeal of cultural activities, he noted, was in some respects unavoidable.126 The record of a discussion that occurred at a conference on libraries and the arts in 1970 is quite revealing in regard to the cultural question. R.C. Benge wondered if libraries should confine themselves to ‘respectable cultural activities’ or satisfy a ‘wider interpretation of culture’. Alexander Wilson wondered: ‘If you are in charge of an arts centre and someone wants a group of hippies down to perpetrate a happening, then the avante garde is a big problem for the librarian who runs these [cultural] activities, and is a problem for any administrator whose money comes from public funds’. J.C. Phillpot confirmed that public library arts provision was not really for the avant-garde, adding, tellingly, that it was ‘for the middle aged and middle class, by the middle class’. ‘You can’t have institutionalized anarchism’, said one delegate. Some arts festivals run by public libraries had experimented with pop concerts but just how successful these had been was questionable: were they simply a ‘sugared apple’ to ‘kid [the kids] into the library’.127 A continuing, implicit objective of the public library, therefore, was, as one library educator asserted in 1974, ‘to put readers on the road to “high culture”, in the tradition of Leavis and the Third Programme, rather than positively to encourage the emergent plural culture’.128 Despite the pop-culture revolution, the 1960s saw a continuation of a long tradition of public librarians professing an interest in highbrow culture, to the extent of exhibiting ‘Pooterish’ characteristics.129 In the language of Pierre Bourdieu, public librarians were heavy investors in ‘cultural capital’, occupying a cultural ‘habitus’ aligned with highbrow culture.130 If economic capital is about how much you earn and social capital is about who you know, cultural capital is about what you know: the practices, or dispositions, actors acquire, from table manners to the vocabulary of artistic taste, in the social milieu, or habitus, they occupy. For Bourdieu, cultural capital is closely associated with an individual’s position in society – that is, with social distinction. Culture is

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effectively a symbolic means of assisting social domination. The ‘cultivated habitus’ – secondary to the primary habitus which equates to socialisation – is formed through education, and privileges the cultural capital of the dominant social class. Bourdieu’s notion of ‘embodied’ cultural capital is especially relevant in this regard. Embodied cultural capital comprises the cultural skills, knowledge and competencies a person exhibits in respect of cultural activities and objects (objectified cultural capital) in the context of their membership of cultural institutions and of their educational qualifications (institutionalised cultural capital). True, theorists have come to believe that cultural capital can be accumulated on any number of strata. It is possible, indeed, to speak about ‘subcultural’ capital (for example, being ‘in the know’ about a certain genre of popular culture). However, Bourdieu essentially conceptualises cultural capital in terms of high culture. For Bourdieu, cultural knowledge coincides with social power. He distinguishes between those who simply have to do, or be, what they are, and those who are what they do. The former are easy in their skins in respect of cultural competencies; having the ability to talk knowledgeably about high culture is a middle-class, cultural-capital trait. The latter, however, are constantly on their guard to constantly prove that they own ‘symbolic’ capital (cultural capital whose ownership is seen as authentic and thus legitimate). An individual may acquire a certain amount of cultural capital but perhaps not quite enough to truly enter the world of the ‘cultural nobility’. Unlike those who ran the BBC in its early decades, for example, public librarians had never been drawn from a social elite.131 Yet the culture they embraced tended towards the elitist. Suspicion of popular culture was rife in Sixties librarianship discourse on matters like fiction reading, television, youth readers and the provision of newspapers. The gulf that existed in the 1960s between the public library and ‘the popular’ was a continuation of interwar librarians’ ‘double-talk, hypocrisy and closet popularisation’, as Hung has put it.132 Many librarians remained bogged down in the ‘entertainment versus enrichment’ controversy, not accepting that both could be accommodated. Television is a prime example in this regard. Some librarians argued that television (and the cinema and radio) provided a stimulus to reading and investigation, and engendered a greater awareness of world events.133 Many librarians rejoiced at the expansion of book borrowing from libraries since 1945, especially the informative and educational books introduced to people by television. But more often than not television became the whipping boy for any perceived decline in morals and educational and cultural standards. Children’s rooms were seen as counter-forces to the distraction wrought by television.134 Opening the Southborough Library, Bromley, the mayor of the borough hoped the new building would provide a quiet place in which to study, tempting youngsters away from television.135 It was feared that television was changing reading habits for the worse. ‘The sad fact is’, remarked one librarian, ‘that instead of [being] a nation of bookworms, we have degenerated into a race of television moles’.136 The President of the Association of Assistant Librarians announced that ‘libraries alone stand for freedom of choice in a world deafened by television, film and radio’.137

72 Modernisation and modernism The new communication age was seen as potentially damaging to youth in particular. In some respects, the attitude of public librarians to youth pop culture was similar to that of the BBC. Generally, the BBC approached the youth phenomenon anthropologically, the new adolescent subculture being ‘meticulously combed for traces of a moral malaise’.138 Not only was there apathy towards the library needs of teenagers, there was great misunderstanding too.139 American comics were often cited by librarians as morally noxious. They presented, according to one librarian, a ‘very grave menace to the mental health of the children of this country’.140 Under the rubric ‘Long Live the Revolution’, a contributor to the Assistant Librarian in 1970 accused libraries of not caring about underground or alternative literature, what some termed the ‘hippy press’.141 Even the provision of mainstream newspapers came in for criticism in some quarters. In his wartime report, McColvin had called for the phasing out of newspaper collections because they attracted ‘an undesirable element, and so prejudice the good repute and full use of the library’.142 Newspapers continued to be a common feature in public libraries, of course, but increasingly they appeared to be offered grudgingly, the availability of news and current affairs programmes on television and radio being offered as an excuse for promoting newspapers in libraries less enthusiastically. By the early 1970s, the percentage of users reading newspapers in the libraries they visited was mostly well below 10 per cent.143 Incredibly, the fiction debate, which stretched back to the origins of the public library, continued into the 1960s.144 As in the past, light fiction was often merely tolerated, its provision justified by the ‘cultural bait’ argument that it could help inexperienced and unsophisticated readers graduate to better material, effectively climbing the rungs of the cultural ladder. Following the economic crisis of 1967, Manchester Public Libraries proposed the suspension of fiction purchases.145 Against the backdrop of the new Public Libraries Act (1964), York’s librarian, O.S. Tomlinson, was delighted to detect a move away from fiction reading, especially what he described as ‘narcotic’ literature, towards ‘educational’ books.146 Yet in many other places library readers retained, if not strengthened, their penchant for fiction. In Glasgow, for example, adult fiction accounted for 63 per cent of adult loans in 1958, a percentage that edged up slowly to reach 75 per cent in 1970.147 Contrary to common belief, Sixties public libraries did not become big providers of the popular paperback, the new mass mode of fiction publication. Hardbacks were viewed as more economical in the long run because of their physical resilience.148 Some fiction continued to be censored. It was reported in 1963 that Ian Fleming’s ‘James Bond’ novels were being banned by Durham County Libraries for those under the age of fourteen.149 Although after the courts had in 1960 legalised the publication of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and many public libraries had chosen to stock it on their open shelves, in Birmingham’s libraries it was kept behind librarians’ desks until 1973, those readers desiring to read it having to make a special request.150 Fear of the popular and of the cultural effects of changing times was typified by the philosophy of public library purpose conveyed by W.J. Murison (County

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Librarian of the West Riding of Yorkshire) in his book The Public Library (1955). Murison’s bugbear was ‘standardisation’, which he saw ‘in its lowest form in the stultifying influence of the cinema’. As for the strip-cartoon and the American comic, these were said to ‘pander to laziness’. Football could not be truly called a recreation, he posited, because it did not re-create. Murison warned that: ‘A generation saturated with the cinema, and now tasting television, can scarcely avoid mental stagnation and laziness of vocabulary unless some attractive alternative is offered’. One such alternative, Murison offered, was the public library. It was an institution capable of combating cultural standardisation and ‘uniformity of habit’. Libraries were impartial, they could counteract bias injected into people by others, and they could create ‘the whole man for the whole world’. Murison was convinced that libraries could champion individualism and thereby counter the massification of culture.151 Shoring up non-standardised culture against the onslaught of the ‘popular’ was at the heart of efforts in the 1960s to rebrand the public library as the ‘cultural centre’ of any locality, hosting a wide range of extension activities.152 The wares of the cultural centre – lectures, film shows, gramophone collections and recitals, society and club meetings, play and poetry readings, exhibitions, group visits, concerts, drama, adult classes and extramural talks, discussion groups, arts festivals and displays, film-making and hobbies clubs153 – were patently not plebeian. The notion of the cultural centre thus firmly undergirded the public library’s cultural conservatism. The idea of the public library as ‘cultural centre’ had been promoted by Eric Leyland as early as the 1930s. Leyland hoped for the evolution of the public library ‘into something more than a library’, requiring its officers to fulfil functions other than those of librarians. Although recognising that significant advances had been made since the First World War, in matters like the extension of open access and increased borrowing, he called for more effort to attract non-users, or the ‘heathen’ as he called them. He was less concerned, however, with attracting readers of popular material than readers of ‘non-fiction and fiction of a comparatively high standard’. It was this group of readers, he urged, that must interest librarians most, and from whom may be expected the most valuable results. Such people already read good literature, have the intelligence to realise the advantages of the Public Library system once brought to their notice, need the facilities the Public Library can offer and will swell the comparatively small band [of existing users] by making use of those facilities. Citing the power of modern advertising and acknowledging that the public library had to overcome an ‘aloof attitude of the kind that afflicted the Church of England’, Leyland advised that a good way to attract such a group of readers was through an extension of extension activities.154 Library extension had a long history in the public library movement.155 Championed by such figures as Edward Sydney (Librarian of Leyton, 1928–1957) and Harold Jolliffe (Librarian of Swindon, 1946–1969), by the mid-1960s around

74 Modernisation and modernism 50 per cent of library authorities engaged in extension activities. In post-war Swindon, for example, activities tended towards the middlebrow, with an emphasis on popular education and enlightenment. These were grass-roots affairs, reflecting the needs of local groups. They were not highbrow activities, but neither can they be described as mass and avant-garde culture.156 Government, notably at the time of the passing of the 1964 Public Libraries Act, pushed the idea that public libraries be much more than mere book-lending institutions and should rebrand themselves as ‘cultural centres’.157 A 1975 report on cultural activities in public libraries by the Department of Education and Science restated the importance of the development of libraries as cultural centres.158 There were calls in the library profession for public libraries to emulate the French ‘maison de la culture’.159 Librarians understood that extension activities helped keep the library in the public eye and created and maintained goodwill.160 Others, as noted above, believed the public library should stick to its main job, which was to provide books, not promote and stage cultural events.161 Towards the end of our period ‘cultural centre’ began to take on a definition that went beyond ‘arts centre’. Reflecting an awareness of the new communication age, it was suggested that the local library could become ‘the information hub of the community’,162 and an escalation in the provision of non-print media enticed some to suggest that libraries be renamed ‘communication centre’.163 In addition, the idea of the cultural centre came to include the ‘whole way of life’ definition of culture, where library buildings stood as reflections of the individual characteristics of communities in which there existed diverse social groups.164 As such, the library as ‘cultural centre’ shifted towards the library as ‘community centre’. This term became much more common in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Its initial emergence also paralleled calls for a new mode of service provision in public libraries, community librarianship. By the early 1970s, some librarians had begun to highlight the middle-class trajectory of public libraries and to suggest policies that might target the needs of the disadvantaged. The core philosophy of community librarianship went well beyond earlier calls to simply widen the appeal of the public library and connect more closely with the public.165 It was a deeply political project that said public libraries could help redistribute wealth and opportunity by positively discriminating in favour of groups that in today’s terminology are described as ‘socially excluded’.166 Community librarianship adhered to the ideology laid down by the journal Librarians for Social Change whose editor, John Noyce, told readers in the journal’s first issue, in 1972, that he had no sympathy for those who wanted to ‘keep politics out of libraries’.167 There were calls in some quarters for librarians to speak out ‘in favour of an Equal Britain … to bring forth a new social contract with the poor … and the socially inadequate’.168 Many librarians were opposed to this attempted politicisation of their profession, undeterred by the accusation that librarianship was the ‘Profession Most Proficient at Opting Out’.169 They did not welcome the prospect of being branded as mere social, or community, workers. This would constitute a further blow to efforts to raise the status of the profession. A subtext of the drive to reposition public

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libraries as cultural centres was the quest to improve status, which was seen as at the level of a ‘second division’ profession (this was a division also occupied by teachers, but librarians received worse pay than them on average).170 Although the 1960s brought some increase in respect for public libraries, worries about status remained an important issue for librarians.171 It was hoped that the phenomenon of the cultural centre would reverse the image of the librarian as an ‘anaemic recluse’.172 If anything, however, promotion of activities that defined the cultural centre – these being largely high- and middlebrow – entrenched the image of the librarian as detached from the cultural preferences of the masses. As our period drew to a close there were attempts within the ‘cultural centre’ envelope to badge the public library as ‘entertainment centre’,173 but ultimately the ‘higher arts’ label was difficult to dislodge. Having pinned their colours to a ‘cultural centre’ mast, librarians found difficulty in truly connecting not only with the public but also with the new regime of local government, post-reorganisation. The appearance of larger authorities (in London from 1965, elsewhere from 1974) had an impact on opportunities and status in librarianship. Bigger library systems meant new positions could be created in them, such as those of research officer, training officer, local history expert or music librarian.174 At the top, however, librarians who had once run their own systems now found themselves demoted. In places where libraries retained a certain autonomy, there was only room for one head. In addition, in the new world of corporate local government, where departments straddled a number of areas – from leisure and the arts to education and heritage – librarians rarely found they had the knowledge, management skills or kudos to be appointed as leaders.175 Librarians’ flirtation with the idea of cultural and the artistic extension activities as the new lynchpin of public library purpose did much to determine the internal allocation of space in Sixties libraries (although the new coffee bars owed more to popular culture, arguably). In terms of style, on the surface the adoption of modernism implied an embracing of the ‘popular’. But for all the glass, the concrete and bright lights, the carpeted floors, streamlined fittings and paperback books, by the end of the 1960s the public library appeared to be not much more in touch with popular and working-class culture than it had at the start. Librarians became more progressive in their attitudes to their users in certain respects but in the final analysis the majority of the profession was unable to accommodate effectively the popular culture, and certainly not the counterculture, of the age. Thus, the reason why librarians embraced modernism, beyond its pervasive influence, must be sought elsewhere, and probably resides in the realm of librarianship’s historic technocratic nature, its attachment to regulation and to ‘system’. In this regard, William Maidment’s belief, stated in 1975, that the most important quality a public library could teach an individual was a sense of order does not come as a surprise.176 By the time of Maidment’s statement, however, hope of radically repositioning the public library through an application of modernism, or indeed any rebranding of its service orientation, was fast disappearing. In 1975, E.V. Corbett, President of the Library Association for that year, correctly predicted that ‘for the next few

76 Modernisation and modernism years we shall be lucky if we can carry out a holding exercise’.177 Cuts in library expenditure began to bite deeply in 1975, in what The Bookseller pointed out had become a ‘siege economy’.178 The question of charging for public library services had already begun to raise its head.179 The golden age of the public library appeared to be drawing to a close.

New library buildings Because of the war and the austerity measures that followed it, the task of replenishing Britain’s stock of public library buildings had by the mid-1950s become enormous. The war had inflicted a great deal of physical damage on libraries. As early as the end of 1942, eighty library authorities had reported damage to one or more of its library buildings, with around half a million volumes destroyed. At least seventeen branches and seven central libraries had been destroyed. After the war, beyond the renovation of damaged libraries and the replacement of libraries completely destroyed, two types of building work were required. First, a number of libraries had been planned or started before hostilities broke out (this category included fourteen urban central libraries, four county library headquarters and numerous branches). Second, a much larger group was formed by libraries that had been identified before the war as utterly inadequate in being able to offer a modern, mid-twentieth century service and thus needing replacement. The Library Association was aware of forty-four urban central libraries, twenty-four county library headquarters and, despite a spurt of branch constructions in the 1930s, a large number of small libraries in this category.180 Thus, to a large degree the post-war public library service in Britain was unfavourably conditioned by an inherited stock of ageing buildings dating from before the Second World War, including many erected before the First World War. In 1959 the Library Association undertook a study of Britain’s public library buildings. Over 75 per cent of buildings were over fifty years old and had been built to hold a fifth of the books held by libraries in 1959, as well as cater for far fewer readers. The Association noted that whereas the use of public libraries had increased 75 per cent since 1939, the provision of new library buildings and the extension and improvement of existing premises had been virtually at a standstill. In particular, notwithstanding the shortage of fit-for-purpose central libraries, a large number of new branches were needed to serve the three million new homes, many in new housing estates that had been built since the war. In 1960 it was estimated that some six hundred to eight hundred new libraries would be needed over the course of the decade.181 It is true that by the end of the 1950s over two hundred new service points had appeared since the war, but the vast majority of these were ‘rebuilds’ (for example, Plymouth Central Library, 1956) or renovated premises.182 Severe restrictions had been placed on the building of libraries because, understandably, the building of houses, schools and hospitals took priority. Librarians were under no illusion that they would be near the front of the queue for funding in a tough post-war economy. In reviewing the latest literature on library buildings, for example, the librarian

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E.F. Patterson predicted that ‘it will be a number of years before this publication can devote much space to descriptions of new public libraries in Great Britain’.183 For a decade or so after the war central government was unwilling to sanction loans in large amounts. Money was prioritised for renovations, the rebuilding of damaged premises, branches on or near new housing estates and service points in the New Towns. By 1957, however, a Ministry of Education committee was recommending ‘more and better buildings for public libraries’.184 In the late 1950s central government dramatically increased its loans to local authorities for building new libraries: in England and Wales just over £200,000 was lent in 1957, and by 1962 just over £3 million was being borrowed.185 After 1960, therefore, the pace of library construction quickened markedly, over 350 new service points opening in the five years between 1960 and 1964.186 Despite a slight slowing of library building in the wake of the economic problems surrounding devaluation in 1967, a good pace was maintained until the economic crisis that commenced in 1974. Around 250 new buildings were opened between 1965 and 1969.187 Between 1970 and 1975 around 250 new library buildings (of all types) were erected. Between 1975 and 1980, however, far fewer buildings were erected than in any of the previous three quinquennia.188 Despite the extensive efforts made to build new libraries, by 1973 it was recognised there was still a great deal to be done. Of 3,052 libraries open ten hours or more a week at this time, around 1,200 were in adapted premises and more than 800 service points had been built before 1920.189 The urgent need for action began to be recognised by leading librarians. In May 1956 a conference on library design was organised by the Library Association’s London and Home Counties Branch, which was to remain active on the issue throughout the 1960s.190 Speaking at the conference, J.P. Wells warned against adoption of ‘the erroneous principle that an architect’s ideas must override the practical needs of the librarian’.191 Sydney Cook, who was busy at the time designing Holborn Central Library, was on hand to give the architect’s viewpoint. A confirmed modernist, Cook quoted the Belgian painter and architect Henry Van de Velde on falsehood, which ‘can sully inanimate objects in precisely the same way as it degrades the character of man and woman’. He celebrated the passing of the days when ‘architectural composition and monumental impressiveness were the beginning and end of the design of a library’ and the fact that designers were beginning to ‘emancipate’ themselves ‘from much of the ugliness and overemphasis of the Victorian era’. ‘Today’, he propounded, ‘the need is for speed of erection, efficiency and economy in the use of space, clear and unobstructed floor plans, good daylighting, with a greater degree of standardisation and modular co-ordination’.192 Unlike in the area of schools, where since 1948 an Architects and Building Branch had worked within the government department responsible for education, in the library sphere there was no dedicated state sponsorship of buildings research.193 Making their own way, therefore, librarians looked for closer relations with the architectural profession. Architects too began to call for closer cooperation with librarians. In 1961 a joint committee was set up between the City and

78 Modernisation and modernism Borough Architects’ Society and a subcommittee of the Library Association.194 In 1963 the architect D.W. Dickerson, although possibly influenced by their presence, told librarians that more than any other client group with whom he had worked they had ‘a real interest in and feeling for architecture’.195 Returning the compliment, the librarian E.M. Broome told the same audience of librarians: ‘I like architects. I value them as my friends … I find them stimulating company and I often find myself envying them’.196 A question in the 1964 professional exams set by the Library Association asked candidates to draft a memorandum for an architect on the considerations that should influence the siting, basic plan and general layout of a branch library, showing how the librarian’s requirements related to the type of population to be served.197 On the face of it, therefore, librarians and architects enjoyed a much closer relationship in the 1960s than they had in the past. Trust between the two professions was never quite solid, however. There was certainly a view among some librarians, for example, that architects were generally more interested in designing schools and houses – and even crematoria – than libraries.198 This negative image of the relationship can, of course, be countered by numerous examples of excellent communication, as in the case of the design of Birmingham Central Library. In the late 1950s the Library Association began work on detailing public library building standards and requirements.199 These were eventually published in 1960 in a glossy booklet titled Public library buildings: The way ahead.200 Momentum on the issue of library design was maintained throughout the period with assistance from a stream of reviews of new public library buildings in the library press, more extensive even than those appearing in the architectural journals.201 Extensive coverage was also given to other library types, especially the development of academic library buildings.202 Public librarians continued to push for improvements to the buildings which delivered the services they managed. In 1968 the London and Home Counties Branch of the Library Association prepared a feasibility study on the future of library buildings. The study advised the establishment of a £40,000 research programme, funded by central government, to examine and evaluate the trends which may influence future development of the various library services and formulate criteria that will be of assistance to those who may be responsible for the planning and design of the buildings that would be needed to accommodate such services. It also suggested the establishment of a Library Buildings Information Centre ‘through which information on all matters relating to the planning and design of library buildings could be disseminated’.203 However, partly due to a downturn in the economy in the late 1960s, no such research programme of information centre materialised.204 Just as generally British post-war architecture imported a great many ideas from abroad, so also was the design of public libraries subject to foreign influences. In considering the possibilities for their new library buildings, Britain’s librarians had ample opportunity to view new designs coming out of the United States.205

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Throughout much of the 1960s, the Library Journal reported extensively on developments in the United States – yearly, in its 1 December issue.206 British librarians would no doubt have marvelled at the new library in Hammond, Indiana which boasted an ‘auto pick-up window’, a streamlining of book service to match the streamlined design of the building itself.207 Ultimately, British librarians honoured the demand of the American librarian Freda F. Waldon, made in 1947: ‘We want light, air, space’.208 In truth, however, the confluence of these design elements came to be prioritised in British library design mostly due to library influences from Scandinavia, not the United States. Many post-war British architects were deeply impressed in particular by developments in Sweden which had remained neutral in the Second World War and had continued to build. Designs in Sweden – often in ‘a romantic Modernist manner, sensitive to nature rather than formalistically rigorous’209 – were realised by good construction skills, deep democratic impulses and the operation of a powerful welfare state. Scandinavian design attracted interest from British librarians who, to their credit, were very active in liaising with international colleagues to discover the latest developments in library design (for example, in the 1950s Lionel McColvin helped prepare international standards on public library buildings for IFLA, the International Federation of Library Associations).210 The first volume of Bengt Hjelmqvist’s Swedish Public Libraries in Pictures was made available in English in 1956. Its reviewer in the Library Association Record was taken by the evidence in the book of ‘lightness everywhere … These libraries are modern and functional, but they are made pleasant and welcoming by a warm, homely touch’.211 British librarians also expressed an admiration for Danish library buildings and work. Ottervik, Möhlenbrock and Andersson’s Libraries and Archives in Sweden (1954) and Kirkegaard’s Public Libraries in Denmark (1950) were both brought to the attention of the readers of the Library Association Record.212 ‘I have never visited cleaner, brighter, tidier and more pleasant buildings anywhere’, wrote McColvin after returning from Scandinavia in 1951.213 In 1957 he visited Finland and returned with the view that libraries there were ‘far ahead of us’; ‘these people are living in the future’, he added.214 Frank Gardner, Luton’s Librarian, travelled to Sweden in 1953 to attend the first Anglo-Scandinavian Library Conference, held in Halmstad. He returned to write a glowing account of the interior design of the town’s new public library: From the basement lecture rooms to the spacious Lending Library, with its stack free floor and wide gallery, from the electric fittings to the design of chairs and tables, there is hardly a feature that one could criticise from the point of view of comfort of the reader or labour-saving to staff and cleaners. To the stranger, it is like all modern Swedish libraries, free from that excessive ‘woodiness’, the sense of being in a menacing forest of bookstacks and furniture, that so disfigures British libraries.215 In 1956, Elizabeth Bowen gave readers of the Library Association Record an even fuller account of Halmstad Public Library, prefacing her description with the

80 Modernisation and modernism comment: ‘Magnificent library buildings have been erected [in Sweden] in the last five years’.216 The following year the librarian R.G.C. Desmond wrote: ‘There is not a single library in this country that can stand comparison with the best in Scandinavia and on the continent’.217 K.C. Harrison became a big fan of the modern administrative systems and architectural lines of Scandinavian libraries. When Librarian of Hendon, in 1959, he joined other librarians on a tour of Swedish libraries. He and his colleagues left Sweden with an overwhelmingly positive view of the libraries there. On his return, Harrison told The Times that Scandinavia had ‘so much to show and teach us, with their adventurous architecture and the colourful, yet studied, informality of their interiors’.218 Forty years later, in his memoirs, Harrison recalled how: We had all been vastly impressed by the buildings we had seen, particularly by their interior planning and design. We left one city full of admiration for their library buildings, only to be even more impressed by the next example we saw.219 A similar tour was arranged the following year, this time to Denmark whose libraries equally impressed the group of travelling librarians. W.B. Stevenson declared Danish libraries to be ‘forward looking … [and] optimistic’; in Horsholm he had observed a library building that ‘sparkles with light, colour, and the enthusiasm of the library staff’, in which readers ‘recline in chairs of the most advanced design’.220 In his British Public Library Buildings (1966), co-authored with S.G. Berriman, Harrison stated that in library design ‘Sweden continues to forge ahead … Most of the Swedish structures are noted for their spaciousness and clever layout, while all of them attract through the genius of their design’. The Danes, he added, ‘have shown a special interest in the need for flexibility in planning and, more than most, they have followed the American lead in this respect’.221 Harrison’s Libraries in Scandinavia had been published in 1961. A second edition was published in 1969, improved by the many further visits he had made to Scandinavia in the meantime.222 The second edition included a report on a trip to see the new public library in Gothenburg, opened in 1968. The book is a detailed account of library provision in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland. It is by no means confined to public libraries, nor their design. However, he did present multiple descriptions of new public libraries that he considered to be innovative and attractive, ‘unsurpassable in their charm, taste and variety’. He reserved particular praise for Finnish public libraries, with their ‘half-gallery type of construction … graceful staircases up to the galleries, and … clever … employment of murals’. For examples of the finest library buildings in Scandinavia, he suggested, librarians should look to Finland, which had given an ‘inspiring lead to the rest of the world’.223 The attraction that many librarians felt in the 1960s towards Scandinavian libraries represented, in essence, a new orthodoxy in library design. The influence of Scandinavian design was crucial to the development of Sixties libraries in

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Britain. For example, the idea of the large gallery (as seen at Luton, Camden and many other places) which, unlike the nineteenth-century gallery, led somewhere was imported essentially from Scandinavia and directly aped the plan of the Frederiksberg library in Copenhagen.224 The widespread use of attractive woods, for floors and walls, in library interiors – as at Eastbourne Central Library where Tasmanian oak was used in panelling and where columns were faced in sycamore225 – aped the naturalistic approach to interior design found in Scandinavia. A new public library, with many features illustrating a Nordic influence, including a mezzanine gallery housing a music library, was opened in Grimsby in 1968. Its Librarian, E.H. Trevitt, was said to be a keen student of Scandinavian public library design.226 The growth in popularity of the concept of the public library as a cultural centre owed a good deal to influences from Scandinavia. ‘The most striking characteristic of the modern Swedish public library’, wrote Bengt Hjelmqvist, also in 1968, is ‘its ambition to serve as the cultural centre of the municipality’.227 Interest in Scandinavian architecture continued throughout the 1960s, as seen in the arrangement of Anglo-Scandinavian meetings and in the publication by the Library Association in 1971 of an English translation of library building plans and standards operating in Denmark.228 Whereas once it had been British librarians who had been highly curious about library buildings abroad, especially in Scandinavia, as the 1960s progressed foreign librarians came to visit and admire the new breed of British library buildings that were appearing.229 In 1966 Berriman and Harrison wrote of a ‘British library building renaissance’.230 In its booklet Public library buildings: The way ahead (1960), the advice given by the Library Association – which that same year chose a modernist design for its own new headquarters231 – was bursting with modernist credentials. Emphasis was laid on the importance of function. ‘Plan your interior first, and only when that is sure to function satisfactorily bother about the outside or the style’. Every building should have its own character and ‘not look like Woolworths or Littlewoods [large retail stores] or the parish hall or the meat market or a big house that no one wanted to live in any longer or even like any other library but like its own self’. Interiors should exhibit ‘cleanliness, lightness, airiness, space’, and be ‘streamlined’ and ‘efficient’. Both central and branch libraries should be sited where most people meet, in shopping areas and ‘traffic centres’, and where people could see them. Shops grew in value if a library was nearby, it was argued in the booklet. Avoid ‘pompous facades’ and flights of external steps. Open spaces, such as a courtyard, lawn, garden, in front and/or alongside will ‘add distinction and help to make the building stand out from its neighbours and improves the access of light and air’. Have plenty of large windows. Avoid point-lighting as this handicaps rearrangement; artificial lighting should be general. Any library building should ‘permit of re-arrangement of function internally’, and be capable of expansion in at least one direction.232 Following this advice, in stark contrast to the many pompous compositions of the past, Sixties libraries were clothed in a range of contemporary styles which made bold statements about the role they could play in modernising post-war, post-imperial Britain. In keeping with 1960s modernity, it would become common

82 Modernisation and modernism for new public libraries to be publicised as being ‘space age’ in appearance. Most librarians were enthusiastic broadcasters of the modernity of their new buildings (even if they said more about interior than exterior style).233 That library planners bought into modernism so readily is not a surprise: it was the aesthetic orthodoxy of the day. In being a symbol of a brighter future, one that was planned and egalitarian, however, modernism fitted well with the historic ideology of the public library in Britain, which stressed the importance of inclusion and of free access to books and other reading. Library design in Britain – to which E.J. Carter, RIBA’s Librarian, in 1942 ascribed ‘dreariness’ and ‘communal deadness’, and which the librarian Robert Collison thought to be ‘hindered by a florid and wasteful architecture which current taste finds somewhat distasteful’ – was revolutionised in the 1960s.234 Librarians recognised and celebrated this at the time. David Gerard believed the new styles of library architecture that were being deployed represented ‘a change of heart’.235 J.D. Reynolds was more emphatic: ‘It would be difficult nowadays to produce a library that does not look attractive’.236 A great deal of this sense of attractiveness was generated by a new approach to the design of interiors. It was in the transformed contemporary interior spaces where, to use the words of the librarian Joseph Wheeler and the architect Alfred Githens from their The American public library building (1941), readers enjoyed a ‘friendly, open aspect’, that libraries were most visibly toppled from their ‘high pedestal’.237 Dynamically, the new interiors combined the open vistas of the grand-hall library with informality and seclusion. Although one observer claimed that the new age of glass, colour and bright artificial lighting might run the risk of making libraries ‘uncomfortably brash, flimsy, ephemeral, [and] unsuited to the literary sense of scholarship they are supposed to advance’,238 the fact is that readers in contemporary communal settings were able to pursue a separate, individual identity in niches and zones created by intelligently placed furniture and book stacks frequently facilitated by a modular spacing of internal columns. Later generations unfortunately, and incorrectly, came to stereotype Sixties libraries, in terms of their external look, as ‘an endless stream of squat, flat-roofed, featureless boxes’,239 the result of being in such a rush to build that library design ‘placed too much on functionality over form’.240 These issues of style and space, including decisions degrading the spatial question of location (siting), are addressed in the next chapter.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

T. Paine, Common sense (London: [1776] 1792), 51. R. Williams, The long revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 11. P. Addison, The road to 1945: British politics and the Second World War (London: Cape, 1975). R. Pope, War and society in Britain 1899–1948 (London: Longman, 1991). E.D. Simon, Re-building Britain: A twenty year plan (London: Victor Gollancz and the Left Book Club, 1945), 7, 223. Quoted in D. Childs, Britain since 1945: A political history, 4th edition (London: Methuen, 1997), 80.

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7 For basic data on growth rates and coverage of economic development, see A. Marwick, A history of the modern British Isles 1914–1999: Circumstances, events and outcomes (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 20, 163, 275; and R. Pope, The British economy since 1914: A study in decline (London: Longman, 1998). 8 Quoted in T. Wilkie, British science and politics since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 73–74. 9 Department of Economic Affairs, The national plan. Command Paper 2764 (1965). 10 J. Hamilton-Peterson, Empire of the clouds: When Britain’s aircraft ruled the world (London: Faber, 2010). 11 M. McLuhan, Counterblast (London: Rapp and Whiting, 1969), 80. 12 D. Sandbrook, White heat: A story of Britain in the swinging Sixties (London: Abacus, 2006), 44. 13 P. Hennessy, Having it so good: Britain in the fifties (London: Penguin, 2007), 5. 14 This list was assembled from A. Marwick, Culture in Britain since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 69; A. Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States c.1958–c.1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 16–20. 15 G. Turner, British cultural studies: An introduction (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 42–43. 16 F.R. Leavis and D. Thompson, Culture and environment: The training of cultural awareness (London: Chatto & Windus, 1933). 17 Leavis was ‘in so many ways Hoggart’s original mentor’: M. Bailey, B. Clarke and J.K. Walton, Understanding Richard Hoggart: A pedagogy of hope (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 122. 18 R. Hoggart, The uses of literacy: Changing patterns in English mass culture (Fair Lawn, NJ: Essential Books, 1958), 13, 191, 196, 197, 203–205, 271–272. 19 R. Williams, Culture and society 1780–1950 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958), 263, 309, 310. Williams discusses Leavis, 252–264. 20 L. Black, The political culture of the Left in affluent Britain, 1951–1964: Old Labour, new Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 82. 21 R. Williams, Communications (London: Chatto & Windus, [1962] 1966), 10, 34, 105, 124–132, 183. 22 Quoted in L. Black, ‘Making Britain a gayer and more cultivated country’: Wilson, Lee and the creative industries in the 1960s, Contemporary British History, 20/3, 328. 23 G. Mulgan, Culture, in D. Marquand and A. Seldon (eds), The ideas that shaped postwar Britain (London: Fontana, 1996), 201. 24 A. Sinfield, Literature, politics and culture in post-war Britain (London: Athlone Press, 1997), 243. 25 Labour Party, Leisure for living (London: National Executive of the Labour Party, 1959), 6–7. 26 Black, The political culture of the Left, op. cit., 79. 27 A policy for the arts: First steps, by Jennie Lee (London: HMSO, 1965), paragraphs 7, 8, 14, 100. 28 Black, ‘Making Britain a gayer and more cultivated country’, op. cit., 325. 29 Mulgan, Culture, op. cit., 212–213. 30 N. Khan, The arts Britain ignores: The arts of ethnic minorities in Britain (London: Commission for Racial Equality, 1976), 1, 10. 31 R. Peel, Progressively worse: The burden of bad ideas in British schools (London: Civitas, 2014). 32 Department of Education and Science, Adult education: A plan for development (London: HMSO, 1973); H.R. Jones, The Russell Report on adult education in England and Wales in the context of continuing education, Paedogogica Europaea, 9/2 (1974), 65–75.

84 Modernisation and modernism 33 N. Pevsner, Pioneers of the modern movement (London: Faber and Faber, 1936); M. Fraser, Architecture and the ‘special relationship’: The American influence on postwar British architecture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007); E. Darling, Re-forming Britain: Narratives of modernity before reconstruction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007); E. Relph, The modern urban landscape (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1987); A. Powers, Britain: Modern architectures in history (London: Reaktion Books, 2007). 34 G.E.K. Smith, The new architecture of Europe (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Co., 1961), 8. 35 M.F. Guillén, The Taylorized beauty of the mechanical: Scientific management and the rise of modernist architecture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 36 E. Hobsbawm, Age of extremes: The short twentieth century 1914–1991 (London: Abacus, 1995), 515. 37 H. Hitchcock, The British nineteenth century and modern architecture, in Modern architecture in England (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1937), 16; H. Hitchcock, Modern architecture in England, in Modern architecture in England (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1937), 32. 38 H. Hopkins, The new look: A social history of the Forties and Fifties in Britain (London: Secker & Warburg, 1963), 459. 39 The new telephone kiosk, The Architects’ Journal (8 January 1959), 48–50. 40 F. Leslie, Design for 20th-century interiors (London: V&A Publications, 2008), 18–19. 41 P. Rennie, Festival of Britain 1951 (London: Antique Collectors Club, 2007); B.E. Conekin, ‘The autobiography of a nation’: The 1951 Festival of Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 42 M. Banham and B. Hillier, A tonic to the nation: The Festival of Britain, 1951 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976). 43 D. Kynaston, Family Britain, 1951–1957 (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 9. 44 Anthology: The creed of a modern architect, Architecture Review, 77 (January–June 1935), 41. 45 Kynaston, Family Britain, op. cit., 280. 46 P. Gregg, A social and economic history of Britain, 1760–1980, 8th edition (London: Harrap, 1982), 552. 47 The curtain wall comes of age, Architectural Forum (April 1952), 135–140. 48 H. Goodden, The lion and the unicorn: Symbolic architecture for the Festival of Britain 1951 (Norwich: Unicorn Press, 2011), 49. 49 A. Service, Edwardian interiors: Inside the homes of the poor, the average and the wealthy (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1982), 10–11. 50 A.S. Zion, Open house: Unbound space and the modern dwelling (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2002). 51 A. Massey, Interior design in the twentieth century, 2nd edition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), 146. 52 J. Banham, Encyclopedia of interior design, Volume 2 (London and Chicago, IL: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997), 905. 53 R. Weston, Modernism (London: Phaidon Books, 1996), 185. 54 Ibid., 9. 55 P. Gruffud, ‘Science and the stuff of life’: Modernist health centres in 1930s London, Journal of Historical Geography, 27/3 (2001), 395–416; J. Holland, Letting in the light: The Council for the Arts and Industry, and Oliver Hill’s pioneer schools, Architectural History, 54 (2011), 275–308. 56 J. Clancey, Modern world architecture (London: Carlton, 2006). 57 Relph, The modern urban landscape, op. cit., 98. 58 Smith, The new architecture of Europe, op. cit., 36. 59 K. Frampton, Modern architecture: A critical history, 2nd edition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985), 262; H. Mattson and S. Wallenstein (eds), Swedish modernism:

Modernisation and modernism 60 61 62

63 64 65

66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82

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Architecture, consumption and the welfare state (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2010). I.B. Whyte (ed.), Man-made futures: Planning, education and design in mid-twentiethcentury Britain (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007). Le Corbusier, The radiant city (London: Faber & Faber, 1964 [1933]). The Modular Society, led by Mark Hartland Thomas and Bruce Martin, was a private organisation that campaigned for a Fordist, Taylorist and operations-research coordination of construction components: see C. Wall, An architecture of parts: Architects, building workers and industrialization in Britain 1940–1970 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). Hopkins, The new look, op. cit., 472–473. M. Millais, Exploding the myths of modern architecture (London: Frances Lincoln, 2009), 3. P. Blake, Can technology solve the housing crisis? Atlantic Monthly (October 1974), 52–60; P. Blake, Form follows fiasco: Why modern architecture hasn’t worked (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown and Company, 1977); R. Elwall, Ernö Goldfinger (London: Academy Editions, 1996); M. MacEwen, Architecture in crisis (London: RIBA, 1974). Modular society: Post-mortem on modular assembly, The Architects’ Journal (29 January 1959), 184. Housing and the environment, special issue of Architectural Review, 142/849 (November 1967). F.J.C. Amos, High hopes and low life, in International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering, Tall buildings and people? (London: Institution of Structural Engineers, 1974), 56–60. S. Pepper, The beginnings of high-rise social housing in the long 1940s: The case of the LCC and the Woodberry Down Estate, in M. Swenarton, T. Avermaete and D. van den Heuvel (eds), Architecture and the welfare state (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 68–91. M. Glendinning and S. Muthesius, Tower block: Modern public housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1994). Title of Chapter 4 of R. Goodman, After the planners (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 132–153. From his poem Monody on the death of Aldersgate Station, in K.J. Gardner, Faith and doubt of John Betjeman (London: Continuum, 2005), 111. R. Banham, Theory and design in the first machine age (London: The Architectural Press, 1960), 9. A. Colquhoun, Modern architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 11. New Era for Libraries? East Anglia Daily Times (13 April 1959). W.A. Munford, A history of the Library Association, 1877–1977 (London: Library Association, 1977), 290. Ministry of Education, The structure of the public library service in England and Wales [Roberts Report] (London: HMSO, 1959). Ministry of Education, Standards of public library service in England and Wales [Bourdillon Report] (London: HMSO, 1962). Ministry of Education, Inter-library co-operation in England and Wales [Baker Report] (London: HMSO, 1962). A stronger public library service, The Guardian (6 April 1964). M. Hung, English public libraries, 1919–1975: Vocation and popularisation (unpublished PhD, Leeds Metropolitan University, 2015), 232–233. Edinburgh Libraries and Museums Committee, Annual Report (1957–1958), 1; Record year at City Libraries, Edinburgh Evening News (4 November 1965). Massive expansion in use of libraries, Glasgow Herald (27 August 1969). E. Harwood, The English public library 1945–1985 (London: English Heritage, 2013), 3.

86 Modernisation and modernism 83 Library Association Executive Committee Minutes (July 1961). 84 K.C. Harrison, Libraries in Britain (Harlow: Longmans, Green & Co. for the British Council, 1968), 4. 85 R.C. Benge, Libraries and cultural change (London: Clive Bingley, 1970), 133. 86 Ministry of Education, Standards of public library service, op. cit. 87 L. Paulin, Recent developments in the provision of public library services in the United Kingdom, Library Quarterly, 48/4 (1978), 513–514. 88 Benge, Libraries and cultural change, op. cit., 174–175. 89 F. Francis, Libraries call in computers to catch up on knowledge, The Times (29 June 1966). 90 E.V. Corbett, Photo-charging: Its operation and installation in a British public library (London: James Clarke & Son, 1957). 91 N.S.M. Cox, J.D. Dews and J.L. Dolby, The computer and the library (Newcastleupon-Tyne: University of Newcastle Library, 1966); J.C.B. Licklider, Libraries of the future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). 92 A.L. Smyth, Information Manchester, Manchester Review, 8 (Spring 1957), 1–3. 93 R. Haxby, Municipal commercial and technical libraries, in J.D. Stewart (ed.), The reference librarian (London, 1951), 85. 94 J.P. Lamb, Commercial and technical libraries (London: Allen & Unwin and The Library Association, 1955), 269. 95 F.R. Taylor, The role of the public library as the centre for scientific and technical information services, in Proceedings of the Public Libraries Conference, Eastbourne, 1970 (London: Library Association, 1970), 30. 96 H. Jenkins, The library and the life of the community, Library Association Record, 76/6 (June 1974), 103. 97 Queues at library reading room, Yorkshire Evening Post (10 September 1959). 98 K.C. Harrison, Public relations for librarians (London, 1973), 102. 99 Library Association Executive Committee Minutes (November 1960). 100 Ibid. (October 1961). 101 Ibid. (November 1960). 102 M.B. Line, Library surveys (London, 1967). 103 B. Luckham, The library in society (London: The Library Association, 1971); B. Groombridge, The Londoner and his library (London: Research Institute for Consumer Affairs, 1964). 104 M.W. Devereux, Libraries in working class areas, Assistant Librarian, 65/11 (November 1972), 172. 105 R. Pahl, Friendly library: The library and the community, Assistant Librarian, 62/6 (June 1969), 79. 106 K.H. Jones, Towards a re-interpretation of public library purpose, New Library World, 73/855 (September 1971), 76. 107 D. Gerard, New styles of architecture, Library Association Record, 65/1 (January 1963), 27. 108 A. Marr, A history of modern Britain (London: Macmillan, 2007), 247. 109 P.M. Worsley, Libraries and mass culture, in H. Ward (ed.), Library buildings: Design and fulfilment (London: Library Association London and Home Counties Branch, 1967), 5–25 passim. 110 G. Harvey, Public library impact – breaking down barriers, Assistant Librarian, 66/7 (July 1973), 111. 111 William Maidment, Librarianship (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1975), 106–107. 112 H. Jolliffe, Public library extension activities (London: Library Association, 1962), 2–3. The progress of the St Pancras Arts Festival is recorded in W. Taylor, The St Pancras Arts Festival, in E. Hillman (Ed), Essays in local government enterprise. Volume 1 (London: Merlin, 1964), 37–42.

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113 Maidment, Librarianship, op. cit., 108–109. 114 A. Wilson, Public libraries and the arts in Britain, in D.E. Gerard, Libraries and the arts (Hamden, CT: Archon Books and London: Clive Bingley, 1970), 124, 127. 115 A. Wilson, The public librarian as cultural director, Library Association Record, 70/1 (January 1968), 10. 116 Jolliffe, Public library extension activities, op. cit., 298, 301. 117 Maidment, Librarianship, op. cit., 111. 118 D.L. LeMahieu, The gramophone: Recorded music and the cultivated mind in Britain between the wars, Technology and Culture, 23/3 (July 1982), 372–391. 119 Maidment, Librarianship, op. cit., 109–110. 120 T. Kelly, A history of public libraries in Great Britain, 1845–1975 (London: Library Association, 1977), 393. 121 Hung, English public libraries, op. cit., 271. 122 E. Cooper, Gramophone record libraries – past, present and future, Assistant Librarian, 58/4 (April 1965), 72. 123 Harrison, Libraries in Britain, op. cit., 10. 124 J. Walters and P. Cox, Gramophone libraries: Do the public really want them? Assistant Librarian, 60/11 (November 1967), 233. 125 Metropolitan Borough of Stepney, Annual report of the borough librarian (1956– 1957), 12–13. 126 Jolliffe, Public library extension activities, op. cit., 33–34. 127 A. Wilson, Practical implications for a permanent programme, in Gerard, Libraries and the arts, op. cit., 191–193. 128 Jones, Towards a re-interpretation of public library purpose, op. cit., 77. 129 M. Johansen, ‘Good feeling and brotherliness’: Leisure, the suburbs and the Society of Public Librarians in London (1895–1930), The London Journal, 39/3 (November 2014), 249–264. Charles Pooter is a fictional character in George and Weedon Grossmith’s comic novel The Diary of a Nobody (1892), a clerk with ideas above his station who takes himself very seriously. 130 This brief discussion of Bourdieu is based on the following: P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); C. Barker, Cultural capital, in The Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies (London: Sage, 2004), 37; L. Hussey, Social capital, symbolic violence and fields of cultural production: Pierre Bourdieu and library and information science, in G. Leckie, L. Given and J. Buschman (eds), Critical theory for library and information science (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010), 41–51; A. Goulding, Libraries and cultural capital, Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 40/4 (December 2008), 235–237; B. Skeggs, Feeling class: Affect and culture in the making of class relations, in G. Ritzer (ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to sociology (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2012), 269–286; C.A. Monnier, Bourdieu, Pierre (1930–2002), in G. Ritzer (ed.), The Blackwell encyclopedia of sociology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 347–350; D. Reed-Danahay, Locating Bourdieu (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), 47. 131 Hung, English public libraries, op. cit. 132 Ibid., 292. 133 G. Jefferson, Libraries and society (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1969), 4–5. 134 H.G. Fletcher, Cheltenham: Hester Way Branch, Library Association Record, 65/12, 480. 135 Mayor opens new £21,000 library, Bromley & Kentish Times (21 September 1962). 136 J. O’Riordan, Has TV changed our reading habits? Assistant Librarian, 54/11 (November 1961), 220. 137 E.J. Wilson, Go unashamed, Assistant Librarian, 50/8 (August 1957), 136. 138 R. Chapman, Selling the Sixties: The pirates and pop music radio (London: Routledge, 1992), 1–2.

88 Modernisation and modernism 139 N. Burgess, The library and the teenager, Assistant Librarian, 58/6 (August 1963), 167–168. 140 W.S. Hudson, American comics, Library Association Record, 54/7 (July 1952), 243–244. 141 M. Darvell, Long live the revolution! Assistant Librarian, 63/2 (February 1970), 26. 142 Quoted in J.D. Henry, A social history of branch library development: With special reference to the city of Glasgow (Glasgow: Scottish Library Association, 1974), 322. 143 Department of Education and Science, Public libraries and their use (London: HMSO, 1973), 22. 144 P.G. New, The public provision of light literature, Library Association Record, 57/4 (April 1955), 149–153. 145 M. Morris, Manchester economises on fiction in libraries, Manchester Guardian (24 November 1967). 146 Greater call on libraries for educational books, Yorkshire Evening Press (2 September 1964). 147 City Corporation of Glasgow, Public Library Annual report (1957–1958; 1962–1963; 1964–1965; 1966–1967; 1969–1970). 148 M. Hart, The use of paperbacks in public libraries in the UK: A review of research (Loughborough: Centre for Library and Information Management, Loughborough University, 1983). 149 No ‘James Bond’ ban in York, Yorkshire Evening Post (9 August 1963). 150 Lady Chatterley … out of the shadows, Sunday Mercury (12 August 1973). 151 W.J. Murison, The public library: Its origins, purpose, and significance as a social institution (London: George Harrap, 1955), 107–115 passim, 187. 152 Harrison, Libraries in Britain, op. cit., 11. In the United States extension work meant the development and promotion of existing core services. 153 List taken from Jolliffe, Public library extension activities, op. cit., 4–5. 154 E. Leyland, The wider public library (London: Grafton, 1938), v, 1–21 passim. 155 L. McColvin, Library extension work and publicity (London: Grafton, 1927). 156 D. Muddiman, The public library in an age of inclusion: Edward Sydney, Harold Jolliffe and the rise and fall of library extension, 1927–72, Library History, 18 (July 2002), 117–130. The development of the public library’s patronage of the arts in Swindon from the 1940s through the 1960s is described in H. Jolliffe, Arts centre adventure (Swindon Borough Council, 1968). 157 Wilson, Public libraries and the arts in Britain, op. cit., 119. 158 Department of Education and Science, Public libraries and their cultural activities (London: HMSO, 1975). 159 Wilson, Practical implications for a permanent programme, op. cit., 187–188. 160 Jolliffe, Public library extension activities, op. cit., 22. 161 Maidment, Librarianship, op. cit., 101. 162 M. Brawne, Off the shelf, Architectural Review (July 1971), 51. 163 J.M. Orr, Designing library buildings for activity (London: Andre Deutsch, 1972), 106. 164 Department of Education and Science, Public libraries and their cultural activities, op. cit., 9. 165 L.S. Jast, The library and the community (London: T. Nelson & Sons, 1939); L.R. McColvin, Libraries and the public (London: Allen & Unwin, 1937); E. Leyland, The wider public library, op. cit. 166 D. Muddiman, S. Durrani, M, Dutch, R. Linley, J. Pateman and J. Vincent, Open to all? The public library and social exclusion, Volume 1 (London: Resource, 2000), 19–20. 167 John Noyce, Editorial, Librarians for Social Change, 1 (Winter 1972), 1. 168 B.C. Arnold, Born free, Assistant Librarian, 67/11 (November 1974), 167.

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169 A. Dearden, Librarianship and the problems of society, Assistant Librarian, 63/4 (April 1970), 112. 170 R.E. Marston, Status, Assistant Librarian, 51/1 (January 1958), 11–12. 171 Peter Labdon, Status seekers, The Assistant Librarian, 54/3 (March 1961), 47. 172 K. McGarry, Book selection, Assistant Librarian, 54/12 (December 1961), 233–234. 173 2021 look for new library, Barking & Dagenham News Shopper (26 October 1971). 174 E.T. Bryant, Music libraries, in P.H. Sewell (ed.), Five years’ work in librarianship 1961–1965 (London: Library Association, 1968), 184. 175 P. Sykes, The public library in perspective: An examination of its origins and modern role (London: Clive Bingley, 1979), 155. 176 Maidment, Librarianship, op. cit., 11. 177 E.V. Corbett, 1965–1975: A decade to remember, in Proceedings of the 1975 Public Libraries Conference (London: Library Association, 1975), 3. 178 D. Haslam, Library statistics: Books in a siege economy II, The Bookseller (6 December 1975), 2586–2589. 179 Should a charge be made for library books? Edinburgh Evening News (19 March 1970). 180 L. McColvin, The public library system of Great Britain: A report on its present condition with proposals for post-war reorganization (London: The Library Association, 1942), 215, 217. 181 E.A. Clough, Library buildings for the 1960s, Librarian and Book World, XLIX/1 (January 1960), 1. 182 M. Dewe, Built to last, in M. Kinnell and P. Sturges (eds), Continuity and innovation in the public library: The development of a social institution (London: Library Association Publishing, 1996), 95. 183 E.F. Patterson, Library buildings, in J.H.P. Pafford (ed.), The year’s work in librarianship, Vol. XIII (London: Library Association), 128. 184 Ministry of Education, The structure of public library service, op. cit. 185 Ministry of Education, Standards of public library service, op. cit., 33. 186 S.G. Berriman and K.C. Harrison, British public library buildings (London: Andre Deutsch, 1966), 18. 187 This figure is based on Harrison’s estimate that the period 1960–1969 saw a total of six hundred new libraries: K.C. Harrison, Central public library buildings, in H.A. Whatley (ed.), British librarianship and information science 1966–1970 (London: Library Association, 1972), 192. From this total the figure of 250 for 1960–1964 is subtracted. 188 G. Thompson, Buildings, equipment and conservation, in L.J. Taylor (ed.), British librarianship and information work 1976–1980. Volume 1 (London: Library Association, 1983), 25. 189 Department of Education and Science, The public library service: Reorganization and after (London: HMSO, 1973), 10. 190 The proceedings were published as K.M. Newbury (ed.), Looking ahead: Techniques and buildings of the future (Gillingham: London and Home Counties Branch of the Library Association, 1956). 191 J.P. Wells, Library buildings of the future: The librarian’s viewpoint, in Newbury, Looking ahead: Techniques and buildings of the future, op. cit., 46. 192 S.A.G. Cook, Library buildings of the future: The architect’s viewpoint, in Newbury, Looking ahead: Techniques and buildings of the future, op. cit., 37, 38. 193 Department of Education and Science, Public libraries and their use, op. cit., 64. 194 Library Association Executive Committee Minutes (March 1961). 195 D.W. Dickerson, Building together 1: The architect and the librarian, Library Association Record, 65/12 (December 1963), 445. 196 E.M. Broome, Building together 2: The architect and the librarian, Library Association Record, 65/12 (December 1963), 452.

90 Modernisation and modernism 197 Library Association, Examination papers set for Winter 1964 (London: Library Association, 1964), Final Examination, Part II. 198 Clough, Library buildings for the 1960s, op. cit., 3. 199 Library Association Executive Committee Minutes (May 1959). 200 Library Association, Public library buildings: The way ahead (London: Library Association, 1960). 201 Individual library designs were naturally covered in architectural journals from time to time. The first extensive coverage of post-war library planning aimed at the architectural profession appeared in a series of supplements in the Architects’ Journal in 1965, an exercise that was repeated three years later: Library spaces, fixtures and equipment, Architects’ Journal (17 February 1965), 425–446; and see a series of supplements on library buildings commencing 21 February 1968. 202 A. Thompson, Library buildings of Britain and Europe: An international study with examples mainly from Britain and some from Europe and overseas (London: Butterworths, 1963) examined various types of post-war libraries in addition to public libraries, and a similarly general picture is given by J.M. Orr, Designing library buildings for activity, op. cit. P. Castle, Five university libraries, Architects’ Journal (6 March 1968), 561–577, examined the new modernist library buildings at the universities of York, Warwick, Lancaster, Essex and Edinburgh, the last designed by Basil Spence. For a librarian’s views on such new university libraries, see in the same issue E.R.S. Fifoot, University library buildings: A librarian’s comments, Architects’ Journal (6 March 1968), 579–580, who complains about too little flexibility, poor application of modular systems and lack of consultation of librarians. On the planning of special libraries, see L.J. Anthony, Library planning, in W. Ashworth (ed.), Handbook of special librarianship and information work, 3rd edition (London: Aslib, 1967), 309–364. Architects also considered their own libraries: Architects’ personal and office libraries, Architects’ Journal (7 August 1968), 255–278; (14 August), 307– 321; (21 August), 355–378. 203 London and Home Counties Branch of the Library Association, A feasibility study on the future of library buildings’ prepared on behalf of our Architect/Librarian Working Party by Mr. Donald Reynolds, Library Association Council and Committee Papers (1968), 1276–1298. 204 Letter from A.S. Gann (Department of Education) to H.D. Barry (27 March 1969), Library Association Council and Committee Papers (1969), 1504–1505. 205 W.S. Yenawine, Contemporary library design (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1958). 206 E.g. see: Plans for Kalamazoo, Library Journal, 80/21 (1 December 1955), 2675– 2679; Santa Ana prepares, Library Journal, 80/21 (1 December 1955), 2680–2683. 207 Hammond Public Library, Hammond, Indiana, in R.J. Shaw (ed.), Libraries: Buildings for the future (Chicago, IL: Library Association, 1967), 62. This facility was not a pure ‘drive thru’, however, as the driver still had to approach the window on foot. 208 American Library Association, The library building (Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 1947), 13. 209 Powers, Modern architecture, op. cit., 231. 210 Library Association Executive Committee Minutes (26 November 1959). 211 Library Association Record, 59/1 (January 1957), 34, reviewed by A.G. Curwen. 212 Library Association Record, 57/6 (June 1955), 244–245. 213 L.R. McColvin, Scandinavian visit, Library Association Record, 53/12 (December 1951), 394. 214 L. McColvin, A visit to Finland, Library Association Record, 59/9 (September 1957), 296. 215 F. Gardner, The Anglo-Scandinavian Library Conference, Halmstad, 1953, Library Association Record, 55/11 (November), 354.

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216 E. Bowen, Swedish library development since 1950, Library Association Record, 58/6 (June 1956), 218. 217 R.G.C. Desmond, Some unquiet thoughts on public library architecture, Library Association Record, 59/3 (March 1957), 87. 218 K.C. Harrison, Travel notes of a librarian, The Times (26 June 1960). 219 K.C. Harrison, A librarian’s odyssey: Episodes of autobiography (Eastbourne: The Author, 2000), 126. 220 W.B. Stevenson, A Danish tour, Library Association Record, 60/12 (December 1958), 364. 221 Berriman and Harrison, British public library buildings, op. cit., 17. 222 Harrison, A librarian’s odyssey, op. cit., 123–135. 223 K.C. Harrison, Libraries in Scandinavia, 2nd edition (London: Andre Deutsch, 1969), 247, 248. Also, see K.C. Harrison, Tale of two city libraries. Library World, 69/811 (1968), 172–174; and K.C. Harrison, Finnish public libraries today, Library Association Record, 69/5 (May 1967), 151–155. 224 F. Gardner, Architect/librarian co-operation, in Herbert Ward (ed.), Better library buildings: Architect/librarian co-operation in their design (London: Library Association London and Home Counties Branch, 1969), 15. However, as early as the late 1950s it was argued that galleries were underused and so lending facilities should simply operate on one floor: see Thompson, Library buildings of Britain and Europe, op. cit., 270. 225 Eastbourne’s New Central Library, Library Association Record, 66/12 (December 1964), 517. 226 Harrison, Central public library buildings, op. cit., 196. 227 B. Hjelmqvist, Behind or ahead? Public libraries in Sweden, in R.F. Vollans, Libraries for the people (London: Library Association, 1968), 192. 228 S. Plovgaard, Public library buildings: Standards and type plans for library premises in areas with populations of between 5,000 and 25,000 (London, Library Association, 1971). 229 Eastbourne New Central Library, Library Association Record, 66/4 (December 1964), 521. 230 Berriman and Harrison, British public library buildings, op. cit., 18. 231 Library Association Record, 62/5 (May 1960), 149–152. 232 Library Association Executive Committee Minutes (28 May 1959; 26 November 1959). 233 Harrison, Central public library buildings, op. cit., 202. 234 E.J. Carter, Notes on library buildings, Library Association Record, 44/2 (February 1942), 66; Robert L. Collison, Library assistance to readers (London: Crosby Lockwood), 2. 235 D. Gerard, New styles of architecture, op. cit., 25. 236 J.D. Reynolds, 1965 – but what next? in J.D. Reynolds (ed.), Library buildings 1965 (London: Library Association, 1966), 3. 237 J.L. Wheeler and A.M. Githens, The American public library building: Its planning and design with special reference to its administration and service (Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 1941), 12, 353. 238 B. Platts, Patronage and pattern at the library, Country Life (2 March 1967), 475. 239 K. Anderson, The aesthetic origins, decline and reappraisal of the historic library building (unpublished MSc dissertation, Leeds Metropolitan University, 1994), 59. 240 P. Harper, Library design has arrived, Library and Information Update, 5/7–8 (JulyAugust: 2006), 35.

3

Style, siting and space

In his book Architecture in Britain today (1969), the architect Michael Webb described libraries of yesteryear as ‘secular temples for the worship of learning’. The old type of library was, he continued, ‘walled-up against the outside world … inwardly a soulless barn containing serried ranks of hard-backed chairs’. In the 1960s, however, he sensed, libraries were turning away from this introspective image and were becoming ‘places of enjoyment not necessarily born of edification, demanding informality and higher standards of comfort’. Sixties libraries, Webb contended, were also ‘information warehouses’, and as such demanded ease of accessibility.1 Webb’s claims were conceivably based not only on his observation of changing interior and exterior styles derived from the rise of modernism but also on an awareness of the new spaces that were appearing in libraries (including those for culture and ‘enjoyment’) and of the importance of siting libraries (now ‘information warehouses’) close to dense populations of ‘communication age’ citizens, whether these be residents on new housing estates or consumers and commuters in redeveloped urban centres. In the 1960s, library investigators and planners increasingly argued that the traditional approach to public library design in all its aspects – style, space and siting – was a major impediment to the progress of the institution in the modern age, especially in the way that non-users found traditional built-forms ‘discouraging’.2

Style The new libraries of the 1960s were celebrated at the time as being ‘aggressively “modern” in appearance’.3 Later generations, however, were not so celebratory. Composed with an uncompromisingly modernist brush, Sixties libraries became stereotyped as sterile steel and glass boxes or ugly blocks of grey concrete, places more likely to be occupied by secret policemen than harmless librarians.4 Even in the 1960s, impressions of the diversity of library styles could be narrow. The librarian Godfrey Thompson divided the modernist libraries he’d seen into two groups: ‘square, white concrete and glass or transitional with some brick and more subtle use of windows’.5 In truth, there was a much greater variety of style. In constructing a taxonomy of Sixties public library modernism, six genres can be identified: ‘utility’, ‘no frills’, ‘Scandinavian light’, ‘glass-and-steel box’, ‘expressionist’ and ‘brutalist’.6

Style, siting and space 93 Taking their cue from the tens of thousands of prefabricated bungalows erected in Britain immediately after the war in an attempt to help solve the country’s critical housing problem, some local authorities provided makeshift libraries in a style which can be described as ‘utility’. The Acomb Branch Library, York (1950) was one such design (Figure 3.1). After prolonged negotiations with the Ministry of Health, a temporary library building was provided for the residents of Acomb. This ‘temporary’ structure remained in place for nineteen years. The single-storey building was made of Ministry of Works precast concrete units and in terms of its size conformed to government rules on economy. The roof was covered with corrugated asbestos roofing sheets. There was a car park and a covered space for prams and cycles. The frontage was attractively laid out with grass, shrubbery and rose beds. Despite its utilitarian conception, the building included a number of diluted traditional references, including a pitched roof, classical pilasters and a symmetrical elevation.7 That same year a similar Ministry of Works ‘hutment’ library, as these kind of structures were termed, was also erected in Sheffield: the Southey Branch Library (1950).8 Despite the boom in permanent library buildings after 1960, temporary demountable, prefabricated structures continued to be erected. These were easy to put up and easy to dismantle and reuse. Terrapin Reska promised to erect and equip a library in a week, citing a new library in Hadleigh, opened in 1968, as an example.9 The company supplied what it called ‘package’ libraries, prefabricated and of standard design. A typical layout comprised an entrance hall with staff counter, a junior library directly ahead and a larger adult area off the hall to the left. There was a choice of soft furnishings, however, allowing for a certain diversity.10 Turning to permanent structures, ‘austerity Britain’ saw the growth of a ‘no-frills’ modernism that fitted with the spending limitations of the time. Its precursor was the simplified historicism of the interwar period, such as the Beckenham Public Library (see Figure 0.2) and the Southfield Branch Library, Leicester (1939) whose main feature was a drum-like mass similar to that used by Asplund in the design of the Stockholm City Library and by Charles Holden in his London Underground stations. The look of the Camberley Central Library, Surrey (1964) resulted from a combination of stripped-down neo-Georgian and sleek modernism (Figure 3.2). Camberley Central Library also referenced the vernacular. Of interest in this regard, therefore, is what one might call ‘vernacular modernism’, a strain of modernism evident in the design of the Lansbury Estate in East London, a model housing project built as part of the Festival of Britain in 1951. Though undeniably modernist and utilitarian, the estate had a pastoral vibe. A picturesque landscape for the twentieth century, Lansbury was an attempt to show how modernism could be compatible with historical continuity.11 The village imagery that infected the estate represented an urban vision that was at once progressive and conservative (and spacious indeed) but which was to be overtaken eventually by economic imperatives and technocratic modernisation, the outcome being the popularity of brutalism, certainly in the sphere of large-scale housing. In the meantime,

94 Style, siting and space

Figure 3.1 Acomb Branch Library, York. Source: Explore York Libraries and Archives.

Figure 3.2 Camberley Central Library. Source: Surrey History Centre.

however, the Lansbury experiment stood for a type of modernism that might best be summed up in a sentiment included in the Festival’s official architectural guide: the desire to create everyday surroundings that corresponded to ‘elegance and order, efficiency and gaiety’.12 Camberley Central Library, in its leafy, countytown setting, corresponded closely to this design mix.

Style, siting and space 95 ‘No-frills’ modernism had a multilayered etymology. It included Swedish social housing, the development of which had not been interrupted by the war. The effects of the Swedish model for local-authority owned estates in Britain were extensive. The Gillmoss Estate in Liverpool was typical of the type of ‘no frills’ Swedish-style housing that appeared throughout Britain in the 1950s. Marking its place in the edifice of the welfare state, the Gillmoss Branch Library (1954) formed an integral part of one of the blocks on an estate that promised deliverance from the poor housing conditions and poverty of pre-welfare state Britain (Figure 3.3). ‘No frills’ designs were more often than not part of a larger category: ‘Scandinavian light’. Scandinavian architecture, often referred to in the architectural journals of the time as the ‘new empiricism’, was viewed in some quarters as dreary, soft and even ‘effeminate’, a departure in modernism from its earlier development shaped by a vigorous Bauhaus aesthetic and the hard compositions of Le Corbusier.13 The popularity of ‘Scandinavian light’, furthered by the success of the Festival of Britain, prompted a reaction from those seeking a return to a more authentic modernism, something which found expression in ‘brutalism’ (see below). The Scandinavian dimension to post-war architecture in Britain more than held its own, however, and this was certainly the case in respect of library design. As we have seen, librarians were overwhelmed by the library

Figure 3.3 Gillmoss Branch Library, Liverpool. Source: Liverpool Record Office.

96 Style, siting and space developments that had been occurring in Scandinavia. The iconic Holborn Central Library (1960) (see Chapter 5) and Luton Central Library (1962) (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2) both had a rich Scandinavian pedigree. Luton, in fact, could easily have claimed a direct lineage from the Festival of Britain’s Festival Hall, as could the Hull Central Library (1962) (Figure 3.4). A ‘Festival of Britain’ style was also visible in the design of the ‘Grade II Listed’ Lillington Library, Leamington Spa (1960).14 Further, as we shall see later, Scandinavian influences were virtually ubiquitous in interior designs for Sixties libraries. Reviewing recent progress in library design in 1967, Godfrey Thompson claimed that ‘we have now advanced so far that we often put up libraries which look like office blocks’.15 Nowhere was this more evident than in the cases of the ten-storey tower block that housed reserve stock in the Kent County Library Headquarters, Maidstone (1964) and Bradford Central Library (1968) (Figure 3.5).16 Many Sixties libraries adhered to the traditional, pre-1939 rectangular shape that mimicked, though not necessarily consciously, the shape of the closed book laid flat, especially if conforming broadly to the common two-to-one length– breadth ratio.17 The steel-framed glass box, square or oblong, was a prevalent style employed for Sixties libraries, with examples ranging from large buildings, like the aforementioned Bradford Central Library, to modest structures, like the Bromley Road Branch Library, Lewisham (see Figure 4.13). Many small libraries – including the Blackhall Branch Library, Edinburgh (1966) (Figure 3.6) – bore a resemblance, it might be suggested, to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona Exposition.18 With its

Figure 3.4 Hull Central Library. Source: Hull History Centre.

Figure 3.5 Bradford Central Library, sketched in the early stages of planning, c.1960. Source: Unidentified artist; with thanks to Bradford Local Studies Library and the Bradford Telegraph & Argus.

Figure 3.6 Blackhall Branch Library, Edinburgh. Source: City of Edinburgh Libraries.

98 Style, siting and space ‘pure surfaces and spaces’ the Barcelona Pavilion was ‘a temple to the modernist aesthetic’,19 one that ‘distilled private life to its barest’.20 Mies van der Rohe went on, of course, to design the famous Martin Luther King Public Library in Washington, DC (1969) where his steel and glass, ‘less is more’, ‘skin and bones’ approach was employed to great effect. Norwich Central Library (see Figures 1.9, 4.3) and Stockton-on-Tees Central Library (1969)21 (see Figure 0.3) might be considered to be part of the same ‘Mies’ family, which also included his Lakeshore Drive Apartments (1949) and the Illinois Institute of Technology (1956), both in Chicago. Translucent at night, all these buildings had great publicity value. The flat-roof box also manifested itself in the bungalow-pavilion style, of which the Seacroft Branch Library, Leeds was a classic example. Seacroft’s south wall was one of continuous double-insulation glass. Bold black-and-white glazed tiles were a feature of the long exterior wall adjacent to an extensive bike and pram shelter (Figure 3.7). The exaggerated scale of the shelter implies that the architect was influenced by the popular, media description of New Towns (though Seacroft was merely a large new suburb) as ‘pram towns’. The allocation of space for bicycles, generous compared with the size of the car park where there was room for just five vehicles, also seems to have been a miscalculation.22 Box designs, like that at Seacroft, lent themselves to systems-method construction. For those local authorities planning a series of branch libraries, standardisation, using common ‘kit’ components, was economically attractive.23 Many library authorities developed a standard plan for their small libraries that could be modified in extent

Figure 3.7 Pram and bike shelter, Seacroft Branch Library, Leeds. Source: www.leodis.net – Leeds Library & Information Service.

Style, siting and space 99 rather than in layout according to the size of the community being served.24 West Sussex, for example, built a series of fairly homogeneous one-room branches.25 Authorities experimented with the adoption of prefabricated ‘systems’ building programmes for their libraries – Nottinghamshire and Durham used the CLASP system, Gloucestershire and West Sussex the SCOLA system.26 Modernism developed outside the box too, in the direction of ‘expressionism’. Expressionist buildings can be clever simulations – imitative representations – of the purpose for which they were created (a recent example being the four ‘openbook’ tower blocks that make up the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, 1995). The Liverpool (Roman Catholic) Metropolitan Cathedral (1967) was symbolically topped by a crown of thorns. Setting a fashion, the Liverpool Cathedral design was in part replicated in the sawtooth, copper-roofed Selsey Branch Library, West Sussex (1964) and in the octagonal public reading space that formed part of the Library Headquarters of Kent County Council.27 A much closer copy was the Fullwell Cross Library, Redbridge, with its ribbed concrete dome, sheathed in copper and raised over round-headed clerestory windows (Figure 3.8).28 The West Byfleet Branch Library, Surrey (1966), built in the round, was another example of the expressionism in branch library design.29 Such circular structures provided attractive civic landmarks, and internally freely offered possibilities for open-plan arrangements. The kind of expressionism that really caught the eye in the 1960s exhibited unpredictable, abstract geometric shapes, the Opera House, Sydney (1973) and the Guggenheim Gallery, New York (1959), being prime examples in this regard. Abstract expressionism in libraries was evident in the design of the whorling

Figure 3.8 Fullwell Cross Library, Redbridge. Source: Wikimedia Commons, photograph by Steve Cadman.

100 Style, siting and space Stanton Hill Branch Library, Sutton-in-Ashfield (1969), described as ‘winklelike’,30 and the Bush Hill Library, Edmonton (1963), with its wildly undulating roofline.31 The lending department of the Pollock District Library, Glasgow (1967) was sheltered by a hyperbolic paraboloid – a ‘conoid’ in mathematical terminology – timber shell roof. Its shape permitted the roof to span a large area without intermediate support. Combined with the glazed curtain walling, the shape helped maximise light. The use of glass screens between departments ‘supplied an air of spaciousness to the library’ (Figures 3.9, 3.10).32 The same design was employed for Drumchapel District Library, opened the following year.33 Abstract expressionism in library design has continued into the postmodern era, the Seattle Public Library (2004) being the most famous example of it in recent years. ‘The time of the modern library building is over’, it was observed in 1997, because buildings were being drawn up in ‘most diverse designs and shapes’ and were no longer simply ‘rectangular modular buildings’.34 The paradigms of library architecture have certainly changed in the last twenty years or so, but persisting expressionist influences arising out of post-war modernism need to be acknowledged. In the later stages of the period addressed in this book, public libraries were increasingly styled in accordance with what became the bête noire of post-war modernism – brutalism. By the time brutalism began to be applied to libraries, it was already deeply entrenched in modernism. The Smithsons’ school at

Figure 3.9 Pollock District Library, Glasgow. Source: Special Collections, Mitchell Library, Glasgow.

Style, siting and space 101

Figure 3.10 Adult department, Pollock District Library, Glasgow. Source: Special Collections, Mitchell Library, Glasgow.

Hunstanton, Norfolk (1954) – ‘more CIA silo than Secondary Modern’, as one architectural historian has put it35 – is widely, though not universally, viewed as having given birth to the term ‘brutalism’. In public housing, brutalism came to be closely associated with the ‘Le Corbusier’ béton brut (rough concrete) ‘cage’ slab, an interpretation of his work which was the opposite of his original concept of a socially harmonious ‘vertical garden city’ that combined private family accommodation with on-site communal services, such as a library. Le Corbusier’s formula was put into practice on the world famous Roehampton housing development, described shortly after it was completed as the ‘finest lowcost housing development in the world’.36 The Roehampton project comprised three estates, the largest being that of Alton East. The Alton East estate, with point-block high-rise, came first and continued the mild Swedish influences evident at the Festival of Britain, in particular the Lansbury estate. Next came Alton West, a scheme with a much harder edge featuring large ‘Le Corbusier’ blocks, each made up of five double-height stories containing maisonettes constructed of prefabricated concrete units and precast flooring slabs and staircases.37 Like the entire estate, the library at Roehampton was designed and built by the London County Council (LCC) but was leased to Wandsworth Borough Council, the latter paying for the equipping of the library and its architect designing bookcases, display units and counters.38 The twin-box library was sited below one of the Alton West estate’s

102 Style, siting and space ten-storey blocks (see Figure 1.6). Although structurally the housing block and the library were separate, with different entrances, the library appeared as an organic outgrowth of the former.39 Its brutalist ‘concrete bunker’ style accorded not only with the housing block that towered above it but also with the direction that LCC housing design would mostly take through the rest of the 1960s – that is, sympathetic to brutalism, suspicious of ‘Scandinavian light’. Opening the library in 1961, the children’s author Noel Streatfeild praised ‘this beautiful building, this delightful new house of books’ (the library went on to be heavily used by children, who accounted for nearly half the loans in the first two months of operation).40 The library’s external brutalism was underlined by a dark and heavy relief panel, portraying successive world civilisations that had influenced British culture, mounted on the wall of the main foyer.41 A number of large libraries displayed a brutalism shaped by a smooth, sleek and often solid-colour finish (through the use of brick, for example), conveying not only a monumentalism as impressive as the medieval castle or ancient sacrificial pyramid but also a civic pomp as potent as the Gothic town hall or classical government building. This type of brutalism can be seen in such buildings as the Birmingham Central Library (see Chapter 8), Kent County Library HQ (1964), Bedford County Library HQ (1969), Worthing Central Library, West Sussex (1976), Rotherham Central Library, South Yorkshire (1978), Bebington Central Library, The Wirral (1971, Listed at Grade II),42 Cardonald District Library, Glasgow (1970) (Figure 3.11) and Barking Central Library, Essex (1974) (Figure 3.12). This great diversity of exterior styling belies the homogeneity of library builtforms that existed, or was perceived, in other respects. First, whatever the style of modernism adopted for exteriors, all were similar in the way they proclaimed a

Figure 3.11 Cardonald District Library, Glasgow. Source: Special Collections, Mitchell Library, Glasgow.

Style, siting and space 103

Figure 3.12 Barking Central Library. Source: London Borough of Barking and Dagenham Local Studies and Archives.

sharp break with the past preoccupation with the past, with backward-looking, historic compositions. Sixties librarians recognised the importance of this message, to the extent that they distinguished little between the varied exterior looks that were fashioned, being merely content with ‘any design which will give … a striking image’.43 Rarely did librarians comment on exterior aesthetics. The reverse was the case, however, in respect of interiors which were commented on profusely. Thus, for K.C. Harrison Sixties libraries were ‘all attractive in their various ways’ but shared the common theme of bringing to an end ‘the institutional look’; he was much more concerned, however, with the demise of the institutional feel inside the walls of the library, specifically its replacement by ‘the clean, colourful and welcoming library, softened by carpeted browsing areas, curtains, plants and flowers, and by comfortable upholstery’.44 This brings us to the second aspect of homogeneity in the styling of Sixties libraries: the great similarity in interior design features, many borrowed from the Scandinavian model. Whether in terms of open-plan spaces, improved lighting, lightweight furniture, heightened colour scheme or appealing flooring, interior features were replicated across libraries, irrespective of their external style. Visiting Worthing Central Library shortly after it opened in 1976, George Berriman, former County Librarian of Cheshire, set to one side what he perceived to be the building’s brutalist, prison-like exterior (where only the legend ‘Library’

104 Style, siting and space identified it as such) and assessed the interior as representing ‘a public service operating in a relaxed, unostentatious and competent setting’ which could even be described as ‘sumptuous’.45 A feature of the brutalist Cardonald District Library (1970) was its balcony, with a wooden balustrade that ran around three sides of the main lending department, providing a reading and study area approached by a delightful curved staircase.46 Cold and fortress-like outside, Cardonald exuded a feeling of warmth and homeliness inside (Figure 3.13). In a guide to its services published eighteen years after it opened, Baillieston Library, Glasgow (1966) was said to reflect ‘the early and mid-1960s emphasis on attractive, light, airy buildings with a potential for flexibility (i.e. open plan)’. It was suggested that the library was born of Scandinavian influences and comment was passed on the ‘noticeable effect of spaciousness achieved in small buildings’.47 Southborough Library, Bromley (1962) sported a playful Festival-of-Britain/Scandinavian-style canopy above the librarians’ entrance control station, the library’s external appearance displaying a similar stylistic etymology (Figures 3.14, 3.15). Naturally, librarians did not have complete control over the interior design of their buildings but one aspect they were able to influence heavily was the choice of fixtures and fittings. They began to take note of developments in contemporary furniture design that would replace what one librarian in 1963 referred to as equipment of ‘hideous and antiquated design … fit only for a museum of

Figure 3.13 Adult department, Cardonald District Library, Glasgow. Source: Special Collections, Mitchell Library, Glasgow.

Style, siting and space 105

Figure 3.14 Entrance control station, Southborough Library, Bromley. Source: London Borough of Bromley Local Studies and Archives.

librarianship’.48 Furniture, including shelving, became lighter and more flexible. The pre-war preference for solid-looking furniture was abandoned. Desks and counters were given laminate tops. Some libraries installed bookcases that were curved on the vertical plane, with wider shelves at the bottom of the stack slanted upwards to allow readers to better browse and retrieve books stored at floor level. Curved shelving on the horizontal plane – ‘serpentine island shelving’ – was also suggested, in an effort to break up the monotonous pattern of book storage that had existed for centuries (Figure 3.16).49 Plastic tiles were an improvement on the monocolour linoleum of yesteryear. Many libraries installed hardwood floors or cork tiles in warm colours. Colour was also imported by carpeting, a floor covering new to libraries (carpeting was also a good means of sound control).50 In the Portsmouth Central Library (1976) carpets were tangerine, which made an interesting combination with the choice of colour for the walls, this being puce (dull pink).51 Some colour choices later began to be seen as clearly ‘of their time’: in 2006, a contributor to the Mass-Observation Archive described public libraries of the 1970s as simply ‘beige’.52 The important point is, however, that colour per se was now being promoted. Regarding the Hulme District Library, Manchester, it was said that prints for loan displayed in the building added ‘colour and freshness to the appearance of the library’.53 Books with brightly coloured jackets in see-through protective sleeves added to the scene. As discussed in Chapter 1, more colourful interiors were enhanced by better lighting.

106 Style, siting and space

Figure 3.15 Southborough Library, Bromley. Source: London Borough of Bromley Local Studies and Archives.

What postmodern inroads were made into the interior design of libraries before the mid-1970s were less to do with new forms of imagery inspired by Sixties pop culture than by post-modernism’s engineering- and vernacular-style inflections. No library adopted an external look that resonated with blatant postmodern, hightech engineering-style compositions of years to come, like the inside-out Lloyds Building, London (1986) or the Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris (1971), the latter characterised by a drain-pipe architecture which housed a large reference library and which some saw as a supermarket-like, populist gimmick.54 There were, however, references to the engineering style in some libraries in terms of exposed structural supports. What became a postmodern credential in the form of hightech designs evolved, of course, from the interiors of the Smithsons’ Hunstanton School, rooms there having unfinished interiors, with pipework, electrical ducting and structural elements on display. Roof girders were visible in the Festival of Britain’s iconic Dome of Discovery. They were also openly on view in the Allerton District Library (see Figure 0.4) and in the Cardonald District Library (see Figure 3.13), and were reported, not surprisingly, by the journal Tubular Structures to be a major feature of the Maidenhead Central Library (1971).55 The width of the adult lending library of Redcar District Library, covered by a serrated

Style, siting and space 107

Figure 3.16 Example of curved shelving. Source: Redrawn by Daniel Cho, from J.M. Orr, Designing library buildings for activity, London: Andre Deutsch, 1972.

metal roof, was spanned by castellated metal beams. This, combined with opensteel pillars, led to the library being described as ‘an industrial structure’.56 The high-tech, industrial look in libraries was added to shortly before the end of our period in the form of anti-theft security machines.57 Another precursor of postmodern styles was the growing respect, as the period progressed, for the vernacular and for historic premises renovated or converted along modernist lines. Given the widespread acceptance of libraries in a modernist garb that had been set alongside buildings clothed in historical styles, it did not appear incongruous for historic libraries to be reinvented in a modernist mode. Opened in 1971 after extensive renovation, Govanhill District Library, Glasgow was said to present ‘the latest example of how the interior of an old building can be made to appear new’. Many appreciative comments were made about the renovation.58 Ceilings throughout the library were lowered to conceal the former heavy plasterwork and to direct attention away from the building’s Edwardian origins (it had been opened in 1906). In places natural roof lighting was retained by using laylight panels. Fluorescent lighting in modular panels was installed. A central feature of the library was an attractive, semicircular counter (Figure 3.17).59 As inflation took off after around 1970 and building costs rose, renovation of historic library interiors became a rational option for local authorities. Considering the waning of belief in modernism, increasingly there was also an aesthetic logic to renovation projects. As the ‘old’ increasingly became the ‘new’, respect for the

108 Style, siting and space

Figure 3.17 Govanhill Library, Glasgow, following renovation. Source: Special Collections, Mitchell Library, Glasgow.

vernacular grew. A good example of vernacular style mixed with modernist references was a series of branch libraries opened by Buckinghamshire County Council in the early 1970s. Set in parkland close to the village hall, Burnham Library, serving a population of 18,000, comprised an open-plan space for children and adults and a more isolated area for study. There was also a meeting room with its own entrance. The library’s design was said to have been inspired by a barn seen by its architect, Derek Turner.60 Described, indeed, as a ‘barnlike’ structure, the main library space was punctuated, in modular fashion, by two lines of timber columns forming a central aisle. Each column was connecting at a right-angle to the nearest wall by a timber beam, the effect being ‘imaginary’ stables or, more realistically, potential book alcoves. Ceiling cladding was in Parana pine. The free use of light woods as well as dormer windows and angled ceilings also gave a traditional, rustic feel to ‘sister’ branch libraries in Haddenham and Great Missenden. These libraries also displayed the slanted roofs and internal and external brickwork associated with Aalto’s work: for example, the Säynätsalo Town Hall and Library (1951).61

Style, siting and space 109

Siting A possible reason for librarians’ lack of interest in external style was their belief that excellence in design would rarely make up for the poor siting of a library.62 The first aspect of siting to consider is the geographical preferences that were expressed regarding central and branch/district libraries. In the decade or so after the war, branch libraries had been opened in a variety of non-library premises, either by full adaptation of those premises or through mixed use: sports pavilions, hospitals, village institutes and halls, shops, chapels and, in one instance, even in a ‘fish and chip saloon’.63 At the same time, the mobile library service was greatly expanded: in 1949 only fourteen library authorities used mobiles; by 1962 seventy urban authorities alone were using them.64 While mobile services and branches in adapted premises continued into the 1960s, the period saw a shift in emphasis towards static, purpose-built branches. Most new public libraries built in the 1960s were branch libraries. By 1966 half of the country’s chartered (fully qualified) public librarians were working in branch libraries.65 In that same year the Department of Education and Science was allocating money for ninety-two new branch libraries. This figure increased to 112 in 1968 (although it declined, in line with a decline in economic activity nationally, to fifty-one in 1969 and eighty-five in 1970).66 The building of new branch libraries by county library authorities was especially extensive. In 1946, there were 246 county branches nationwide; 745 by 1965.67 Surrey was one county that invested heavily in branch development.68 Considerable branch expansion also occurred in urban local authorities. Liverpool constructed a series of impressive branch libraries.69 To implement the plan efficiently, maximum standardisation was adopted. For example, standard beech shelving and furniture was interchangeable between branches.70 The first service point to be opened under the plan was Allerton District Library (1965), designed by the City Architect, Ronald Bradbury. Serving a geographical area of the traditional one-mile radius, the accommodation (for fifty seated readers) comprised separate adult and children’s spaces, linked by a reference section. There was a large car park. Large glass walls characterised the exterior (see Figure 0.5).71 In the 1960s Glasgow embarked on an ambitious programme of district library construction. New libraries were opened in Castlemilk (1961), Pollock (1967), Pollockshaws (1968), Drumchapel (1968), Cardonald (1970), Easterhouse (1971), Knightswood (1971) and Hillhead (1975); while extensive renovations were undertaken in a small number of historic libraries: Elder Park (1962), Partick (1966), Dennistoun (1967) and Govanhill (1971).72 Up and down the country it was often the central libraries, however, that were thrust into the limelight. Prominent new central buildings included the following: Kensington (1960), Holborn (1960), Guildford (1962), Luton (1962), Norwich (1962), Eastbourne (1964), Hampstead (1964), Canterbury (Kent County Headquarters, 1964), Hornsey (1965), Crewe (1967), Bradford (1968), Doncaster (1969), Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1969), Ewell (Bourne Hall, 1970), Birmingham (1974) and Bromley (1977). In recognition of the importance of this new crop of central libraries some were opened by royalty. Queen Elizabeth II opened Luton

110 Style, siting and space Public Library in 1962 and Hampstead Public Library in 1964. In 1960 the Queen Mother opened both Holborn Central Library and Kensington Central Library. Bradford Central Library was opened by Princess Alexandra in 1967 and Princess Anne opened the new library and theatre complex at St Pancras in 1971.73 Despite the appearance of a number of new city-centre and borough-centre libraries, in 1972 K.C. Harrison called for a ‘determined attack on the problem of the central libraries’.74 Rather than any reality of underperformance in providing new central libraries, this plea possibly reflected a bias towards central library development. It is true that in the 1960s progress in the provision of small libraries was impressive but this was not necessarily the result of lobbying by librarians relative to the considerable support they gave to prestigious central-library projects. Librarians continually pointed to the uneconomic nature of small branch libraries and were vocal in their displeasure regarding what they saw as an overproduction of small branch libraries.75 In 1964 Lionel McColvin argued that it was ‘a mistake to have too many branches, because then it becomes expensive and often impossible to maintain a good choice of books and to offer suitable staffing’.76 In 1971, Portsmouth’s Librarian, Ralph Malbon, forcefully reiterated what many had been saying for years: that there were far too many small branch libraries in Britain’s towns and cities. Small facilities were costly to run and inefficient. The number of books issued was relatively low and overall productivity was poor. Mostly, no information service was possible. ‘Let us dispose of the moribund little libraries which are eating out our hearts mostly in wastelands’, said Malbon. The trouble was that closing small branches was politically and socially difficult. His solution, supported by many leading librarians, was to boost the profile of central and district libraries, which could provide ‘a communal roof for all local educational and cultural societies, which are the backbone … of culture in our towns today’.77 Branch libraries in working-class districts were seen to be more uneconomic than those in middle-class neighbourhoods, because issues per head of population were normally much lower, reading being a less popular pastime among the poorer classes.78 Yet the poor, with a low rate of car ownership, often living in neighbourhoods with inadequate transport links and faced with high transport costs relative to their incomes, were in most need of truly ‘local’ libraries. In library planning the received wisdom was that ideally the farthest one should have to travel to a service point in an urban area was one mile.79 But for leading strategists and top librarians this ‘gold standard’ for siting produced too many branch libraries. There was a tension, therefore, between, on the one hand, the desire for fewer branches, and, on the other, the need, especially in low-income neighbourhoods and to assist the elderly, the young and anyone challenged by ‘distance’, to site libraries no more than a mile’s walk away – that is, within pram-pushing distance.80 The car was a big influence on the planning of libraries, branch libraries in particular. Car and van ownership increased exponentially, rising from 3.9 million in 1955 to 11.8 million in 1970.81 Increasing car ownership meant that there was pressure on planners to provide car parking facilities and to accept the argument that an area could be served by a smaller number of larger libraries. This did little

Style, siting and space 111 for those on lower incomes but there was an anticipation that the culture of the car would spread and so early in the period many branch and district libraries, even in urban areas, were supplied with car parks. As car ownership exploded, the size of these car parks proved insufficient, prompting librarians to advocate further for a concentration of services in fewer, larger service points close to existing general car parking facilities, such as those near shopping and civic centres.82 Siting near, or in, a shopping centre (though not above shops, where identity was lost) was advocated as the primary position.83 Doncaster’s central library (1969) was located in a shopping centre, a pedestrian way passing through the library on the ground floor.84 Failing the securing of sites near shops, proximity to other community facilities, such as health and community centres, was advised.85 Many libraries were placed in complexes or compact areas that housed other institutions of the welfare state. Tang Hall Branch Library, York opened in 1962 next door to a health centre that had been opened the year before.86 In Carlton-inLindrick a ‘three-in-one’ premises was opened in 1962, housing a health clinic, chiropody service and a library.87 In Killingworth, Northumbria in 1974 a library opened with a health centre, with a pastoral centre and sports centre in adjacent blocks.88 In 1965 a branch library was opened in a comprehensive school in Bristol, doubling as a school library, but it has to be emphasised that dual-use premises were a rare occurrence.89 Hulme District Library (1965) was housed in ‘an attractive, modern building in the centre of shops, services and other amenities’.90 The Eastham Branch Library, Bebington (1962) was sited opposite a row of shops and close to a local housing estate (Mill Park).91 Such siting decisions were in the tradition of Aalto’s Säynätsalo complex which contained a library, town hall and shops.92 Given a choice, however, between siting a library, on the one hand, near/in the civic centre, or on the other hand, near/in the shopping centre, most librarians, it was suggested, would choose the latter.93 There was, however, a certain kudos to be gained from being part of a civic centre, as was the case with the Birmingham Central Library (1974), to be discussed in Chapter 8. There was also a practical advantage to being in a civic centre, in terms of the increased footfall received from people using other services. The disadvantage was the difficulty some had in identifying the library in the complex as a whole.94 In Crewe, where a new central library was opened in 1967, the attractions of a civic-centre location obviously outweighed the drawbacks. Similarly, Stockton-on-Tees Central Library (1969) was sited adjacent to the town’s municipal buildings, its entrance proudly bearing the municipality’s coat of arms. Integration with the civic centre was also the case in Coventry. A new central library there was envisioned as part of the large-scale rebuilding of the city which had been devastated by a German air raid in November 1941. In April 1959 Coventry Corporation announced its plan to build an innovative elliptical-shaped central library at the cost of £390,000, and a model of the library and the regenerated square in which it was to be located was prepared by the City Architect’s Department (Figure 3.18). In the design, narrow vertical windows stretched the full height of the structure, from the ground to the flat roof. Polished

112 Style, siting and space

Figure 3.18 Model of Coventry Central Library, never built. Source: Coventry History Centre.

aluminium mullions extended above the roof parapet, while above the ground floor panes of glass sloped outwards and inwards, following the shape of the mullions. Inside, lit by circular roof lights, a ramp giving access to all departments spiralled around an open well, a device deployed in structures as far apart geographically and temporally as the Vatican Museum in Rome (1932) and the Seattle Public Library (2004), but highly innovative at the time in the context of the previous history of the public library in Britain. The library was depicted as the centrepiece of a revived city square. The square was also to include the new cathedral, designed by Basil Spence, opened in 1962, which was set alongside the ruins of the cathedral razed to the ground in the 1941 air raid. Controversially, Spence’s design was uncompromisingly modern. Moreover, he raised eyebrows in using the ruins of the medieval church as a forecourt to his design.95 Described as equally ‘unusual’, it was nonetheless predicted that the new modernist library, like Spence’s modernist cathedral, would give ‘shape and dignity’ to the city square.96 Other buildings in the square were a mixture of old and new: the late-Victorian, neo-Jacobean town hall; a new art gallery; and new offices housed in ‘an admirably workmanlike example of the modern, medium-sized office building’.97 This clutch of buildings represented a bold attempt to create a new civic and cultural zone in the centre of Coventry, but it ultimately proved overambitious and most of it was never built. The 1959 plan for a new Coventry Central Library, including the historic setting in which the structure was to be set, was aggressive and imaginative.

Style, siting and space 113 Moreover, it is intriguing that the plan for it was unveiled at the very time Spence was involved in the final phase of his Coventry Cathedral project – for the design of Coventry’s ‘library that never was’, the details of which would have been familiar to Spence, bears a remarkably close resemblance to his design for Hampstead Central Library, to be discussed in Chapter 6. Whether proximate to a civic centre or shopping centre, the development of central facilities enjoyed great support from leading librarians who, conversely, were less likely to be enthusiastic about the lower-status branch library. Interestingly, some radical librarians also came to support the preference for central buildings and the commensurate reduction in traditional branches, but for different reasons. Their line of thought was to replace branch provision with a multiplicity of mini-service points in places like markets and train stations, in which only popular texts would be available and where the paraphernalia of catalogues and classification schemes would be done away with.98 Overall, however, despite the large investment in an array of sparkling new central libraries, branch library development in the 1960s probably affected the greatest number of people. Librarians naturally got behind many branch projects but mention needs to be made of another major driving force, the ‘housing crusaders’ councillor, especially in the context of the new mass housing estates of the time. A tension can be identified, moreover, between local politicians who won kudos, if not votes, from supporting the erection of local libraries proximate to new housing schemes and the many librarians who pointed to the waste attached to the proliferation of small service points.99 The expansion of suburbia between the wars had led to the construction of a large number of branches in, or adjacent to, housing estates, public and private. This was seen as an exciting phase in the development of the public library,100 but the scale of this interwar expansion paled in comparison to the branch building that took place in the 1960s as a result of the growth of mostly public housing. It became common to furnish a new council estate with its own library. This reversion to the ‘ward library’ was popular with estate residents and with councillors who represented them, although was thought less attractive to occupants of housing in adjoining areas who often had to find their way through estates they would otherwise perhaps not wish to visit.101 The new Roehampton Library was at the heart of the LCC estate there. The new Kent County Library Headquarters at Maidstone was sited on the town’s new Springfield Estate.102 In Finsbury, the streamlined St Luke’s Branch Library (1963) was located near to, and was designed to harmonise with, the newly built Gallway Street flats (Figure 3.19).103 In the new council schemes branch libraries began to be planned on the ground floor of blocks of flats,104 as in the case of the Regent’s Park Library (1967) and the Pimlico Children’s Library (1960). In Scotland the main library building activity in the 1960s was in branch libraries, a great many built in connection with new housing estates.105 New estates were needed to help solve Glasgow’s dire slum problem.106 A number of estates were erected within a five-mile radius of the city centre: for example, those at Castlemilk (1961), Pollock (1967), Drumchapel (1968) and Easterhouse (1971).

114 Style, siting and space

Figure 3.19 St Luke’s Branch Library, Finsbury. Source: Islington Local History Centre.

Cumbernauld, thirteen miles to the north-east of Glasgow, opened a library in 1967, having been designated a New Town in 1955 (more about New Towns below). Moving from a Glasgow slum to a house in Castlemilk in the mid-1950s, one resident three decades later recalled thinking at the time that it was ‘A dream come true’.107 Yet, all new estates suffered from a deficiency of services in their early years, branch libraries to serve the local population arriving later than would have been the ideal. Knightswood Library, Glasgow (1971) served a local housing estate that was at one time planned to be the largest in Scotland, with a population of over 20,000. Its combination of clerestory windows above timber curtain walling and entirely glazed end walls and returns provided a huge amount of light, the effect of which was increased substantially by the library’s warehouse-like open-plan (Figures 3.20, 3.21).108 In Leeds, plans to decentralise working-class housing had been laid down even before the end of the war, opening the way to a large-scale programme of estate construction in the immediate post-war decades.109 One such estate was located around the once-green, ‘oasis’ village of Seacroft, on land which the city council had purchased in 1934. By the 1960s the area had been turned into a concrete, high-rise urban development which, although providing much needed homes, was seen by some, because of its predominantly working-class nature, as holding out little promise for a ‘successfully integrated society’.110 The public library opened in Seacroft in 1963 was one of a series of branch libraries constructed on suburban housing estates in Leeds in the 1960s. It was located close to a new shopping area and a civic centre comprising a health clinic and youth centre. By 1968 it was serving a local population of 32,000, young readers being able to view the expanding estate through the generous, floor-to-ceiling windows of the library’s children’s section (Figure 3.22).111

Figure 3.20 Knightswood District Library, Glasgow. Source: Special Collections, Mitchell Library, Glasgow.

Figure 3.21 Spacious, open-plan interior of Knightswood District Library, Glasgow. Source: Special Collections, Mitchell Library, Glasgow.

116 Style, siting and space

Figure 3.22 Children’s area, Seacroft Branch Library, Leeds. Seacroft’s new housing estate can be spied through the windows. Source: www.leodis.net, Leeds Library and Information Service.

Such ‘housing estate’ branch library projects were undertaken in the knowledge that similar provision had been tested elsewhere. In the reconstructed Hansa quarter of Berlin in 1959, a low-rise library was built to counter the neighbourhood’s recently constructed high-rise apartment blocks. Its ‘intimacy of scale and horizontality of line … [was a] welcome foil’ to the tower blocks nearby. The library, designed by Werner Düttmann, was linked by a covered way to the local underground railway station, and offered its readers an outside courtyard replete with deckchairs, pools, plants and sculptures.112 Unfortunately, branch libraries on or near council housing estates were prone to antisocial behaviour. No sooner had it opened, the Eastham Branch Library, Bebington (1962) was plagued by nuisance-creating gangs of youths, in particular the ‘junior teddy-boy element’.113 In the early 1970s staff of the Alvering Library, Wandsworth were complaining of repeated harassment by ‘hooligans’.114 Tang Hall Library was troubled by antisocial behaviour from the outset. Plying their trade in a crime-troubled interwar housing estate in the suburbs of York,115 Tang Hall’s librarians reported in 1965 that the premises were frequented by ‘groups of boisterous and noisy youth, obviously with nothing better to do, who naturally gravitate to the library, the only brightly lit building in the district on winter evenings’.116 The appearance of the glass-rich library at night, when light flooded out of the building, as opposed to the daytime when is cascaded in, proved too

Style, siting and space 117 attractive for certain unwanted ‘clients’.117 Three years after it had opened the library was ‘still troubled by acts of vandalism and unruliness’.118 In addition to serving suburban and inner-city housing estates, new libraries were needed for Britain’s post-war New Towns.119 The Redcliffe-Maud report on local government in 1969 advised that each New Town should have a library.120 Libraries in fact became a key part of the ‘design for living’ in New Towns.121 In New Towns, the problem of selecting between central and branch facilities was acute. The geography of early New Towns was problematic for library planners. The layout of New Towns, on a pattern inherited from the fifty-year-old gardencity model, with separate neighbourhood units scattered around a central civic and shopping area at one or two miles distance, meant that ideally small branches, and certainly mobile services, were required. The alternative was to provide a large town-centre service. Leisure and cultural facilities were slow to develop in New Towns.122 If a library could beat other facilities – sports centres, dance halls, theatres, cinemas – to it, they had a better chance of attracting readers with little else to do, many of whom, moreover, were new to library use. But dealing with new readers, a high proportion of them drawn from working-class zones of Britain’s big cities, was a problem in itself, one librarian complaining that his clientele, inexperienced in library etiquette, could be found producing books from ‘bags containing fish, potatoes, groceries, firewood, and fats’, when returning them.123 The development of Stevenage, Britain’s first New Town, corresponded to the pattern seen elsewhere in the 1950s.124 The master plan for Stevenage, issued in 1946, envisaged a large central library and, following the establishment of multiple neighbourhoods with heterogeneous characteristics, five branch libraries.125 As early as 1949 it was recognised that the town’s central cultural facilities would only be erected in the later stages of the town’s development.126 Stevenage residents became frustrated at the time it took to provide a library: ‘it seems hardly fair on the long-suffering ratepayers to have their pie always so far off in the sky’, wrote one resident.127 ‘Think boldly, you timid authorities! Away with botched-up and make-shift arrangements’, exclaimed another.128 The site for a library was purchased in 1957, and the first phase of the building was opened in 1961, by which time the town’s population had already reached 41,000. The design of the library was described by the town’s magazine as ‘new-look’, although its aesthetic qualities may have been undermined by its location close to the town shopping centre which has been described as ‘low, unified, practical and almost wholly unmemorable’.129 Once fully open, the library proved very popular; on one Saturday in early 1964 some 5,000 books were issued.130 Generally speaking, in Britain’s New Towns libraries were relatively late in being developed. This was unfortunate, given the self-contained nature of the New Town urban environment. On the plus side, libraries were often ahead of the development of other cultural and leisure facilities and were sometimes the only covered and heated social gathering place in a New Town for months or even years. In most New Towns the aim appears to have been to prioritise centrallibrary provision, placing them close to central civic and shopping zones.

118 Style, siting and space Eventually, central library buildings in New Towns became successful service points, amongst the best in the country.131 They certainly boosted the reputation of the central library, something which appealed to the library establishment. Central library projects, such as those in New Towns, were supported with enthusiasm by top librarians partly because of their dislike of economically inefficient branch libraries. Leading librarians also saw central libraries as productive of status for a library profession seeking to make its mark professionally and in local government. In terms of professional status, architects clearly benefited from the portfolios they filled with the social architecture of the welfare state, including libraries, and it is likely librarians wished to benefit similarly. This would have been nowhere more the case than in connection with prestigious projects to redevelop and regenerate Britain’s city and civic centres, projects that often had central libraries at their heart, as has been evident in this chapter in the case of Coventry and as will be shown in chapters that follow in respect of central library projects in cities like Luton, Newcastle, Bradford, Hampstead and Birmingham.

Space ‘The library of today should be constructed from the inside out’, announced a contributor to the periodical Librarian and Book World in 1960.132 This call marked a shift in emphasis away from a preoccupation with aesthetic appeal (although clearly, as we have seen earlier in this chapter, this was not abandoned) towards a concern for library spaces. Also in 1960, the poet-librarian Phillip Larkin wrote that ‘there seems no reason why many features at present associated with social buildings should not form part of a library’.133 Along similar lines, in 1965 central government acknowledged that there was ‘a dearth of good local buildings for showing and practising the arts’, a vacuum that libraries were attempting to fill.134 The government’s argument was that capital resources had to be exploited to the full: expensive buildings for limited use were wasteful.135 New demands on libraries were expected to appear as the leisure society expanded, the economy modernised and education and culture grew. This would lead to the reordering of library spaces, the appearance of new kinds of library space and a more generous treatment of traditional kinds also. In the 1960s, innovation in the manipulation and creation of library spaces reflected what librarians believed were the public’s changing needs at the time. Just as librarians, as noted above, appeared less interested in exterior than interior style, so also were they more concerned with the library ‘plan’ – with such matters associated with library interiors as traffic flow, flexibility, the disposition of service functions and the increased provision of non-book cultural spaces. The result of this focus on interior space was that the Sixties public library was characterised by the openplan, although in places this occurred within a compartmentalisation of the library ushered in by the subject-department approach, by the maturation of the idea of the library as ‘cultural centre’ (a branding which had been discussed, in fact, before the war),136 and by an investment in the modularisation of internal space (something which had also been raised before 1939).

Style, siting and space 119 Reflecting a growing seriousness regarding the importance of science, technology, education and culture, in some larger libraries, such as Bradford Central Library (see Chapter 4), subject departmentalisation, emphasising the importance of specialised, expert knowledge, was introduced. Subject departments did away with the traditional division between lending and reference departments and organised materials into groups of broadly related subjects. These groups found physical expression in the spaces designed to house them.137 The idea had been imported from the United States where, for example, Brooklyn Public Library had been departmentalised in 1941.138 In Britain, the kind of subject divisions that were employed included arts and humanities; social sciences; sciences; music and gramophone; business, commerce and technology. To these divisions were added traditional stand-alone units like those for popular reading and children. Harlow Central Library (1963) was organised on a broad subject basis: spaces for Arts and Literature; Humanities; Science and Technology; and Popular Material.139 Each of the divisions in the subject-divided library required support from professional staff ‘dedicated’ to various areas of knowledge and culture. Having witnessed its appearance in some large new Sixties buildings, it would have been easy for the contemporary observer to leap to the conclusion that the large public reference department had had its day. However, the traditional reference library, originally fashioned in the Victorian era, was to prove more resilient than promoters of subject specialisation predicted, not least because of its appeal as a place simply of study to the increasing numbers of youngsters staying on at school to the age of eighteen and to students attending colleges and universities. A prominent specialism in subject-arranged libraries was the commercial, technical and scientific department. These had first appeared in the First World War (on a reference-only basis) and were the most visible representation of that part of public library purpose which we can describe as ‘utilitarian’. A number of large libraries provided business departments. The flagship of this kind of service, though outside the subject-arranged library, was the City of London’s stand-alone City Business Library (1970). With a colour scheme in ‘ruthless white’, smart Swedish marble flooring and an open-plan of flexible modularised zones created by multiple internal columns, it is easy to see how it was claimed that in the City Business Library the ‘setting emphasises the pattern of service: briskness and efficiency are the keynotes’.140 Birmingham Central Library too included a commercial and technical (business) quick-reference section in its popular wing (see Chapter 8). If spaces such as these did not entirely reflect society’s very positive contemporary attitudes to scientific and economic modernisation, the seriousness of the public library in matters relating to technological and economic progress, as well as in the area of utility-producing education, was more fully underlined by the greater amount of space given over in Sixties designs to reference facilities and study activities. Running alongside the move towards subject specialisation and the division of space that this implied was the shift towards the ‘open’ – sometimes called the ‘free’ or ‘fluid’ – plan (this could occur, of course, within spaces allocated to specific subjects, such as in the central libraries in Bradford and Birmingham where books that were less in demand were housed in compact storing adjacent to open reader

120 Style, siting and space spaces). Whereas some new, large city-centre public libraries were designed, or altered, to accommodate the move to subject specialisation, while at the same time accommodating open perspectives, there was a parallel move, especially in medium and small libraries, like at the Ings Branch Library, Hull (1972) (Figure 3.23), towards almost comprehensive open-plan layouts that eradicated barriers that had in the past compartmentalised spaces and functions. Although the open plan had been developing generally in architecture for decades, in the library context the influence of Scandinavia, as in the case of style, was important. Enthusiasm for open-plan libraries was strong in Scandinavia where, as the Danish librarian Sven Plovgaard explained on a visit to Britain in 1960, it was understood that sharply defined departments conveyed an impression of an over-institutionalised, forbidding library (though in very large libraries, he admitted, some departmentalisation was inevitable). By contrast, argued Plovgaard, open interiors made for an informal, flexible and efficient plan, any separate spacing needed being manufactured by careful arrangement of furniture and various movable barriers.141 The open-plan library was the result of many influences. The open-plan design per se was a new vision of architectural space born at the beginning of the twentieth century (although with roots also in the late nineteenth century vogue for Japanese design). Architects, especially those engaged in housing design, began to break free from traditional spatial constraints. The open plan was a key element in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie houses. The elimination of self-contained rooms was also a feature of Le Corbusier’s work (for example, the Villa Savoye, 1929). Free-flowing floor plans were later combined with large expanses of glass wall that replaced windows and had the effect of blurring the distinction between inside and outside.142 ENTRANCE

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Figure 3.23 Plan of Ings Branch Library, Hull. Source: Redrawn by Daniel Cho, from plans held by the Hull History Centre.

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Style, siting and space 121 In Britain too the call for the open-plan house grew louder. In his book The House: A Machine for Living In (1935), Anthony Bertram explained that psychologically we needed ‘to feel a largeness which our working lives probably do not possess’, while physically we should not, like a snail, be ‘limited to the convolutions of our shell’.143 The open plan also had an effect on the design of furniture and fixtures. After the war, in keeping with architectural modernism, heavy, ‘boxy’ furniture was replaced by designs with light, elongated lines; in the home, free-standing, easily-movable, and sometimes double-sided, units with shelves and cupboards were used to divide space, such as that between the kitchen and living room.144 In addition to the context of the home, the open plan was also incorporated into the designs of large office blocks. Post-war modernism saw the emergence of the ‘open office’ in which the open plan was ‘landscaped’. Floor space was broken up into zones by fabric-covered screens, desks, filing cabinets, plants and other ‘barrier’ devices. Layout was defined by the desired flow of people and activities through the building rather than by rigidly defined work hierarchies.145 The overall impression was one more akin to the home than the scientifically managed office environments seen earlier in the century. These changes in office space, linked to the ‘human relations’ school of human-resource management, ‘suggested fun rather than brutal efficiency’.146 The open plan, and the flexibility and senses of spaciousness and informality it engendered, was one of the most publicised aspects of Sixties libraries. Regarding the Bush Hill Branch Library, Edmonton (1963), it was reported that: ‘Large windows are double-glazed and give a very fine view into the library from the street’, while fluorescent lighting added to the brightness. The sense of uninhibited luminosity was enhanced by the fact that the entire library was open plan, its functions demarcated only by the flexible arrangement of furniture.147 In openplan spaces book stacks were placed further apart to allow people to sit at tables or in easy chairs while browsing, giving libraries a ‘residential air’ (see Figure 5.4).148 Small, separate tables were used in place of institutionalised long tables. S.G. Berriman hoped the new modernist library would replicate, if not in style then in ambience, the library of the gentleman’s club.149 The open plan, it was argued, delivered flexibility and created an ‘atmosphere of freedom and informality’ such as could be seen in the modern supermarket.150 Beaconsfield Library (1965) was as open as a medieval hall, with wall and roof beams visible.151 A common approach in such medium-size, one-room libraries was to build a gallery at one end to house reference materials, as at Southborough (1962).152 One of the most visible changes wrought by the open plan was the erosion of barriers between adult and children’s services. Imaginative designing gave children at Eastbourne’s new central library ‘a distinct library of their own but [one] which is not actually separated from the main library’; the transition was said to have been ‘effected naturally and with the minimum of break’.153 In large buildings, interiors were given pleasing open vistas. Open ground floors were often flanked by mezzanine balconies, access to which was sometimes by open ceremonial staircase, as at Harlow Central Library. Following the appearance of the prototype at Frederiksberg, Denmark in 1935, the ‘Scandinavia

122 Style, siting and space gallery’ became a fashionable accent in European libraries, including libraries in Britain (though some doubted its usefulness if it was simply an isolated space that led nowhere).154 The open plan in Sixties libraries bought into the Scandinavian ethic of lightness and optimism: ‘a buoyant, airy, almost feminine feeling based on transparency and open structures’.155 Openness and the modernist inclination towards letting the outside in, towards investing in light and fresh air, was reflected in some places, including Horley Public Library, Surrey (1966) (Figure 3.24),156 in the provision of enclosed exterior spaces for reading and reflection – gardens, courtyards, patios and roof gardens. Suggestions and efforts were also made to set branch libraries, in particular, in green settings.157 Open-plan libraries often went hand in hand with more spacious entrance halls. With huge windows and lit by a mixture of tungsten and fluorescent lighting, Seacroft Library combined its spaciousness with a notable brightness. This was nowhere more evident than in its large and inviting terrazzo-tiled foyer (Figure 3.25).158 The pursuit of flexibility as well as openness in library interiors was at the heart of the mid-century modularisation movement. Thoughts about the open-plan library – an early example of which was the partition-free layout of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore (1933) – were infused with the promotional crusade of Angus Snead Macdonald, who had joined the bookstack manufacturing firm of Snead and Company in 1905.159 In the 1930s Macdonald launched a campaign against library buildings which he castigated for having revelled in what he called

Figure 3.24 Garden patio, Horley Library. Source: Surrey History Centre.

Style, siting and space 123

Figure 3.25 Entrance hall and staff counter, Seacroft Branch Library, Leeds. Source: www.leodis.net, Leeds Library and Information Service.

‘regal display’, created at the expense of utility. Macdonald denounced the ‘tyranny of tradition in library architecture’; for him, a library should be a ‘working laboratory’ not a ‘monumental reading place … for bookworms’. In his ideal library readers lounged in restful chairs and on sofas situated by tables that were frequently replenished with new books and magazines and upon which sat vases of attractive flowers. Readers were permitted to smoke! Tea was served to groups of young people discussing a new book. Macdonald called for intimate reading spaces, not the dragooning of readers at long, institutionalised tables.160 Macdonald’s modern, open library required flexibility in internal arrangements. He devised the ‘divisional-unit’, or ‘flexible-unit’, plan. In 1945, in his article ‘New possibilities in library planning’, he renamed this the ‘modular system of construction’.161 Striking what would today be termed a ‘post-Fordist’ pose, he asked: ‘Should we not also consider that readers’ tastes and habits are constantly changing and that a building must change with them or become obsolete’.162 Macdonald explained that in his modular system rooms would not be frozen in size because interiors would be: divided into equal, rectangular prisms of space, bordered on top and bottom by floors and ceilings and on the vertical edges by structural columns. Aside from the columns there should be nothing to interfere with the free use of the space except for such things as main stairways, elevators and lavatories.163

124 Style, siting and space A flexible interior permitted the easy interchange of stock, reader and staff areas. Modular construction, he pointed out, had been in use for a long time in other building types – he was thinking of warehouses, textile mills and the first department stores – and was well suited, he believed, to libraries. There were no prescribed dimensions to Macdonald’s modular units, with the exception of ceiling height which he recommended should be set at eight feet. This stipulation was a direct challenge to the traditional, monumental reading room where height connoted the high status accorded to knowledge and the library that had collected it (note, however, that choice of an incorrect module could be disastrous; in a large library a difference of just a few inches in ceiling height could make a difference of thousands of volumes).164 Aside from the overblown decoration of walls and ceilings in many great-hall reading rooms, treatment which absorbed rather than enhanced light, monumental spaces with high-placed windows, as argued in Chapter 1, were relatively light abundant. So what prevented Macdonald’s low-ceiling plan, in which most users would be too far from windows to be ‘effective’ readers, from being rejected outright? The answer was, first, significantly improved artificial lighting; and, second, the application of efficient air conditioning. The first requirement was met by the fluorescent lamp, or strip. Fluorescent lighting was introduced commercially in 1938 although, as explained in Chapter 1, its take-up was hampered by squabbles between the utility companies and lighting manufacturers. Once fluorescent lighting had become widely available, however, the concept of the modular library could become a reality, assisted, of course, by developments in air conditioning which before the Second World War had been confined to certain factories, to public buildings like cinemas and restaurants and to some libraries (the Enoch Pratt library was mostly air conditioned) but which during the war was used extensively in American war production.165 Yet one should not exaggerate the uptake of air conditioning in libraries (there were more installations in the university library sector than in public libraries).166 Even before Macdonald’s seminal 1945 article in which the concept was formally named, modularity had taken root in library advocacy and even practice. In their book The American public library building (1941), Joseph Wheeler and Alfred Githens had committed themselves to the modular idea.167 In addition, in Britain, the concept had become a reality as early as the late 1930s, in the form of the planning and construction of the Manor Branch Library, Sheffield, by W.G. Davies, the City Architect (due to the outbreak of war its completion was delayed until 1953). The layout was arranged according to the divisional-unit plan, internal pillars generating uniform, flexible spaces, some separated from each other by glass screens, as in the case of the children’s library (Figure 3.26). In the Manor Branch Library each module was 13 ft 6 in square, a length chosen because of its suitability for alcoves. Glass screens and armour-plate glass doors were used between all public departments. It was deemed desirable that, although the departments were kept separate, readers could see in an instant each department’s existence and functions. Moreover, it was judged that as practically the whole building could be seen from any one point, the onlooker had a sense of

Style, siting and space 125

Figure 3.26 Children’s department, Manor Branch Library, Sheffield. Source: Picture Sheffield, Sheffield Local Studies and Archives.

the buildings ‘spaciousness and dignity’;168 and despite the reader enjoying an open-plan experience, no one department could disturb the other: the whole interior could be ‘seen and not heard’.169 Modular planning as a means of delivering flexibility was increasingly discussed in the 1950s.170 As the 1960s dawned, however, Britain’s librarians acknowledged that they had not yet adapted to the American idea of a controlled artificial environment, which required the deployment of efficient and reliable airconditioning technology as well as a high standard of ‘artificial’ lighting, or Permanent Supplementary Artificial Lighting in Interiors (PSALI), which still had to be supplemented by natural light by day.171 Even if the concept of modular construction was not invoked, or its implementation not universal, the call for the improved interior flexibility that modularisation was meant to satisfy remained loud. A recurrent theme in post-war writings on library design, flexibility, like modularisation, had a ‘scientific’ solution in many librarians’ minds. There was great interest in analysing the ‘flow’ of people, activities and materials in libraries. Borrowing from ‘operations research’ (OR) and perhaps influenced by designers of special libraries who had made use of flow charts and space–function relationship diagrams,172 public librarians began to produce flow charts for architects, depicting and forecasting the desired physical positioning of departments and zones (public and non-public), their interrelatedness and traffic flow (diagrammatic representations of anticipated movement of staff, public and

126 Style, siting and space resources within the building).173 Some librarians began to explore the systems approach to planning, whereby wearing the hat of the ‘library-systems engineer’ she/he would study advances in science and technology (including buildings) to develop systems and subsequently monitor, evaluate and adjust them.174 Also, librarians became well versed in providing data sheets for architects, describing the proposed activity in a particular space or room.175 In some quarters the library, in all its aspects, was seen as a ‘system’ that could be planned according to systems-engineering principles.176 In an era of rapidly increasing use, it became apparent to librarians that buildings had to have ‘expandable and divisible spaces’ (EDSs), as in a factory or large department store.177 In 1971 the Library Association published an English version of standards for public libraries issued four years earlier by the Danish State Library Inspectorate. The work of the Danes was visibly ‘scientific’, discussing and illustrating as it did reader traffic, patterns of operation and ideal allocations of space, even down to the level of distances between shelves and the size of passage spaces in relation to activities undertaken.178 Although there was some scepticism regarding the amount of flexibility that could practically be built into a multipurpose library,179 librarians realised that making libraries as flexible as possible was important in an age of widespread cultural change and, more specifically, the unpredictable emergence of new cultural activities. In Sixties libraries the range of spaces reflecting changing cultural tastes, as well as the traditional, was large, going well beyond the foundational book-based service. This was more the case, naturally, the larger the library. Before moving on to discuss the new cultural spaces, it is worth highlighting changes that occurred in one particular customary space, that reserved for children. A traditional space that received even greater attention in the 1960s was the children’s room. In Pimlico, Westminster an innovative stand-alone children’s service was opened in 1960,180 its inauguration announced to great acclaim in the national press.181 The library was situated on the new Churchill Gardens housing estate, designed by Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya. The estate comprised a large number of high-rise blocks of flats and maisonettes, which were said to have brought about a ‘human and domestic atmosphere’,182 and which Basil Spence, a fan of the housing scheme, believed had ‘significance’.183 Futuristically, a 120foot tower at the centre of the estate, known as the Pimlico Polygon, housed a heat accumulator receiving power directly from Battersea Power Station on the opposite bank of the River Thames.184 Pimlico was more deeply pinned to the architectural map in 1970, when the famous concrete and glass Pimlico School – ‘an exotic piece of modern architecture’ – was opened.185 The Pimlico Children’s Library was located at the base of a seven-storey block containing three tiers of two-storey maisonettes. Powell and Moya took a couple of the bays intended for shops and turned them into what was trumpeted as an oasis for children. They also made good use of a service yard at the rear, extending the library by creating a brick-paved courtyard.186 The L-shaped room was lit on its two inner sides by natural light from the courtyard, which was glass-screened and which served as an outdoor reading room in the summer months.187

Style, siting and space 127 The library’s internal design was uncompromisingly modern. The staff counter was of a novel light design in metal and glass. The interior was decorated in grey paint and light woods. The library’s furniture – reception desk, movable bookcases on wheels and the card-catalogue cabinet – were designed by the architects. Laminated tables had red, white or grey tops. In many respects, the room avoided what would have been accepted as the traditional look of a children’s department (Figure 3.27). In fact, its appearance was more akin to the modern office (indeed, a great many children’s libraries of the 1960s appear to take their cue from the office environment, providing an abundance of ‘workmanlike tables’ and streamlined furniture and fittings).188 For Lionel McColvin, Librarian of Westminster and the instigator of the Pimlico Children’s Library, public libraries needed to embrace the modernist revolution in design, even if that meant a synchronisation with adult accommodation and the adoption of a ubiquitous, minimalist style. The general impression at the time, however, was that the designers had provided ‘a cheerful atmosphere, avoiding the character of an overpowering institution’.189 Colouring was seen as restrained, the covers of the books being seen as ‘the most natural method of giving bright, stimulating colours’.190 Tungsten ceiling lights, partly recessed due to the low ceiling, were said to offer an appropriately (for children) less harsh atmosphere than that provided by fluorescent

Figure 3.27 Pimlico Children’s Library, Churchill Gardens Estate, Westminster. Source: Westminster Archive Centre.

128 Style, siting and space lamps.191 The ceiling was suspended at varying heights depending on the nature of the activities to take place in the zones below. Imaginatively, a large reinforced concrete column close to the entrance was decorated with a monochrome Ordnance Survey map of London with the Thames and the Churchill Gardens site picked out in colour. ‘The whole library is in scale with the children who use it’, observed one architectural journal.192 The energy that was expended and the imagination that was entailed in constructing a built-form as novel and exciting as the Pimlico Children’s Library were arguably a reflection of the changing place of, and attitudes to, children in society, not least the growing investment in education. More generally, it can be argued that the Pimlico experiment was evidence of the evolution of library spaces as a function of cultural change.193 Reacting to cultural change, or aspects of it at least, librarians were adept at undertaking makeshift arrangements in older buildings to house cultural events. For example, old reading (news) rooms that had outlived their usefulness could be turned into exhibition, activity and meeting places. Redundant corridors could be used for displays. In the post-war librarian psyche, however, affected as it was by the modernising ‘zeitgeist’ of the age, there was no substitute for purpose-built cultural facilities. These could be provided in any size of library, but the push towards open-plan designs meant that in small libraries such facilities were rarely feasible. Planners thus placed emphasis on mid-sized and large libraries. As a minimum, medium-sized libraries, it was advised, should have gramophone-record, exhibition and meeting spaces, the latter equipped with overhead, slide and film projectors, tape recorders, portable television sets and pianos. Many large branch or standard-size district libraries were given halls on the first floor. St Luke’s Branch Library, Finsbury (1963) was given a semi-basement which created extra space above for a lecture hall over regular library spaces for children and adults.194 Exhibition spaces were central to the public library’s new cultural role. Exhibition facilities were prominent in large central libraries such as those in Luton, Holborn, Hampstead, Bourne Hall and Birmingham (see Chapters 4–8) as well as in those of middling size, such as in Stockton-on-Tees (Figure 3.28). In larger libraries facilities might include workshops for such activities as photography, painting, film-making, crafts and creative writing. A place to show films or stage plays and similar events – in a theatre or, as was provided at Stockton-on-Tees, a good-sized hall (Figure 3.29) – was essential. Spaces for television and the video recording of it to aid study through the Open University were envisaged, and were in fact provided at libraries in Walsall, Islington West and Finsbury.195 Some larger libraries, such as Bradford Central,196 and even some modestly sized facilities, such as at Stockton-on-Tees, were able to offer coffee bars (Figure 3.30).197 At Redcar District Library the coffee bar, along with an exhibition space, formed part of the entrance hall.198 These were said to be attractive to teenagers, though some saw them as a ‘peripheral solution’ that failed to address the root problem of poor education and a resultant low demand for reading materials.199

Figure 3.28 Exhibition area, Stockton-on-Tees Central Library. Source: Teesside Archives.

Figure 3.29 Lecture hall, Stockton-on-Tees Central Library. Source: Teesside Archives.

130 Style, siting and space

Figure 3.30 Coffee bar, Stockton-on-Tees Central Library. Source: Teesside Archives.

At first glance, efforts to popularise libraries by including coffee bars in them appear incongruous with one of the major changes seen in new libraries: the absence in designs of the separate newsroom, historically the most popular library department. The new approach was to fuse the reading of newspapers and magazines with the general activities of open-plan reading rooms, informal zones for this reading being created with a light-touch deployment of indicative barriers such as carpeted areas and of plant containers, appropriate easy-style seating and tables, or what Michael Brawne called ‘aedicular furniture’ productive of niches for individual reflection yet in an open space.200 Such zoning, unlike the compartmentalisation of the past, also created more space for books, browsing, study and quick-reference services. In 1973, viewing them through a promotional lens, K.C. Harrison praised the public-relations benefit that new cultural spaces in Sixties libraries had brought to the institution.201 New cultural spaces, it was widely argued, could help introduce libraries to people who would otherwise not be attracted to them. It was hoped that Hulme District Library’s (1965) lecture hall and other non-book facilities would attract local residents who were less than what one might describe as ‘book conscious’. Badged as the largest branch library in the country, Hulme District Library was the first major district library to be built in Manchester since the war.

Style, siting and space 131 Featuring a language laboratory, readers could hire tapes in a variety of languages.202 Such new library spaces was confirmation that public libraries were now being positioned as cultural centres.203 A prime example of the move towards the library as cultural centre was the range of services built into the St Pancras Public Library (1971), among them a large theatre (the Shaw Theatre). The building, referred to as a ‘comprehensive development’, represented a close and intimate relationship between the library and the arts, underlined by the fact that the new building was opened (by Princess Anne) in connection with the opening also of that year’s Camden Arts festival.204 The building was also an attempt to render culture compatible with commerce, a tall block of offices being constructed over the library and theatre. The most eyecatching space in the library was a huge reference room spread over two floors, the upper floor being a gallery running around all four sides of the department. The space mimicked a Renaissance grand-hall library, a heritage that was forced home by the room’s flamboyant artificial lighting which was delivered by immense pendant tubular fittings, described by one observer as an architectural feature of ‘gross proportion’ which owed more to ornament than utility, a criticism which readers on the upper level, troubled by glare, might have endorsed.205 The arts dimension to the new St Pancras Library was emphasised by the placing of the theatre box office, which also served as the office for all major municipal arts events in the Borough, in the building’s entrance foyer, the ground-floor portion of the library being sited more deeply in the building.206 Reflecting Camden’s arts pedigree, the foyer doubled as an attractively generous exhibition hall, even though it was described at the time as a space with a ‘chill atmosphere’.207 The new library in Sutton Coldfield (1974) was similarly promoted as a cultural centre, though on a smaller scale. The library, carpeted throughout and advertised as a multimedia facility, was said to be a far cry from the average dusty book museums of yesteryear: for example, records and pictures were available in addition to the standard diet of printed materials. Users were invited to: ‘Browse among the potted plants to find the book, record or picture of your choice’. ‘We’re in the business of giving information to people and we must do so in all the available media’, said librarian Roger Lee. Teenagers found paperbacks more accessible, he said, and so these were made liberally available. ‘Our new library is a broad based cultural centre and as such we’re a multi-media operation’, he added.208 In the same vein, the multipurpose hall in the Stockton-on-Tees Central Library was used for a variety of cultural performances, including film shows, dances and theatrical entertainment.209 Spaces for the arts and new cultural interests were not only developed in libraries; they were also made available to library users in poly-purpose centres that included libraries. In Wythenshawe, a satellite district of Manchester developed according to garden-city principles, plans had first been drawn up for a new library in the early 1950s. Originally conceived as the hub of the housing estate, by 1960, despite protests from some local politicians seeking more local service points, the library had become part of a much larger project.210 Opened in 1971, the library was the largest in the Manchester area aside from the city’s

132 Style, siting and space central library, which had been opened nearly four decades earlier. Wythenshawe Library was part of a centre called the Forum which housed a theatre (including accommodation for actors), a thousand-seater public hall, a smaller hall, a swimming pool, a sports hall, restaurant, coffee bar and licensed bar. Described as ‘comfortable, not to say luxurious’, the building was deemed to be ‘far removed from municipal drabness’. The aim of having cultural facilities in one building was said to be one of ‘cross-fertilisation’.211 Closer to the centre of Manchester, a library formed part of another large complex, the Abraham Moss Centre (1975), which provided an extensive range of educational, cultural and recreational facilities.212 Seen as an attempt to ‘break into the cycle of deprivation that has warped life in large areas of the city’,213 the Abraham Moss project – comprising a district library, a recreation centre (with swimming pool, squash courts, dance hall, gymnasium, floodlit playing fields, sports halls and a sauna), two schools (a lower and a middle), a college of further education, an adult education centre and social centres for the old and the young – was badged as a ‘total community centre’. The library portrayed itself as a ‘multi-media resource centre’.214 An inviting schedule was drawn up for the potential user of the centre: ‘Having bought your newspaper from the corner shop, you can … leave your child in the crèche and go upstairs to read quietly in the warm coloured and bright library – perhaps with your favourite background music in the headphones’,215 after which, of course, you could visit the gym, have a swim, attend a social club and, in the evening, go to the theatre. It was argued that mixed use would save precious resources: for example, the school making use of the centre’s public sports facilities, or the library making use of meeting rooms and exhibition halls. In the months that immediately followed the centre’s opening the library, like its adjoining facilities, was praised as a great success. In the years that followed, however, the library was said to suffer at times from noise, vandalism and theft. The branding of the Abraham Moss project as a ‘community centre’ was a portent for the future in terms of the changing identity of the local public library in Britain in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The notion of the ‘community library’, with its connotation of ‘social centre’ – the library as gathering place – became much more popular after the 1960s, just at a time when the idea of the library as cultural centre seemed to have begun to have made its mark. The notion of the ‘community library’ had pre-war origins. In 1939 Stanley Jast published a book entitled The library and the community.216 Three years later, in his wartime report on the condition and future of the public library system, Lionel McColvin had some acute things to say about extension activities and the notion of library as cultural, community or social centre. On his research trip around the country he had found few libraries with ‘dedicated’ lecture halls/rooms (as distinct from spaces such as newsrooms and children’s departments that could double as lecture facilities when needed). Whereas the decades prior to 1914 had seen calls for lecture halls in libraries as a means of furthering education to counter increasing international economic and imperial competition, by the Second World War the feeling had grown amongst librarians that the popularity of the library lecture, certainly the mass lecture, had diminished. However, most librarians still

Style, siting and space 133 recognised the need for spaces supporting extension activities like meetings organised by local educational, political, social and cultural groups.217 McColvin himself played down the proposition that public libraries should effectively become community centres for cultural and social activities first, and purveyors of reading second. He was certainly opposed to the concept of the library as ‘social centre’. Whereas the social centre might make sense in such venues as small village libraries, where library services often shared the same premises that fulfilled other community functions, in the vast majority of libraries, he wrote, ‘it would definitely appear a bad thing to be associated with matters recreational – games, socials, dances and the like’. The danger of the library as social centre, he argued, lay in the potential this had for mostly serving classes and cliques, as had occurred, he believed in community centres on local-authority housing estates, the effect being to ‘crystallize existing class feelings rather than promote wider understanding’. It was essential, he posited, to avoid excessive bias towards organised groups at the expense of the individual, service to whom was the library’s chief work. However, McColvin did not object to libraries being housed in the same complex as, or adjacent to, other community and cultural services.218 The 1960s was the high water mark of the proposition that the public library building could diversify into a cultural centre delivering a wide range of non-book cultural and leisure opportunities. That the ‘cultural centre’ proposition, and the library spaces that flowed from it, gained so much attention owed less, however, to any popularisation that may have occurred in public library provision than to librarians’ belief that the ‘best’ arts and the ‘best’ culture were of the middle- and highbrow kind. It was this cultural bias that largely explains the appearance in Sixties libraries of such new spaces as theatres, exhibition halls/corners, television rooms, workshops and meeting rooms.

Notes 1 M. Webb, Architecture in Britain today (Feltham: Hamlyn Publishing, 1969), 191. 2 B. Groombridge, The Londoner and his library (London: Research Institute for Consumer Affairs, 1964), 53. 3 G. Thompson, Public library buildings, in W.L. Saunders (ed.), Librarianship in Britain today (London: Library Association, 1967), 44. 4 Directive on Public Library Buildings (2006), Mass-Observation Archive, University of Sussex. 5 Thompson, Public library buildings, op. cit., 45. 6 This taxonomy has been formulated in part by having consulted general discussions of modernist styles, including: E. Relph, The modern urban landscape (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1987), 198–203; O. Hopkins, Architectural styles: A visual guide (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2014). 7 New branch library at Acomb: Official opening (City of York, 1950); Acomb Branch Library, Library Association Record, 52/10 (October 1950), 376–377. 8 J.P. Lamb, Three new libraries in Sheffield, Library Association Record, 52/6 (June 1950), 190–191. 9 Terrapin erects and equips library in seven days [advertisement], Architects’ Journal (6 March 1968), 113. 10 Terrapin Reska: Complete library service [sales brochure of Terrapin Reska & Company] (c.1970).

134 Style, siting and space 11 H. Atkinson, The Festival of Britain: A land and its people (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 182–185. 12 R.W. Liscombe, Refrabricating the imperial image of the Isle of Dogs: Modernist design, British state exhibitions and colonial policy 1924–1951, Architectural History, 49 (2006), 340; H.M. Dunnett, The guide to the [Festival of Britain’s] exhibition of architecture, town planning and building (London: HMSO, 1951), 5. 13 J. Grindrod, Concretopia: A journey around the rebuilding of postwar Britain (Brecon: Old Street Publishing, 2013), 140–141. 14 E. Harwood, The English public library 1945–1985 (London: English Heritage, 2013), 5; Historic England, Lillington Library, accessed 13 October 2015 from www. historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1420766. 15 Thompson, Public library buildings, op. cit., 45. 16 Kent County: Headquarters, Maidstone, Library Association Record, 66/12 (December 1964), 530–538. 17 A. Thompson, Library buildings, in P.H. Sewell (ed.), Five year’s work in librarianship 1956–1960 (London: Library Association, 1963), 268. 18 I. de Solà-Morales, Cristian Cirici and F. Ramos, Mies van der Rohe: Barcelona Pavilion (Barcelona: Gustavo Gil, 1993). 19 Relph, The modern urban landscape, op. cit., 116. 20 A. Ferebee, A history of design from the Victorian era to the present, 2nd edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), 9. 21 County Borough of Teesside, Official opening of the Stockton-on-Tees Central Library (1969). 22 Branch library, Seacroft, The Builder (11 December 1964), 1247–1249; Leeds City Libraries, Seacroft Library: Official opening (1964). 23 G. Thompson, Planning and design of library buildings (London: The Architectural Press, 1974), 61. 24 C. Ray, County libraries, in P.H. Sewell (ed.), Five year’s work in librarianship 1961–1965 (London: Library Association, 1968), 239. 25 Liaison: News-Sheet of the Library Association (April 1962), 26. 26 A. Longworth, Branch public library buildings, in H.A. Whatley (ed.), British librarianship and information science 1966–1970 (London: Library Association, 1972), 209. Other systems were ONWARD and SEAC. 27 West Sussex County: Selsey Branch, Library Association Record, 66/12 (December 1964), 570–572. 28 E. Harwood, Space, hope and brutalism: English architecture 1945–1975 (London: Historic England, 2015), 468–469. 29 Public library, West Byfleet, Surrey, Architect & Building News (24 August 1966), 331–334. 30 Longworth, Branch public library buildings, op. cit., 211. 31 G.M. Noble, Edmonton: Bush Hill Branch, Library Association Record, 65/12 (December 1963), 487. 32 Corporation of Glasgow Libraries Department, Opening of Pollock District Library (1967). 33 Corporation of Glasgow Libraries Department, Opening of Drumchapel District Library (1968). 34 E. Mittler, The postmodern library: Changing patterns, continuing challenges, Liber Quarterly, 7/1 (1997), 300. 35 Grindrod, Concretopia, op. cit., 133. 36 G.E.K. Smith, The new architecture of Europe (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Co., 1961), 42. 37 J.R. Gold, The experience of modernism: Modern architects and the future city 1928– 1953 (London: E&FN Spon, 1997), 222. 38 Wandsworth Borough Council Libraries Committee, Minutes (9 October 1956).

Style, siting and space 135 39 E.V. Corbett, Roehampton Library: Official opening (1961). 40 Authoress opens ‘house of books’, South Western Star (6 October 1961). 41 The decorative plaque at Roehampton Library [typewritten note] (1961). 42 Historic England, Bebington Central Library, accessed 13 October 2015 from www. historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1422767. 43 G. Thompson, Public libraries: A librarian’s comments, Architects’ Journal (6 March 1968), 583. 44 K.C. Harrison, Libraries in Britain (Harlow: Longmans, 1968), 13. 45 G. Berriman, Splendours on the south coast, Library Association Record, 79/1 (January 1977), 28. 46 Corporation of the City of Glasgow, Public libraries 1970–71: Annual report of the City Librarian (1971), 12. 47 Baillieston Library [guide] (Glasgow City Libraries, 1984). 48 John Jones, Furniture and fittings: Part V, Assistant Librarian, 56/4 (April 1963), 73. 49 J.M. Orr, Designing library buildings for activity (London: Andre Deutsch, 1972), 78. 50 D.J. Saunders, The use of carpets in noise control, Flooring and Carpet Specifier, 15/5 (May 1970), 2–3; M.J. Kodoras, The sound absorptive properties of carpeting, Interiors CXXVIII/11 (June 1969), 130–131. 51 Berriman, Splendours on the south coast, op. cit., 46. 52 Directive on Public Library Buildings (2006), Mass-Observation Archive, op. cit. 53 L. Murray, Hulme District Library, Manchester Review, 10 (Winter 1965–1966), 251. As also occurred in Macclesfield: B. Brill, Macclesfield Library: The first 100 years (Macclesfield: Cheshire Libraries and Museums, 1976), 24. 54 R. Burke, Can this gimmickry, populist supermarket approach work? Library Association Record, 80/8 (August 1978), 392–394. 55 Maidenhead Central Library, Tubular Structure 18 (April 1971), 23. 56 Redcar District Library, Architectural Review, CL/893 (July 1971), 48. The library was by Ahrends, Burton and Koralek who had also designed a brutalist library at Trinity College, Dublin. 57 Book snatchers: Beware of the electronic watch-dog, Yorkshire Evening Press (4 October 1971). 58 Corporation of the City of Glasgow, Public libraries 1970–71: Annual report of the City Librarian (1971), 7–8, 16. 59 Corporation of Glasgow Libraries Department, Re-opening of Govanhill District Library (1971). 60 Liaison: News-Sheet of the Library Association (December 1973), 90. 61 Three Buckinghamshire libraries, The Architects’ Journal, 159/8 (20 February 1974), 379–398; R. Weston, Town Hall, Säynätsalo, Alvar Aalto (London: Phaidon, 1993). 62 Orr, Designing library buildings for activity, op. cit., 27. 63 After the war, Grapevine: Staff Magazine of the Nottinghamshire County Library Service (December 1967), 4. A reference library for Denbighshire County Libraries was opened in a prison chapel in Ruthin: County library notes, Library Association Record, 57/5 (May 1955), 193. 64 T. Kelly, A history of public libraries in Great Britain, 1845–1975 (London: Library Association, 1977), 363. 65 A.D. Mortimore, Branch libraries (London: Andre Deutsch, 1966), 9. 66 Longworth, Branch public library buildings, op. cit., 205. 67 Kelly, A history of public libraries in Great Britain, op. cit., 363. 68 New branch or district libraries (and small central libraries) included those in Godalming, Sunbury, West Byfleet, Horley, Egham, Banstead, Reigate, Camberley and Caterham. The records of these libraries are kept in the Surrey History Centre, Woking. 69 The branches included: Allerton, Childwall, Leyfield Road, Gillmoss, Gateacre, Hunt’s Cross, Cantril Farm and Scotland Road. On post-war library development in

136 Style, siting and space 70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

Liverpool, see H.C. Campbell, Metropolitan public library planning throughout the world (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1967), 114–118. Libraries in the north west (Manchester: Library Association North Western Branch, 1971), 17. Allerton Branch Library: Official opening (1965). Details of branch library development in Glasgow can be found in J.D. Henry, A social history of branch library development: With special reference to the city of Glasgow (Glasgow: Scottish Library Association, 1974) and in Campbell, op. cit., 111–114. Openings of libraries by royalty appear to have declined in recent decades, although the Queen’s opening of Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s new central library in 2009 should be noted. K.C. Harrison, Central public library buildings, in Whatley, op. cit., 192. See discussion following P.M. Worsley, Libraries and mass culture, in H. Ward (ed.), Library buildings: Design and fulfilment (London: Library Association London and Home Counties Branch, 1967), 22–24. L. McColvin, The British public library, in C.M. White, Bases of modern librarianship (Oxford: Pergamon, 1964), 62. R. Malbon, Productivity in branch libraries today and in the future (London: Branch and Mobile Libraries Group of the Library Association, 1971), 1, 12. E.A. Clough, Library buildings for the 1960s, Librarian and Book World, XLIX/1 (January 1960), 2. McColvin, The British public library, op. cit., 62. Department of Education and Science, Public libraries and their use (London: HMSO, 1973), 61. A. Marwick, British society since 1945 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 121. A.D. Mortimore, C.R. Hall and E.J. Kelly, Readers’ borrowing habits in the car age (London: Library Association Branch and Mobile Libraries group, 1967); Longworth, Branch public library buildings, op. cit., 207. It was a trend seen in the United States: see, Shopping for books, Daily Telegraph and Morning Post (16 May 1959). Harrison, Central public library buildings, op. cit., 195. Department of Education and Science, Public libraries and their use, op. cit., 61. Tang Hall Branch Library: Opened … 29 November 1962 (City of York). It’s a three-in-one, says county chief, Worksop Guardian (17 December 1962). Official opening of the Health Centre and Library Communicare Killingworth (Northumberland County Council, 1974). Jones, Urban libraries, in Sewell (1968), op. cit., 227. Libraries in the suburbs, Manchester Review, 11 (Winter 1970–1971), 318. P.D. Pocklington, Bebington: Eastham Branch, Library Association Record, 65/12 (December 1963), 474. M. Brawne, Libraries 2: Communicating with individuals, Architectural Review, 130/776 (October 1961), 253. Thompson, Public libraries, op. cit., 582. Harrison, Central public library buildings, op. cit., 194. J. Rykwert, Architecture, in B. Ford (ed.), The Cambridge guide to the arts in Britain, Volume 9: Since the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 262. Unusual library, Daily Telegraph (4 November 1959). Coventry’s Central Library, The Times (23 March 1960). B. Grant, What is a library building? Assistant Librarian, 60/11 (November 1967), 231. Thompson, Public libraries, op. cit., 583. K.C. Harrison, Suburbia 1900–65, Library Review, 33 (Summer 1984), 108.

Style, siting and space 137 101 Thompson, Public libraries, op. cit., 583. 102 Kent County: Headquarters, Maidstone, op. cit., 534. 103 St. Luke’s Branch Library, Finsbury, Architect & Building News (6 March 1963), 351–354. 104 Thompson, Library buildings, in Sewell (1958), op. cit., 278. 105 M. Burgess, Scottish public libraries, in Sewell (1968), op. cit., 254. 106 On post-war public housing in Glasgow, see M. Pacione, Housing policies in Glasgow since 1880, Geographical Review, 69/4 (1979), 395–412; Housing in twentiethcentury Glasgow: A collection of source material (Glasgow: Strathclyde Regional Council Education Department, 1983); Seán Damer, From Moorepark to ‘Wine Alley’: The rise and fall of a Glasgow housing scheme (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989). 107 Housing in twentieth-century Glasgow: A collection of source material, op. cit., 178. 108 Corporation of Glasgow Libraries Department, Opening of Knightswood District Library (1971). 109 City of Leeds Housing Committee, Post-war housing report (April 1943). 110 Suburb size of a town, Yorkshire Evening Post (12 January 1968). 111 In 1965 it was estimated that the library would eventually be serving up to 80,000 local residents: City of Leeds, Annual report of the Libraries and Arts Committee (1965). 112 Reconstructed Hansa Quarter in Berlin: Unusual layout of model public library, The Times (29 May 1959). 113 Pocklington, Bebington: Eastham Branch, op. cit., 474. 114 War declared on hooligans, Clapham News (11 May 1973). 115 Tang Hall Branch Library, op. cit. 116 City of York Public Libraries, Report for the year 1964–5 (1965), 8. 117 Tang Hall Branch Library, op. cit. 118 City of York Public Libraries, Report for the year 1967–8 (1968), 7. 119 On library development in New Towns, see: D. Tonks, The library services in the New Towns of north-east England (unpublished Fellowship of the Library Association thesis); B. Hall, Libraries in New Towns, in Whatley, op. cit., 464–479. 120 As noted by K. Worpole, Contemporary library architecture: A planning and design guide (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 62–63; Royal Commission, Report on local government in England, Command Paper 4040 (1969). 121 W. Burns, New towns for old (London: Leonard Hill Books, 1963), 124. 122 A. Saint, New Towns, in Ford, The Cambridge guide to the arts in Britain, Vol. 9, op. cit., 149. 123 F.W.S. Baguley, Some county library problems (3): Library provision in a new town and on a new estate, in Proceedings of the 1958 Library Association Annual Conference (London: Library Association, 1958), 71. 124 J. Balchin, First new town: An autobiography of the Stevenage Development Corporation 1946–1980 (Stevenage Development Corporation, 1980). 125 Ministry of Town and Country Planning, Stevenage New Town master plan (1946), 31. 126 Stevenage Development Corporation, Stevenage New Town technical report (July 1949), 20. 127 Letter to Stevenage Echo (January 1954), Stevenage Public Library News Cuttings. 128 Letter to Stevenage Echo (April 1953), Stevenage Public Library News Cuttings. 129 Saint, New Towns, op. cit., 155. 130 New look central library, Purpose, 30 (Spring 1964), 6–7. 131 Longworth, Branch public library buildings, op. cit., 208. 132 Clough, Library buildings for the 1960s, op. cit., 3. 133 P.A. Larkin, The University of Hull’s new library, Library Association Record, 62/6 (June 1960), 189.

138 Style, siting and space 134 A policy for the arts: First steps, Command Paper 2601 (London: HMSO, 1965), 12, para 49. 135 A. Wilson, The public librarian as cultural director, Library Association Record, 70/1 (January 1968), 10. 136 Cultural centre in Leeds suggested, Yorkshire Post (5 October 1937). 137 M.A. Overington, The subject departmentalised public library (London: Library Association, 1969); R.J. Duckett, ‘Subject departments: Their rise and fall at Bradford Metropolitan Libraries’, Art Libraries Journal (Summer 1985), 5–11. Subject departmentalisation was pioneered in the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore (1933) where administrative functions were located at the centre of the building and with subject departments, with an enquiry desk in each, situated around the periphery. 138 J.L. Gardner, Some thoughts on subject departments in a large public library, Library Association Record, 57/7 (July 1955), 254–260. 139 Ray, County libraries, in Sewell (1968), op. cit., 238. 140 G. Thompson, The new City Business Library, The Library World, LXXI/840 (June 1970), 368. 141 S. Plovgaard, Building layout in Denmark, in K.M. Newbury (ed.), Design in the library (Penge: The Library Association London and Home Counties Branch, 1960), 20–21. 142 On the open-plan house generally, see A.S. Zion, Open house: Unbound space and the modern dwelling (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2002). 143 Quoted in F. Fisher, Designing the British post-war home: Kenneth Wood, 1948–1968 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 30–31. 144 J. Banham, Encyclopedia of interior design. Volume 2 (London and Chicago, IL: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997), 905. 145 A. Massey, Interior design in the twentieth century, 2nd edition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), 146. 146 A. Forty, Objects of desire: Design and society 1750–1980 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986), 154; F. Duffy, Office buildings and organizational change, in A.D. King (ed.), Buildings and society: Essays on the social development of the built environment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 274. 147 Noble, Edmonton: Bush Hill Branch, op. cit., 487. 148 Thompson, Public library buildings, op. cit., 47. 149 S.G. Berriman, The provision and design of county library buildings, Library Association Conference Proceedings (London: Library Association, 1958), 29. 150 R. Desmond, reviewing W.S. Yenawine’s America-focused book Contemporary library design (1958), Library Association Record, 61/10 (October 1959), 271. 151 Branch library at Beaconsfield, Architects’ Journal (10 March 1965), 621–625. 152 Harwood, The English public library 1945–1985, op. cit., 4–5. 153 Eastbourne’s new Central Library, Library Association Record, 66/12 (December 1964), 520. 154 A. Thompson, Library buildings of Britain and Europe: An international study with examples mainly from Britain and some from Europe and overseas (London: Butterworth, 1963), 269. The Scandinavia-inspired ‘Lion and Unicorn’ Pavilion at the Festival of Britain, it is worth noting, had a mezzanine gallery. 155 H. Goodden, The lion and the unicorn: Symbolic architecture for the Festival of Britain 1951 (Norwich: Unicorn Press, 2011), 79–80. 156 Central library, Horley, Surrey, Building (16 December 1966), 57–59. 157 Thompson, Public library buildings, op. cit., 46. 158 Branch library, Seacroft, op. cit.; Leeds City Libraries, Seacroft Library, op. cit. official opening … 25 June 1964. 159 C.H. Baumann, The influence of Angus Snead Macdonald and the Snead bookstack on library architecture (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1972). The firm specialised in the multi-tier, self-supporting bookstack. Columns supporting the shelving also bore the

Style, siting and space 139 160 161 162 163 164

165 166 167

168 169 170 171 172 173

174 175

176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183

weight of the tiers above. Snead also installed marble or glass flooring in stack areas and contracted the lighting. A.S. Macdonald, A library of the future. Part 1, Library Journal, 58 (1 December 1933), 974; A.S. Macdonald, A library of the future. Part 2, Library Journal, 58 (15 December 1933), 1025. A.S. Macdonald, New possibilities in library planning, Library Journal, 70/22 (15 December 1945). Ibid., 1170. Ibid., 1171. London and Home Counties Branch of the Library Association, A feasibility study on the future of library buildings, prepared on behalf of our Architect/Librarian Working Party by Mr. Donald Reynolds, Library Association Council and Committee Papers (1968), 1292. Baumann, The influence of Angus Snead Macdonald, op. cit., 194. G. Thompson, Buildings, equipment and conservation, in L.J. Taylor (ed.), British librarianship and information work 1976–1980. Volume 1. (London: Library Association, 1983), 33. They endorsed the ‘flexible library notion’ and cited Macdonald’s 1933 article ‘A Library of the Future’: J. Wheeler and A. Githens, The American public library building: Its planning and design with special reference to its administration and service (Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 1941), 266. Sheffield City Libraries, Manor Branch Library: Official opening (1953), 2. Thompson, Library buildings of Britain and Europe, op. cit., 115. Thompson, Library buildings, in Sewell (1963), op. cit., 268. E.J. Mold, Heating and lighting, furniture and equipment, in Newbury, Design in the library, op. cit., 28. L.J. Anthony, Library planning, in W. Ashworth (ed.), Handbook of special librarianship and information work, 3rd edition (London: Aslib, 1967), 309–364. Thompson, Planning and design of library buildings, op. cit., 58–60. In keeping with ‘operations research’, Thompson explained the need for librarians to establish the ‘pattern of operation’ in any library design. Operations research (OR) arose in the war as a means of managing large-scale military operations, and after the war was integrated into the management of industrial concerns. The relevance of OR was understood by some librarians: R.M. Hayes and J. Becker, Handbook of data processing in libraries, 2nd edition (Los Angeles, CA: Melville Publishing, 1974). M.M. Flood, The systems approach to library planning, in D.R. Swanson, The intellectual foundations of library education (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 38. Orr, Designing library buildings for activity, op. cit., 20–21; F. Gardner, Architect/ librarian co-operation, in Herbert Ward (ed.), Better library buildings: Architect/ librarian co-operation in their design (London: Library Association London and Home Counties Branch, 1969), 12. M.M. Flood, The systems approach to library planning, Library Quarterly, 34/4 (October 1964), 326–338. Gardner, Architect/librarian co-operation, op. cit., 14. S. Plovgaard, Public library buildings (London: Library Association, 1971), 41. S. Kenny, A theatre of books, in D.E. Gerard, Libraries and the arts (Hamden, CT: Archon Books and London: Clive Bingley, 1970), 147. L-shaped library with courtyard has room for 4,000 books for children, West London Press (11 March 1960). D. Rowntree, Children’s library in Pimlico, Guardian (28 June 1960). E.D. Mills, The new architecture in Great Britain, 1946–1953 (London: Standard Catalogue Co., 1953), 207. Face of our time, Sunday Times, 28 December 1958.

140 Style, siting and space 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218

Smith, The new architecture of Europe, op. cit., 45. A real example of going all-in, Guardian (20 October 1970). Rowntree, Children’s library in Pimlico, op. cit. Children’s library in Pimlico, Architects’ Journal (2 June 1960), 839. J.D. Reynolds (ed.), Library buildings, 1965 (London: Library Association, 1966), 44. Children’s library at Pimlico, Architect & Building News (12 October 1960), 467. Ibid., 467. R.J. Cecil, Libraries: A survey of current lighting practice, Light and Lighting, 55/8 (August 1962), 241. Children’s library at Pimlico, op. cit., 467. Wilson, The public librarian as cultural director, op. cit., 11–12. St. Luke’s Branch Library, Finsbury, op. cit., 351–354. A.C. Jones, Urban libraries, in Sewell (1968), op. cit., 226. Borough library is going to open a coffee bar, Daily Mail (19 September 1963). County Borough of Teesside, Official opening, op. cit. Redcar District Library, Architectural Review, CL/893 (July 1971), 44. N. Burgess, Coffee bars in libraries, Library Association Record, 65/11 (November 1963), 498. Brawne, Libraries 2, op. cit., 253; Thompson, Library buildings, in Sewell (1958), op. cit., 278. K.C. Harrison, Public relations for librarians (London: Andre Deutsch, 1973), 90. Language lab in library, Manchester Evening News (7 December 1965); L. Murray, Hulme District Library, op cit., 251. Wilson, The public librarian as cultural director, op. cit., 11–12. Three openings in one by Princess Anne, Hampstead News (9 April 1971); Public library, theatre and office block at Euston Road, St. Pancras, Architects’ Journal (9 June 1971), 1311–1324. H. Ward, London Borough of Camden: St. Pancras, in H. Ward (ed.), New library buildings 1974 issue (London: Library Association, 1974), 4; W.R. Maidment, St. Pancras Library & Shaw Theatre (Camden Borough Council, 1971). W.R. Maidment, A new library for St. Pancras, Library World, LXXII/851 (May 1971), 308–311. Public library, theatre and office block, op. cit., 1318. Sutton’s new library last word in comfort, Erdington News (5 November 1974). County Borough of Teesside, Official opening, op. cit. Knowledge comes first for estate, Manchester Evening News (13 April 1954); A theatre – with flats on stilts, Manchester Evening News (16 March 1960). N.A. Simpson, Wythenshawe Central Library, Manchester Review, 12&13 (1971– 1974), 35. T. Kelly and E. Kelly, Books for the people (London: Andre Deutsch, 1977), 226. Abe Moss, Manchester Evening News (8 May 1975). The centre was located in an inner-city district, a long pedestrian walkway cutting through the centre to connect Cheetham in the south to Crumpsall in the north. S. Marks, The ‘total community job’, Municipal and Public Services Journal, 83/24 (13 June 1975); P. Medlicott, Community dream, New Society (8 May 1975), 339–340. Community clasped, Architects’ Journal, 161/19 (7 May 1975), 964. J.S. Jast, The library and the community (London: T. Nelson & Sons, 1939). L.R. McColvin, The public library system of Great Britain: A report on its present condition with proposals for post-war reorganization (London: The Library Association, 1942), 69. Ibid., 70.

4

Flagship libraries Intersections of style, siting, space and light

In the 1960s, the library and architectural presses carried many reviews of new public library buildings. This chapter highlights a selection of the best of these reviewed designs, ‘flagship’ libraries that caught – and in some cases still catch – the eye (coverage of a selection of truly iconic Sixties libraries is left to the final four chapters). The most publicised flagship designs were of city- or borough-centre libraries, such as Luton (1962), Norwich (1962), Bradford (1967), Newcastle-uponTyne (1968) and Bromley (1977). Also featured in this chapter are Finsbury Public Library (1967), a notable medium-size building, and Jesmond Branch Library, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Bromley Road Branch Library, Lewisham, both opened in 1963, which were fine examples of innovative small-library design. In discussing these buildings, reference is again made, as in the previous chapter, to issues of siting, space and style. Note is made of the way these elements, and that of light, at times came together, or intersected, in the individual designs discussed.

Luton Central Library (1962) By the 1950s, Luton’s ageing central library, reckoned to be the busiest in the country, was said to be bursting at the seams.1 Its much needed replacement was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 2 November 1962 (although it had already been in operation for a few months before this ceremony). The library was judged to be the country’s ‘first literary supermarket’ and the ‘Coventry cathedral of the library world’. The Librarian, the lively David Gerard, explained that we wanted a building which would forever destroy the image of a library as a dreary, dusty, unattractive place to be got into and out of as quickly as possible. We got it in a building which is not only elegant and inviting, but which works efficiently.2 Prior to completing the plans for the library, the Borough Architect, M.H.G. Blackman, made a number of enquiries relating to planned and existing public libraries in Britain. In 1959, accompanied by the chair of the Libraries Committee and David Gerard, Blackman undertook a tour of Sweden.3 During the trip the group inspected twenty-two libraries. They were especially appreciative of the

142 Flagship libraries interiors of Swedish libraries which they described as ‘very light and pleasant, with walls in pastel shades and many fitted with light-coloured wood’.4 Luton Central Library was eventually modelled on these Swedish examples. The library was conceptualised as the cornerstone of the town core’s redevelopment, heralding the beginning of a ‘new look’ for Luton’s central quarter.5 It was the first stage in a comprehensive town-centre plan, built on a site overlooking what ultimately became the town square and adjoining a pedestrian shopping precinct. The library was to be one of a clutch of ‘sleek modern buildings rising up from the old town centre’,6 and would become, it was anticipated, the epicentre of Luton’s cultural activities.7 There was, however, considerable opposition to the siting of a library in the town centre. It was argued that the time for grand civic quarters adorned by handsome, imposing public buildings had passed. It was more important, economisers said, to provide space for commercial properties that would deliver a healthy business rate.8 Supporters of the library’s proposed site explained that cultural buildings would in fact add value to the city centre in terms of pushing up rateable values from which the coffers of the local authority would benefit.9 Initial plans were scaled back, but not because of the strength of the arguments of those who opposed them on grounds of civic pomposity. Soil samples taken from the proposed sight revealed potential problems for the library’s foundations.10 The River Lea passed through the site and eventually this had to be accommodated in a concrete culvert. The result of these engineering investigations and manoeuvrings was that the footprint of the library had to be reduced and some of the low-level components within the building had to be relocated.11 Thus, the major difference between the original design and the eventual construction was the shifting of the basement reserve stack and theatre to elsewhere in the building. The reserve stack was housed in a tower extending above the roofline, the theatre in a curved, additional storey. These changes to the base design gave the building a ‘Festival Hall’ appearance, accentuating what was already a ‘Scandinavian light’ look (Figure 4.1). The building’s imposing style was enhanced by its height, in part a function of the decision – perhaps prompted by those who had wanted a more commercial complexion for the town centre – to set aside a good deal of the ground floor for shops. The exterior of Luton Central Library, with its Portland stone dressing, remains extremely attractive, but not everyone was supportive of the design at the time of opening. Sir Albert Richardson, a former president of the Royal Academy, felt repelled by it. In his opinion, the building had ‘a chilling effect which is very detrimental’, adding that it had ‘the character of a factory’, one that exhibited, moreover, an ‘inhuman nudity’.12 It was the interior of the library that fired the imagination of many. The editor of the Library Association Record described the view of the open, double-height lending area from the first-floor landing as the most exciting library threshold I have ever seen … Everything is an open invitation to wander, and one does so, in a daze of proprietorial pleasure … There are no doors and the eye travels over a vista of changing levels of floor and ceiling, never getting a chance to be bored.13

Flagship libraries 143

Figure 4.1 Luton Central Library. Source: Luton Culture (Luton Libraries).

The boast was that the best ideas were built into the library, making it a true ‘centre for culture and relaxation’.14 It was, a local newspaper contended, Luton’s first authentic cultural centre, a pleasing substitute for a town centre that, like others, was becoming a ‘desert of neon lights, hamburger bars and bingo parlours’.15 The new library would be a meeting place for ‘responsive’ people, said Frank Gardner who, in buoyant mood, badged it as a ‘Community Centre de luxe’.16 The library’s control area, where books were borrowed and returned, was located on the ground floor, separate from the greater part of the library above. A conveyor belt carried books away from the control area, for redistribution throughout the library. The only library space for public use on the ground floor was a children’s room, with a homework area, a fairy-castle storytelling room and ceiling lighting that simulated a starlit sky. The north-facing wall of the children’s library was entirely glazed.17 The ground floor was also the location for a Citizens’ Advice Bureau which answered questions relating to employment, travel, family issues, personal problems, education and training. It received over 10,000 enquiries in its first year of operation, 1962–1963.18 On the first floor could be found the library’s most impressive space: the open, spacious and lofty double-height lending library (Figure 4.2). A push-button display panel mapping the library and its collections helped readers locate books according to subject: an alphabetical list of main subjects was provided on the

144 Flagship libraries

Figure 4.2 Lending department, Luton Central Library. Source: Luton Culture (Luton Libraries).

panel and as the button was pressed for the required subject its location on the shelves was illuminated on the plan. The lending space offered great scope for mounting exhibitions. David Gerard described the lending area as ‘an exciting vista of colourful books and varying floor levels, enlivened by the constant movement of readers’; many people were reported to have commented on the quietness of the room, facilitated by double-glazed windows and a suspended acoustic ceiling which absorbed echoes.19 A carpeted, soundproofed record library, a periodicals room and a conference room led off the lending library. A mezzanine gallery, providing additional books for loan, overlooked the lending-library void. It also provided entry into the reference room at the far end of the lending space. The reference room housed study cubicles, and each reader’s desk had an open-fronted cabinet with a shelf for the storage of personal belongings.20 The reference area was separated from the lending space by a large glass screen supplied by a local company but engraved in Sweden at the Orrefors Glass Factory, providing further evidence of the library’s Scandinavian origins.21 The building was crowned by a 240-seat theatre (complete with refreshment room) and a roof garden. Armed with this facility, as well as its other spaces, the library soon established itself ‘as a musical, film and theatrical centre of importance to the area and at the same time as a meeting place for discussion of all kinds’.22 Widely praised for its pleasing design, Luton Central Library attracted not only local users in large numbers but also library planners and architects who, it was reported, came from far and wide to inspect the building.

Flagship libraries 145

Norwich Central Library (1962) Norwich Central Library, designed in 1956 by the City’s Architect David Percival, was originally meant to have filled a prominent space in the city centre but was pushed back behind a car park and made subordinate to the interwar Art Deco City Hall, built in 1938 (Figure 4.3). Located thus, according to the architect Michael Webb, a contemporary commentator on Sixties architecture, the building appeared ‘papery and insubstantial’. Its black-and-white tonality, however, repeated even down to the grey-on-white paving grid of the building’s central piazza, conveyed a certain forcefulness and was said to harmonise well with the neighbouring sixteenth-century church and the fifteenth-century Guildhall. The library was both ‘sympathetic and tough’, in the opinion of Webb, who added that a ‘rigorous geometry informs every part of the building’.23 The library was organised around a central piazza, or courtyard. The tower block on the west side of the courtyard housed offices and bookstacks. Beneath this, and across a large part of the footprint of the library, was a basement store for manuscripts and archives. Viewed from the courtyard, the library’s public rooms were highly transparent. Light was admitted into the double-height, ground-floor lending library through large floor-to-ceiling windows forming much of the inner wall. The lending library’s outer wall was less open, decorated with wood panelling between narrow vertical windows. Also on the ground floor was a popular reading area (with magazines and newspapers), to the right upon entering through the main doors. The reference library occupied ground and mezzanine levels; Webb described it as ‘serious in feeling: a cool décor of grey columns,

Figure 4.3 Norwich Central Library, with the interwar Town Hall in the background. Source: Norwich City Council; Norfolk County Council Library and Information Service.

146 Flagship libraries white walls and regularly spaced reading tables’.24 In all the public rooms, ceilings were of Columbian pine, as was the wood panelling in the lending library and on some other walls. The external walls of both the lending and reference libraries faced a streetscape with a heavy weight of motor traffic. Protection against the resulting noise and hurried activity thus necessitated the vertical slit windows mentioned above. The main lighting was taken from the roof, through numerous rectangular skylights, and, as noted, from the central courtyard.25 The main entrance hall was adorned by permanently floodlit mosaics depicting various stages in the history of reading.26 Five full-height windows at the front of the building lit both the entrance hall and the popular reading area. These gave ‘a particularly cheerful appearance at night’ (see Figure 1.9).27 Generally, the building was seen as a ‘great success’.28

Bradford Central Library (1967) Bradford Central Library, opened by Princess Alexandra in 1967, was designed by the City’s Architect, Clifford Brown. In terms of style – a nine-storey, steelframed, concrete and glass skyscraper – nothing could have contrasted more starkly with Bradford’s splendid Victorian Gothic town hall, over which the new library looked from its high position beyond the city’s new inner ring-road (see Figure 3.5). The design had begun to take shape nearly a decade before the building was opened, a sketch of the elevation appearing in the Library Association Record in 1959.29 The height of Bradford Central Library – great height connoting the availability of a universe of knowledge30 – was its main feature. The design was greatly influenced by the City Librarian, Harold Bilton who had read about the American system of subject departmentalisation and was determined to apply the idea to the plan for the new central library. He apparently met little opposition in implementing his subject-department scheme. The layers of the library were laid down thus: Ground floor First floor Second floor Third floor Fourth floor Fifth floor Sixth floor Seventh floor Eighth floor

Foyer; Junior Library; Theatre with Bar Art; Music and Gramophone Meeting Rooms; Cafeteria Commerce, Science and Technology Patents Social Sciences Local History Cataloguing Department; School Libraries Department Library Offices; Staff Facilities31

Just as a geologist can read exposed strata of rock and determine the story of the development of the land, we can observe the layers of cultural activity that made up the Bradford Central Library and conclude that this was a project of great cultural depth, one that evolved over a decade or more. The art library, with an adjoining exhibition space, was said to be heavily used by local artists and

Flagship libraries 147 craftsmen.32 The bookstack, rising from basement to roof in a narrow windowless block on the north-west end of the main block, housed a remarkable reserve collection, including a large stock of local history materials and rare books.33 These elements, together with the meeting rooms, cafeteria and 400-seat theatre, made the library, in Bilton’s words, the ‘natural cultural centre’ of the city.34 Energetic cultural enlightenment was matched by an abundance of physical light. Internally, the building was flooded with light from rows of large windows. The height of the building made the upper floors – such as the double-height Commercial, Science and Technology Library (Figure 4.4) – particularly bright during daylight hours. The large windows of the main public rooms faced northeast, thereby minimising solar gain. Said to be especially pleasing was the glass-fronted entrance hall with its elegant canopy. The interior of the hall was ‘spacious and its marble floor, walls and columns, together with pendant clusters of tubular lights, all help to make it an aesthetic delight’, commented a local newspaper (Figure 4.5).35 The fact that a large part of the library was enclosed in glass made the building a highly effective means of display at night. Billed as ‘an attempt to forecast the future rather than reflect the past’, Bradford Central Library was nothing like the libraries that previous generations of Bradfordians had experienced.36 Its design was bold and progressive, declaring a strong intent to prepare a historic industrial mill town for the twenty-first century. By the time the twenty-first century arrived, if not earlier, however, it was clear

Figure 4.4 Commercial, Science and Technology Library, Bradford Central Library. Source: Bradford Local Studies Library.

148 Flagship libraries

Figure 4.5 Entrance hall, Bradford Central Library. Source: Bradford Local Studies Library.

that the building’s futuristic promise had not been fully realised. Meant to be a prominent part of the regeneration of the city centre, the building never contributed as much as it should have in this regard due to its siting a quarter of a mile from the shopping and civic centres and, more importantly, the other side of a ring road that could only be breached by using inhospitable pedestrian tunnels. A building awash with glass, it was unfortunate that, despite its favourable orientation in respect of solar gain, in the late-1980s the air-conditioning system began to encounter serious difficulties. Subject departmentalisation brought with it certain inefficiencies: it created division and isolation, the multiple service points proving difficult to staff and expensive to run.37 The impressive library theatre was absorbed into the National Museum for Photography, Film and Television next door, which opened in 1983, prompting one journalist to term the library complex a ‘cultural Centrepoint’, a reference to the famous ‘white elephant’ high-rise office building on London’s Tottenham Court Road.38 Whether or not this criticism is justified, there is no denying the excitement that surrounded the Bradford Central Library in its planning phase and early years.

Newcastle-upon-Tyne Central Library (1968) Four years after the opening of his iconic Hampstead Central Library (see Chapter 6), Basil Spence witnessed the completion of his second public library. Veering towards the brutalist wing of modernism, the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Central

Flagship libraries 149 Library design included the same type of vertical louvres to combat solar heat gain that had been used at Hampstead (Figure 4.6). For local planners there was a lot riding on the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Central Library, for it was anticipated that the new library would ‘set the standard’ for the rebirth of the city.39 It was seen as a major component of the redevelopment plan for the city centre, setting the plan’s overall tone. Local leaders believed the new library would rival the best in Britain.40 It was advertised as nothing less than a reflection of ‘the space age’.41 Spence’s design was described as a ‘library of the future’ and ‘one of the finest libraries in the country’.42 Not everyone in the city was behind the scheme, however. The building was described as a ‘prestige scheme’ but also, negatively, as ‘grandiose’. Detractors viewed the project as profligate and unnecessary, the same position that had been adopted by opponents of the Luton Central Library. In keeping with a growing hesitancy about modernism, one critic called the design ‘imposing’ but also ‘hideous’, flanked by superior older buildings of which, in his opinion, the library took no account and with which it failed to blend.43 ‘All that would seem to have happened’ said another critic, ‘is that we have lost a building with poise, character and tradition, and got in its place a concrete and glass box’; when the gloss had worn off, he warned, the library will take on the look of a ‘bus station waiting room’ or the ‘food hall of a supermarket’.44

Figure 4.6 Model of Newcastle-upon-Tyne Central Library. Source: Newcastle Libraries.

150 Flagship libraries In contrast, positive backers believed that the money expended on the library and similar cultural projects would bring dividends in terms of industrialists investing in the North-East.45 They believed that the cost (projected in 1964 to be between around £800,000 and £1 million) would be money well spent. The new building would double the capacity of the old library, yet provide room for expansion. It would be a building designed to maximise fluidity.46 The Libraries Committee assessed that ‘a very large number of people in the city are reading more’, and that the library would help invigorate the cultural and economic life of the city.47 Proud of the city’s new creation, the city librarian arranged ‘ticket only’ public tours of the library in advance of it opening.48 Interested groups came to see the new library from as far afield as India and Australia.49 Whereas externally the shape of Spence’s design departed from his cigar-like Hampstead creation, internally the emphasis was once again on open-plan spaces. Subject specialisation was attempted in the new Newcastle-upon-Tyne Central Library in a way that avoided the disadvantages of subject specialisation. The library was not divided spatially on subject lines, as in Bradford (as we have seen, some were beginning to recognise this as expensive and inflexible). Rather, subject specialists were positioned in a ground-floor inquiry hall, providing a concentrated service supported by the resources of a large bibliographical room.50 Controversy over internal spaces was less than that generated by the external appearance of the library. There was general appreciation of the interior. The reading room floor, with its five zones, was deemed highly successful: quiet, carpeted, well-lit and largely free of casual readers browsing at the shelves.51 In one area, however, that of the popular reading room, a disagreement was evident. There were complaints that in a library of its size and prestige to cram the popular reading room (used mostly for the reading of newspapers) into a ‘grim and unfriendly’ space off the main entrance hall was ‘meagre and unsatisfactory’.52 It appears that this space was created partly to segregate ‘undesirables’, who had frequented the old library in large numbers, from more ‘serious’ readers. For the same reason – sanitising the readership – it was decided not to provide a snack bar.53 These moral-spatial decisions were not surprisingly classed as ‘snob apartheid’.54 The Libraries Committee defended its decision to ‘seclude’ newspaper readers and deter ‘undesirables’ by arguing that the library was first and foremost a place for books and reading, not a social club or a place for meetings; also, placing the news space near the reception area improved supervision, it claimed.55

Bromley Central Library (1977) Bromley was the first London Borough to erect a new central library following reorganisation of local government in the capital in 1965. Bromley Central Library, which included a large theatre, was in the making for many years before it eventually opened in 1977. Outline plans were drawn up as early as 1964, at which time it was said that when completed the library would be ‘the envy of cities and towns all over Britain’.56 It was designed by the Borough Architect,

Flagship libraries 151 John Aneurin, with considerable input from successive Borough Librarians, A.H. Watkins and D.M. Laverick. It had the advantage of being awarded a site on a busy high street where considerable footfall was guaranteed (Figure 4.7). The planning for the new library began nearly two decades before its completion. By the late 1950s the existing Bromley Central Library (opened in 1906) had become entirely outdated. Approval for the scheme was given in principle by central government in 1962. Detailed plans and models were revealed to the public in 1964, the new London Borough of Bromley giving approval to the scheme in 1967. The project was delayed, however, because a single local taxpayer objected to the scheme on the grounds that such an expensive library should not come out of public taxation, the objector accusing supporters of the scheme of ‘intellectual snobbery’.57 After considering the objections, a public enquiry found in favour of the scheme. Further delays were inflicted by industrial action, rising costs and the discovery of unwanted streams flowing across the site. Construction eventually got underway in 1969, and in the same year the old central library was demolished.58 The project then ran into the problem of escalating costs, as the effects of the inflationary effects of the early 1970s boom and the 1973 oil crisis began to bite. In 1975 it was admitted that the library would not have been built had it been proposed at that point in time.59 When first revealed, the design of the library was criticised as ‘a hotchpotch of architectural mannerisms with none of the unity and dignity vital in a civic scheme of this kind’.60 Such criticism may have been prompted by the windowless plinth

Figure 4.7 Sketch of the proposed Bromley Central Library. Source: London Borough of Bromley Local Studies and Archives.

152 Flagship libraries upon which was placed a structure that looked more like an office block than a library. In reality, the style of the frontage offered an ideal solution to the library’s siting on a narrow, busy high street. The impenetrable plinth gave shelter from noise and pollution to readers in the reference library behind it. Its overhang provided traditional arcade-like protection to shoppers using the street-level retail outlets which earned the local council much needed rental revenue (as had occurred at Luton). The prioritising of shop units on the ground-floor frontage meant access to the building had to be on its southern flank, off the walkway that led down to the Churchill Gardens public park. The library and theatre had separate entrances, though these were positioned under the one canopy. Upon entering the library, users were confronted with a long flight of stairs up to the public rooms (a lift was also available). At the top of the stairs, on the first floor, readers found themselves in the lending library which extended through two storeys, giving ‘a sense of spaciousness’ (the upper storey was formed by a mezzanine balcony).61 The lower floor of the lending library moved seamlessly into an extensive children’s library. The whole space was lit by large windows to the south and west. The first floor also housed a very large reference library, separated from the lending area by doors and a glazed screen. The second floor accommodated the local studies collection, the centrepiece of which was the H.G. Wells collection, the great author having been a citizen of Bromley. The library theatre, the Churchill Theatre, was located below the library. It was one of the most modern and ambitious theatres in the country, and with 750 seats it was one of the largest civic theatres in Europe. The view from the theatre foyer and from its restaurant was over the public gardens below, as was the outlook from the lending library above.62

Finsbury Public Library (1967) Nestling deep within the folklore of British librarianship is the image of Finsbury (previously Clerkenwell) Central Library (1890) as ‘the first modern library in Great Britain’.63 It was there that in 1894 James Duff Brown introduced the openaccess system, whereby readers were given direct access to the bookshelves in a controlled – or, as he put it, safeguarded – fashion, employing a good classification system to guard against misplacement and wicket gates to assist not only the efficient issue and return of books but also the surveillance of those who might be tempted to steal them.64 Though not as groundbreaking, the new Finsbury Public Library (1967) nonetheless exhibited many novel features. Once the new library was opened, the old Finsbury Library was demolished, a victim of the modernist mass housing movement. It was not, however, a direct victim, demolished to make way for the high-rise blocks that had begun to menace it (Figure 4.8). Rather, its fate was sealed indirectly by the fact that its replacement came about as an integral part of the area’s housing redevelopment. In terms of its built-form, C.L. Franck’s Finsbury Public Library, which after local government reorganisation in London in 1965 became a district library within the Borough of Islington, was an outgrowth of a large block of flats

Flagship libraries 153

Figure 4.8 The old Finsbury (previously Clerkenwell) Public Library shortly before demolition. Source: Islington Local History Centre.

(containing 450 homes) on the Finsbury Estate, the construction of which had begun in 1962. Seen from the thoroughfare nearest to the estate, St John’s Road, the library was the focal point of the scheme (Figure 4.9). The shape of the library was determined by its proximity to the housing block. The library emerged from under the block and stretched out in the direction of St John’s Road. This accounted for its shape. The front of the library followed the curve of the street (the convex front being like an elongated version of the nearby famous Finsbury Health Centre by Lubetkin, opened in 1938). Under the first floor of the block, height was restricted to a single level, but nearer the road two levels could be built into the design. The style was said to be in harmony with the character of the housing scheme. The latter consisted almost entirely of precast units, and units of similar size were used in the library’s construction. Any monotony detectable in the housing block was ameliorated in the library’s elevation by contrasting black-andwhite panels. In addition, free-standing pilotis carrying the upper floor were clad in attractive marine-blue glass mosaic tiles.65

154 Flagship libraries

Figure 4.9 Finsbury Central Library. Source: Islington Local History Centre.

As noted above, Finsbury Public Library was conceived as a cultural centre and book headquarters for the whole Metropolitan Borough of Finsbury, but was reduced to branch status with the creation of the London Borough of Islington. By this time plans were too advanced for major changes to be made. The plan was consequently on a more ambitious scale than the average branch library (Figure 4.10). Among the library’s various ancillary rooms was a large lecture and events hall, with a capacity for 160 and a small kitchen for refreshments. Breaking with the Victorian legacy, toilets were provided – of necessity in the entrance hall, in view of the large numbers expected to use the hall as well as the library. Also leading off the entrance hall was a large lending library, the building’s main public space. A feature of the lending department was its shallow, barrel vaulted ceiling with several curved skylights. Additional light was admitted, generously, through the full glass wall at the northern end of the lending area. Off the lending library was a children’s department, with a quilt room and a separate entrance from the lobby. A small, enclosed reference area was also located off the lending library, as was a music area.66 Study facilities, which were extensive, no doubt because of the library’s proximity to the Northampton College of Technology (which became City University), were provided on the second floor, overlooking St John’s Road. The second floor also offered a roof garden. In the basement, craft workshops were provided for tenants of the housing estate, including teenagers pursuing handicraft activities. A notable element in the plan was a television room, off the entrance hall. It was designated for ‘quiet viewing’ only, with the ‘university of the air’ (the Open University) especially in mind.

Flagship libraries 155

Browsing Corner

Adult Library

Music

Entrance Hall Block 8

•

•

• •

Advisor

St. John Street

Lecture Hall

•

Rear Entrance

Messrs Wilkins Car Park

Figure 4.10 Plan of ground floor of Finsbury Central Library. Source: Redrawn by Daniel Cho, from plan held in Islington Local History Centre.

Jesmond Branch Library, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1963) Jesmond Branch Library in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, designed by Henry Faulkner Brown, won a Civic Trust award for ‘architectural good manners’, an honour it shared with eight other buildings, including a multistorey car park in Birmingham (Figure 4.11).67 The design was depicted as a contribution to the creation of a ‘new north’, the hope being expressed that such artistically fine cultural projects would banish the image of the North-East as ‘one vast industrial landscape’.68 A steel and plated-glass drum, Jesmond Branch Library offered a striking contrast to the Edwardian buildings that surrounded it – a Methodist church to the south and red-brick terrace houses to the west.69 Reviewing the plan of the library a year before it opened, the Borough Librarian believed the library would ‘harmonise with its surroundings’.70 The sense of harmony was largely achieved

156 Flagship libraries through the building’s shape, its circularity acting like a cog connecting two rods constituted by the streets set at ninety degrees to each other that enclosed the library. The sawtooth nature of the building’s curved wall (the angles filled alternatively with ceiling-height windows and granite sets) emphasised the cog metaphor. The cog’s lubrication, as it were, came in the form of the building’s luminosity and spatial fluidity. It was said that the faceted, sawtooth wall glazing ‘floods the building with light and lets people see both in and out’.71 A central skylight added a further layer of illumination. This attention to light provided a feeling of spaciousness in the library but at the same time a certain intimacy was achieved in relation to the external environment. Light travelled easily down the spacious avenues between book shelves without appearing to be for the purpose of panoptic oversight, the avenues appearing instead to provide inviting pathways for readers to browse. Overall, form and function were seen to be ‘subtly interwoven’: the library was said to have the appearance of being ‘outwardly a book supermarket, inwardly a well-lit and attractive place to browse’ (Figure 4.12).72

Figure 4.11 Jesmond Branch Library, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Source: Newcastle Libraries.

Flagship libraries 157

Figure 4.12 Adult lending department, Jesmond Branch Library, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Source: Newcastle Libraries.

Bromley Road Branch Library, Lewisham (1963) The Bromley Road Branch Library, in Lewisham, south-east London (1963) was a good example both of the small ‘office block’ library and the compact cultural centre (Figure 4.13).73 Meant partly to serve a local interwar, working-class cottage estate (Bellingham), the branch was in fact a relatively long distance from even the estate’s nearest residents. It was on the doorstep, however, of a swathe of semi-detached houses, the cultural needs of whose middle-class residents would have been very much aligned with what the branch offered by way of non-book cultural facilities. The building comprised two masses. The main section of the building was a reinforced concrete box, with front and rear faces largely glazed and flanks faced in granite and limestone chippings. A smaller, single-level box projected from the main section’s north side. The larger section housed the following: an entrance hall, a reference library and a children’s library on its ground floor (above a basement book store and various service rooms); a public hall and meeting room on the first floor; and staff areas on the top floor. The smaller section was occupied almost entirely by the adult lending library. Upon entering a relatively spacious foyer housing a photocharging machine, readers could access the reference library to the left, the lending library to the right or the junior library straight ahead. The reference library housed three hundred

158 Flagship libraries

Figure 4.13 Bromley Road Branch Library, Lewisham. Source: Lewisham Local Studies and Archives.

scientific and technical journals, providing a level of scientific and technical information, it was claimed, ‘beyond that previously available in Lewisham’.74 It included an information counter with a telex installation, and behind the counter was situated a small photographic dark room for processing photocopies and the micro records generated by the photocharging machine. The reference space also contained three sound-insulated study cubicles and an accessions room (later made into a study space). The adult lending department was generously illuminated by skylights and at both ends by coloured glazing mounted in a stone, honeycombed tracery. It was said that the lending space had ‘excellent natural lighting from a combination of top and side ceiling lights showing a marked Finnish influence’.75 A large and bright children’s department, in a single-storey unit at the rear of the major block, completed the ground-floor accommodation. Its attractions included an array of floor-to-ceiling windows, circular coffee tables with easy chairs and the liberal use of bright and attractive colours both in the linoleum tiled floor as well as in the walls. It supplied an impressive seven thousand volumes. Access to the first-floor public hall was by a curved staircase from the foyer. The double-height hall – for lectures, exhibitions, film shows and musical performances – could accommodate up to 200 people. An adjacent meeting room was designed for more modest gatherings. A soundproof screen separating the two gathering spaces could be slid back to provide a larger space. A mezzanine floor housed a projection and sound-equipment room for the hall and the Borough

Flagship libraries 159 Librarian’s office. The top floor of the building was occupied by a staff room and kitchen and by several administrative offices, the branch acting as a de facto library headquarters for the borough, the borough’s central library being antiquated and unsuitable for extension. The ancillary, non-book cultural spaces – theatres, music libraries and meeting, exhibition and television rooms – that, with the exception of Jesmond, characterised these flagship libraries reflected a purposeful reorientation of the public library towards the cultural centre. Paralleling the invitation public libraries now offered to citizens to partake of a more enriched cultural enlightenment, large parts of the interiors of each of the facilities presented in this chapter were open-plan, thereby enhancing the brightness engineered by glass walls, smartly placed windows and fluorescent lighting. Libraries that were soaked with natural light by day were, it followed, artificial-light emitting by night, Norwich, Bradford, Jesmond and Bromley Road being good examples of the after-dark ‘lighthouse’. Literally lighthouses of culture, such libraries were also metaphorical beacons of urban regeneration. The siting of central libraries in the heart of city centres resulted from a recognition that, far from being viewed as low-tier civic institutions, public libraries were readily accepted as engines of city and regional regeneration. Even the small Jesmond branch was believed to be making a contribution to regional renewal, and can be included in the same category in this respect, therefore, as its Newcastle-upon-Tyne city-centre parent, sired by Basil Spence. Siting also intersected with style, orientation and configuration. Jesmond’s circular shape slipped neatly into the corner site the library had been allocated, providing, along with its bold modernism, a striking contrast with the older buildings adjoining it. Bradford’s ‘skyscraper’ monumentality was imbued with additional power by its siting not only on a hill but also slightly off-centre in relation to the town’s civic and commercial hub. This gave perspective both to those peering up at it from the town centre, and those looking down from it – camera obscura-like – onto the civic and commercial scene below. Bromley’s high-street location prompted an embracing of the commercial sphere, lifting the library’s first level to the building’s first floor, as shops with lucrative rental values were given ground-floor priority. Proximity to the high street meant that the reference room in Bromley Central Library showed a closed face to the external environment, which in any case suited the traditional introspection expected in reference and study spaces. This encouraged a Janus-faced approach to the design, however – one that presented an open face at the rear of the building which overlooked the aesthetically pleasing public gardens. Of all the buildings featured in this chapter Finsbury looked to the future with the greatest vigour. This was not just because its sleek concrete, steel and glass style struck an ultra-modernist pose. It also appeared forward-looking because it was an integral part of a housing project which was deeply symbolic of an ambitious welfare state and which exuded an intrinsically progressive social purpose.

160 Flagship libraries

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

The busiest lending library in the country bursts at the seams, Luton News (16 May 1957). Luton Public Libraries, Annual Report (1961–1963), 4. Luton Library, Museum and Art Gallery Committee, Minutes (9 March 1959, 8 June 1959). The Librarian was also said to have travelled to the United States: Library one of the best in Europe, Luton News (1 November 1962). Novel library ideas noted, Luton News (17 September 1959). Luton’s ‘new look’ gets underway, Saturday Telegraph (3 September 1960). A new Luton emerges, Tuesday Pictorial (23 August 1960). Central Library gives new concept to interior design, Tuesday Pictorial (24 July 1962). Siting the new library, Luton News (1 January 1959). Bid to change library site fails, Luton News (6 August 1959). Luton Library, Museum and Art Gallery Committee, Minutes (7 September 1959). Mystery of New Library, Luton News (1 October 1959). Library like a factory, Luton News (18 October 1962). Luton and Norwich: Achievement, Library Association Record, 64/12 (December 1962), 456. World’s best ideas built into new library, Luton News (27 September 1962). New library Luton’s chance of a cultural centre, Luton News (17 May 1962). Luton Public Libraries, Annual Report (1961–1963), 4. J.M. Orr, Designing library buildings for activity (London: Andre Deutsch, 1972), 82. Luton Public Libraries, Annual Report (1961–1963), 12–14. Ibid., 3. F. Gardner, Three new central libraries: Luton, Library Association Record, 62/11, 371–372; Central library for Borough of Luton, Official Architecture & Planning (December 1962), 801–805. Library over a river, The Municipal Journal (21 December 1962), 3889; Luton will be proud of glass screen gift for library, Luton News (21 June 1962). L. Baker, The story of Luton and its public libraries (Luton: Bedfordshire County Library Luton District and Luton Museum and Art Gallery, 1983), 84. M. Webb, Architecture in Britain today (Feltham: Hamlyn Publishing, 1969), 191–192. Ibid., 192. Norwich Central Library, Official Architecture & Planning (November 1960), 512. P. Hepworth, Three new central libraries: Norwich, Library Association Record, 62/11, 373–374; P. Hepworth and M. Alexander, Norwich public libraries (Norwich: Norwich Libraries Committee, 1965), 72. Hepworth and Alexander, Norwich public libraries, 73. Webb, Architecture in Britain today, op. cit., 192. New central library for Bradford, Library Association Record, 61/5 (May 1959), 122. G.S. Wagner, Public libraries as agents of communication (Metuchen, NJ and London: Scarecrow Press, 1992), 181. H.D. Westacott, Bradford Central Library, Assistant Librarian, 60/7 (July 1967), 132–133. R.J. Duckett, Subject departments: Their rise and fall at Bradford Metropolitan Libraries, Art Libraries Journal (Summer 1985), 6–7. My thanks to Bob Duckett for this information. H. Bilton, Three new central libraries: Bradford, Library Association Record, 62/11 (November 1960), 370. ‘A paradise for book-lovers’, Bradford Telegraph & Argus (17 April 1967). Bilton, Three new central libraries, op. cit., 370.

Flagship libraries 161 37 Duckett, Subject departments, op. cit., 9. 38 J. Greenhalf, Pioneering library was a cultural Centrepoint, Bradford Telegraph & Argus (29 May 1913). 39 £935,000 library marks city centre rebirth, The Northern Echo (1 September 1964). 40 New library will rival best in Britain, Sunderland Echo (31 August 1964). 41 City of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Report of the city librarian (1968–1969), commentary accompanying photograph of the inquiry hall in the city’s new library building. 42 City library of the future, Daily Mail (1 September 1964). 43 Different – yes, but not the blend for me, The Northern Echo (18 August 1969). 44 T. Corcoran, How I’d improve the Central Library, Evening Chronicle (4 August 1969). 45 City library plan passed after big row, Evening Chronicle (8 October 1964). 46 Newcastle to get £785,000 library, Evening Chronicle (31 August 1964); Two years to build £935,000 library, Daily Telegraph & Morning Post (1 September 1964). 47 Proceeding of the Newcastle-upon-Tyne City Council, Report of the Libraries Committee (21 September 1960). 48 Public tours of new Central Library, Newcastle-upon-Tyne City Libraries, Administrative Circular (1 October 1968). 49 J. Cox, Main function to issue books – not a meeting place or club, Evening Chronicle (4 August 1969). 50 City and County of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Report of the City Librarian (1968–1969). 51 A. Wallace, Newcastle’s new central library, The Library World LXXII/852 (June 1971), 334. 52 Newcastle-upon-Tyne City Libraries, Annual Report (1968–1969). 53 Let’s have room to read in peace, Evening Chronicle (11 August 1969). 54 T. Corcoran, How I’d improve the Central Library, op. cit. 55 Cox, Main function to issue books, op. cit. 56 Delay in commencing library-theatre, Bromley & Kentish Times (23 April 1965). 57 Council accused over theatre announcement, Bromley & Kentish Times (5 July 1968). 58 Bromley Public Libraries, A report for the years 1960–1963 (1963); Churchill Theatre, Bromley: Opened by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales (1977). 59 London Borough of Bromley, [Report on] Churchill Theatre and new central library, High Street, Bromley (21 October 1975). 60 Library-theatre plan unworthy of the borough, Bromley & Kentish Times (25 September 1964). 61 London Borough of Bromley, [Report on] Library theatre (1964). 62 £2 million new library – open at last, Bromley & Kentish Times (14 April 1977). 63 Islington Libraries, Official opening of the Finsbury Library (1967). 64 Pioneer ‘open access’ library goes, Islington Gazette (27 January 1967); F.G. Gough, The old Finsbury Library, London Town: Greater London Staff Gazette, LXXVIII/927 (February 1977), 7–9. 65 Library, Finsbury, Architect and Building News (1 November 1967), 727–729. 66 A former librarian at the old Finsbury library complained that the reference section had not been transferred in full to the new library, nor the fine arts collection, nor the rare books collection: E.L. Dinsdale, Excellent library vanishes, Islington Gazette (10 March 1967). 67 Civic Trust: 1963 awards, Architects’ Journal, 138/24 (11 December 1963), 1234. 68 Designs like these create new north, The Journal (11 December 1963). 69 Branch library wins bronze medal award, Northern Echo (16 February 1965). 70 Newcastle City Council, Minutes (17 January 1962). 71 Designs like these create new north, The Journal (11 December 1963). 72 Webb, Architecture in Britain today, op. cit., 192. Light was also a feature of another library built in Newcastle around the same time. In the design of Denton Branch

162 Flagship libraries Library large plate-glass windows permitted ‘the necessary lighting conditions for a library’ and made the user ‘conscious of the space he is in and also of the spaces outside’: Designs like these create new north, op. cit. 73 Branch library for the Borough of Lewisham, Official Architecture & Planning (August 1963), 738–742. 74 London Borough of Lewisham, Opening of Bromley Road Library (1963). 75 Ibid.

5

Holborn Central Library Scandinavian ‘light’

Holborn Central Library (1960) not only kick-started the boom in Sixties library building it also, through its radical design, set the tone for the decade’s revolutionary library architecture (Figure 5.1).1 Writing fifteen years after the opening of the library, the Director of Libraries and Arts in Camden looked back on the development of library design since 1960 and announced that ‘every subsequent library has been influenced by the change of style’ that Holborn Central Library had initiated; the building had been, he assessed, ‘a new piece of grand architecture’, but one that nonetheless provided for readers a friendly, intimate atmosphere.2 The library authority in Holborn was the last in England to abandon closed-access in its lending operations, in 1947. This conservatism is

Figure 5.1 Holborn Central Library. Source: Camden Local History and Archives Centre.

164 Holborn Central Library ironic, given the fact that the new central library, which the Borough began planning in the mid-1950s, became one of the most forward-looking, iconic and influential library designs of the 1960s. Holborn Central Library inaugurated what was to become the major period of post-war planning in library buildings. Although containing enclaves of deprivation, the London Borough of Holborn in the mid-1950s (later, in 1965, Holborn was absorbed into the larger, new London Borough of Camden) was a prosperous area of central London. It contained a large number of government and commercial offices, including the historic Inns of Court where lawyers practised and trained in large numbers. These properties, with their high rateable value, not only made the Borough one of the wealthiest in the country, they also brought tens of thousands of commuting workers into the area each day. Library provision in the Borough, however, was inadequate to meet the demands of what was a large and sophisticated ‘daytime’ readership. Planning for a new library began in 1955. The design was to be handled in-house, by the Borough’s architect’s department, under the leadership of Sydney Cook. In 1937 Cook had joined the architects’ department at Luton Borough Council and during the war had been given the responsibility for repairing bomb damage. In 1945 he took control of housing at the Bournville Trust in Birmingham. Two years later, at only 37, he was appointed Architect and Director of Housing for Holborn Borough Council. When Camden Borough Council was formed in 1965 he became its Chief Architect. While in this position (which he held until 1973) he brought together a dynamic young team of architects and oversaw the construction of a number of uncompromisingly modernist buildings. These included – in stark contrast to the modernist, system-built tower block – modestly scaled, often staggered-level public housing schemes which attracted considerable international attention. Social housing produced in Camden under Cook broke with the high-rise Corbusian model. Low-rise and often set around courts, it was housing in the tradition of the residential garden square.3 Cook’s Holborn Central Library was also destined to attract attention. Even before it was opened, the Scandinavian-influenced design became well known, one example of its impact being the use made of it as the basis for the new central library in Exeter.4 Before finalising the Holborn design, Cook spent time in Sweden and Denmark, which he knew had some of the best modern libraries in Europe. The main elements of the Holborn design would seem already to be in his mind before he took his trip to Scandinavia in 1957, although he later adapted ideas he found there to British requirements.5 Despite having seen the impressive monumentality of Asplund’s Stockholm Public Library, he understood that it was Aalto’s Viipuri Library that had made the biggest impact on Scandinavian, and especially Swedish, library design.6 After coming to this conclusion ‘the way ahead became much clearer’, Cook recalled in 1969, adding that: One certainly became clearly and immediately aware that the central theme of the library [building type] was concerned with books and the flexible use of space, not self-conscious detailing of the building, mingled with gifts of

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furniture, memorial busts, etc. – gone were the days of tiptoeing and whispers. These were real places which had to be experienced.7 Cook’s interest in libraries was deep enough for him to call for a government report on library buildings in respect of materials and methods of construction.8 He also noted that Abercrombie and Forshaw’s County of London Plan (1943) had mentioned a whole range of building types, including abattoirs, but not libraries.9 Holborn Central Library, built and equipped at a cost of £250,000 and covering over 39,000 square feet, incorporated many new ideas in library planning. As noted above, the library’s catchment area was no backwater, serving as it did, in addition to a residential population of around 20,000, an extremely large daytime ‘influx population’ of around a quarter of a million commuters. Thus, the new library had to be large, functional and attractive. Unusually, Holborn Central Library was housed on four floors, a feature of the design conditioned by the narrowness of the space (a vacant bomb-damaged site) available for building. Public lifts were thus an essential ingredient in the design. The library was flanked on both sides by party walls of existing buildings. To the rear of the site was a mews, on which was located a Borough assembly hall. Access to this needed to be given even when the library was closed (effectively, a public right of way ran through the library). The foyer entrance that gave access to both the lending department and the upper floors was thus fitted with a metal grille that could be lowered outside of library hours; while the locking of the door at the top of the stairs leading down to the basement children’s library could similarly secure that part of the library. The rear elevation was stepped in accordance with residential ‘daylighting’ regulations, protecting access to light in the buildings nearby. The library’s front elevation was on the busy thoroughfare of Theobalds Road and faced the green space of Gray’s Inn. At ground-floor level the library’s facade was fairly closed. Windows were set high, above the shelving inside, aping the arrangement in the Viipuri children’s department. This arrangement, however, complemented the rustication of the ground floor of the Georgian houses next door, and generally, in terms of lines and window positions there was ‘compliance with Georgian architectural proportions’.10 Lack of openness in the lower facade was to a degree compensated by a pleasant and inviting entrance. A canopy over the entrance steps and door, possibly aping the curved overhang of the Festival of Britain’s ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ Pavilion,11 sloped upwards in a jaunty fashion (Figure 5.2). It was flanked by blue micro-tiled columns and above it glass bricks were installed to provide natural light in the entrance hall. Entry to the library was up a low flight of steps, matching those, in terms of height, leading up to the front doors of the adjacent Georgian houses. This device, as in the case of the houses, facilitated the construction of a half basement. The entrance hall was illuminated by display cases on the party wall. The opposite wall was formed by a glass screen which offered a view of a small interior garden and the lending space beyond (Figure 5.3). The lending collection of

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Figure 5.2 Jaunty canopy, main entrance, Holborn Central Library. Source: photograph by Alistair Black.

50,000 books was accommodated on the ground floor, as well as in a spacious mezzanine gallery (Figure 5.4). Easy chairs and low tables encouraged browsing. A readers’ advisor desk was centrally located. The circulation desk was fitted with automatic key punches for the punched-card system of book issue and return. This would speed up processing at the busy lunchtime period when hundreds of office workers descended on the library in only a short period of time. Natural and artificial light were in ample supply, as was the case throughout the library. High window openings drew in light from above while in the main areas, except for fittings built into bookstacks, tungsten lighting, including desk lamps in the reference library, was preferred to fluorescent lighting throughout the library. It was hoped this would avoid an institutional atmosphere.12

Figure 5.3 Entrance hall, Holborn Central Library. The glass wall provided a direct and inviting view into the adult lending department, beyond a small interior ornamental garden. Source: Camden Local History and Archives Centre.

Figure 5.4 Informal seating in the adult lending department, Holborn Central Library. Source: Camden Local History and Archives Centre.

168 Holborn Central Library The front wall of reinforced concrete was non-load-bearing and was cantilevered out from the first row of internal rectangular columns. Though infringing the purity of the lending library’s open plan, the columns introduced an interesting profile to the ceiling of the lending room, in the form of non-traditional caps, each micro-tiled column acting as the end of book presses placed at right-angles to the front wall (it seemed that the modern reader could be trusted to occupy the resultant alcoves without overt ‘supervision’). The columns and bookstack alcoves were continued in the same fashion in the reference library above. The use of columns represented a modular solution to space allocation. In addition, counters and all staff enclosures were constructed on a modular basis and so were easily readjustable.13 The split-level reference library occupied the entire accommodation on the first floor (Figure 5.5). The entrance was fitted with a photoelectric cell to record the number of people using the reference services. The room was furnished with nine self-contained study carrels and seventy-three individual study tables, each with an individual reading lamp (unfortunately, the tables were three inches higher than the British Standard, meaning that readers were not as comfortable in their reading and writing positions as they might have been). The areas around desks were carpeted to reduce noise. Another noise reduction device in the reference room was the placing of a quick-reference section in its entrance foyer. Here, popular enquiries could be answered and talking was permitted, thereby leaving

Figure 5.5 Reference department, Holborn Central Library. Source: Camden Local History and Archives Centre.

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the rest of the reference-room space for quiet study. Floor-to-ceiling doubleglazed windows were fitted on the south side of the room to reduce sound emanating from the busy Theobalds Road below. To reduce glare, see-through nylon curtains were hung in these windows; although compromising the pleasant view of Gray’s Inn Garden, the curtains could be opened and closed speedily by means of electrical, mechanical control. Photocopier machines and microfilm readers were supplied. The reference stock amounted to 13,000 volumes including a specialist business and economics collection (of 3,000 volumes and over a hundred periodicals) housed on a sub-level room off the reference room. This sublevel also housed the local studies collection. A throwback to the Victorian age, the children’s library was located in the basement. Innovatively, however, it featured an aquarium and a mini-theatre for storytelling and other children’s activities. Coloured upholstered stools supplemented the appropriately sized chairs and tables. Adjoining the children’s library was the periodicals room, with easy chairs and low tables for newspaper readers (over thirty newspapers and more than eighty periodicals were provided). A gramophone library, equipped with the kind of listening cubicle popular in record shops, was housed on the second floor (gramophone records were not at first made available to all, only to local groups organising recitals). The second floor also housed various staff workrooms. On the third floor a spacious hall, capable of accommodating 250, was provided for gramophone recitals, lectures and other cultural activities. Off the hall could be found a tea bar and an exhibition space of works by local artists. The size of the hall could be reduced to the required size by the operation of a mechanical screen with folding wings. French windows punctuating entirely glazed north and south walls of the hall allowed access to terraces which the public could use during intervals or on other appropriate occasions. Great attention to detail was paid in making the running of the library efficient. The architect designed special trolleys to carry returned books from the circulation desk back to the shelves. The trolleys were given removable trays that could fit beneath the ledges of the control desk. Returned books were placed on the trays which were then placed on the trolleys. Fitments, furniture and space were designed with the maximum flexibility in mind. All shelves and partitions were demountable. Underfloor heating (with warm-air ventilation as a top-up) replaced radiators, thereby saving space and allowing for the freer positioning of furniture. The architect recognised that flexibility was essential as the premises would eventually need to be extended, while changes in library administration and patron demand and tastes would inevitably necessitate new layouts. The flexibility of the Holborn design was demonstrated when in 1965 the Borough of Holborn was absorbed into the new Borough of Camden, and the need for administrative accommodation disappeared overnight; the spaces freed were turned into a large music department for the new Borough simply by taking down demountable office partitions, the only clue to the transformation being tell-tale marks on linotiles, and unusually placed light switches and electrical sockets.14

170 Holborn Central Library Like the book trolleys, the bookshelves – in wood and metal and with adjustable heights and built-in lighting – were designed by the architect (he also custom designed the catalogue cabinets, though these soon fell redundant after the introduction of a computer-generated bound paper catalogue in April 1965). Each book press had white plastic shelf facings and white facia boards against which the raised black plastic lettering used for guides stood out clearly; and each was fitted with fluorescent lighting strips. A large amount of effort went into the custom design of the bookshelves. Many visits were made to see mock-ups in companies tendering for the shelving contract. Detailed thought went into deciding on the optimum spacing between shelves and between stacks, the look of title and classification label holders, appropriate artificial lighting and how to make the shelving portable.15 This attention to detail belies the image of modernist designs as penny-pinching and shoddy. Indeed, materials used at Holborn were far from being cheap and cheerful. A number of walls were lined with rich brown mahogany. Even the walls of the public stairwell were finished in wood panelling (alongside Formica), while the use of teak treads on the stairs, though requiring regular resealing, gave ‘a welcome sense of warmth’ to even what was a confined, functional area.16 The building has stood the test of time, even if some of its services (most notably the substantial reference service) have been relocated to other service points and a degree of physical renovation is required. Holborn Central Library was an important departure in public library design in the UK – the first of its kind. Its pedigree, most obviously internally, was that of elegant and functional Scandinavian architecture. This Festival-of-Britain lineage, as we have seen, was criticised by those favouring a more rugged interpretation of modernism as ‘Scandinavian light’, less thrusting and less capable of making statements than brutalist-inspired designs. In the context of Holborn Central Library, however, ‘Scandinavian light’ could easily have been construed as a complimentary term, a tribute to the building’s interiors which were open, inviting and informal, with a weightless appearance, giving, as a contributor to the journal Light & Lighting put it at the time, ‘a general impression of sparkle and brightness’.17 Yet for Holborn Central Library and the hundreds of new libraries that were to follow in its wake ‘Scandinavian light’ is much more than a technical, architectural descriptor that sums up their styles, especially the treatment of their interiors; because when employed as a metaphor it is also evocative of a bright beacon – a Scandinavian ‘light’ – that illuminated and shaped Britain’s library-design landscape throughout the rest of the 1960s and beyond.

Notes 1

The design of the library was presented and discussed in a variety of architectural, library and popular journals. This chapter draws on the following contemporary sources: Holborn Central Library, Official Architecture & Planning (November 1960), 493–500; Holborn’s £250,000 library designed to meet changing service needs, Municipal Journal (4 November 1960), 3432–3433; Holborn Central Library, The Builder (14 October 1960), 694–698; Holborn’s new central library: A

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4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

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contemporary building by the Borough Architect, The Surveyor and Municipal and County Engineer (20 August), 938–940; Three new libraries, London Calling Europe, 662 (21 October 1960), 1–3; Bright for bibliophiles, Holborn in the News (1961); London pride, Library Association Record, 62/11 (November 1960), 358–361; Holborn Central Library: New building described, Paint Journal (December 1960), 356; Library at Holborn, London, Architect and Building News (19 October 1960), 491–504; Holborn Central Library, Interior Design (May/June 1961), 148–149; Holborn’s new central library: Borough architect’s design incorporates new ideas, Municipal Review (July 1961), 434–435; Fabulous fact and fiction, North London Press (24 September 1965), 12–13; A. Thompson, Library buildings of Britain and Europe: An international study with examples mainly from Britain and some from Europe and overseas (London: Butterworths, 1963), 131–136; and Metropolitan Borough of Holborn, Central Library: Opening … 22 November 1960 (1960). Many of these sources are deposited in the Camden Local History and Archives Centre. A shorter version of this chapter appeared as a section in A. Black, ‘New beauties’: The design of British public library buildings in the 1960s, Library Trends 60/1 (Summer 2011), 71–111. W. Maidment, Librarianship (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1975), 17. M. Swenarton, High density without high rise: Housing experiments of the 1950s by Patrick Hodgkinson, in M. Swenarton, T. Avermaete and D. van den Heuvel (eds), Architecture and the welfare state (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 236–257; M. Swenarton, Geared to producing ideas, with the emphasis on youth: The creation of the Camden borough architect’s department under Sydney Cook, Journal of Architecture, 16/3 (2011), 387–414. S. Games, Cook’s Camden, Royal Institute of British Architects Journal (November 1979), 483. E. Harwood, The English public library 1945–1985 (London: English Heritage, 2013), 4. S.A.G. Cook, Holborn Central Library [Part B], in H. Ward (ed.), Better library buildings: Architect/librarian co-operation in their design (London: Library Association London and Home Counties Branch, 1969), 42. Ibid., 43. S.A.G. Cook, Library buildings of the future: 1, the architect’s viewpoint, in K.M. Newbury (ed.), Looking ahead: Techniques and buildings of the future (Gillingham, 1956), 37. Ibid., 35. L. Sidwell, A critical look at some recent libraries: Holborn Central Library, in London and Home Counties Branch of the Library Association, Library buildings: Design and fulfilment (London, 1967), 29. H. Goodden, The lion and the unicorn: Symbolic architecture for the Festival of Britain 1951 (Norwich: Unicorn Press, 2011). R.J. Cecil, Libraries: A survey of current lighting practice, Light & Lighting, 55/8 (August 1962), 232. Sidwell, A critical look at some recent libraries, op. cit., 33. L. Sidwell, Holborn Central Library [Part A], in Ward, op. cit., (ed.), 38. Cook, Holborn Central Library [Part B], op. cit., 43. Sidwell, A critical look at some recent libraries, op. cit., 32. Cecil, Libraries, op. cit., 232.

6

Hampstead Central Library Into the light

Listed at Grade II in 1997, identifying it as a historic building of national significance, the iconic Hampstead (later Swiss Cottage) Central Library was opened by the Queen on 10 November 1964 (Figure 6.1).1 Historic England (the government’s statutory advisor on the nation’s ‘heritage assets’) justifies the building’s listing by saying that it is ‘amongst the most ambitious architectural designs for a library found anywhere’.2 Of all the modernist libraries of the 1960s, Hampstead represented the boldest attempt to redefine the public library builtform, although aspects of its design, including its half-rotunda ends, certainly drew on historical precedent. Plans for a new library for Hampstead – the Victorian Hampstead Public Library in Arkwright Road had been badly bomb-damaged in the war and, though repaired in 1952, was an inadequate, overcrowded facility – formed part of a scheme for a large, new civic centre proposed in the late 1950s.3 A site was chosen at Swiss Cottage, commonly described at the time as the ‘gateway to London’ from the north. The architect chosen to design the sevenacre complex was Basil Spence, possibly Britain’s leading architect of the day. The original brief given to Spence4 was to design a civic centre which included a town hall, council chamber, two multipurpose public assembly halls (one to accommodate 1,250 people, the other 300), council offices, a restaurant, mayoral suite, swimming pool, gymnasium, library and parking for 200 cars below the principal square.5 In presenting his new civic centre for Hampstead, Spence criticised town halls and offices of the past as having ‘starched fronts’ and offering bad conditions for those who worked in them.6 Spence wanted to take the stiffness out of the civic centre. At Hampstead he wanted to open it up and ‘make it a pleasant place for the public, small, interesting and democratic, to provide interesting vistas and silhouettes, and to provide sunny offices’.7 A mark of its modernity, the main administrative block, 150 feet high, was to be positioned over the Swiss Cottage underground station, with lifts bringing civic employees directly from the station into their offices.8 All the buildings on the site were to display ‘quality and permanence,’ and the complex was to be a gathering place where people wanted, rather than had, to go.9 Despite the grandeur of the scheme, some believed it to be not bold enough, confined by its civic orientation. The New Hampstead Society asked why it could not be much more of a social and cultural complex. It advocated the inclusion of

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Figure 6.1 Hampstead Central Library. Source: Camden Local History and Archives Centre; David Cockroft, photographer.

a health centre and an arts centre as well as an Italian-style piazza, to give the site greater definition.10 Spence constructed a model of the planned civic centre and placed it on public display.11 However, neither the model nor the plan bore much resemblance to the final product (the original library, in the right foreground, of the model, pictured in Figure 6.2, was rectangular, with a disc-shaped structure on its roof). Eventually, development beyond the control of local politicians settled the fate of the scheme, which was emaciated by the reorganisation of London local government in 1965. The Borough of Hampstead disappeared and was absorbed, along with the nearby boroughs of Holborn and St Pancras, into a new borough, Camden. However, the area of Hampstead still badly needed a new library, so Spence was asked to concentrate on this one aspect of the former plan, with a swimming pool in addition. Once again he produced models to accompany his drawings and written plan (Figure 6.3). Later, in the late 1960s, plans were put forward to extend Spence’s pool and library project – to add a sports complex, arts centre, hotel, cinema, music college and drama school – but these were never realised.12 In the early 1960s Spence was at his zenith. Arguably the leading architect of his day, with offices in London, Edinburgh and Rome, employing between them over a hundred staff, Spence had become, in the opinion of the Hampstead & Highgate Express, ‘synonymous with architecture in Britain’; ‘Sir Basil Spence “IS” British architecture’, the newspaper added, for no other man, it posited, was ‘remodelling so much of the public face of Britain’.13 Spence worked across a

Figure 6.2 Model of proposed Hampstead Civic Centre. Source: Camden Local History and Archives Centre.

Figure 6.3 Transparent model of Hampstead Central Library, photographed in 2013. Source: Photograph by Alistair Black.

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wide variety of building types: house, high-rise flat, atomic power station, university, airport, town hall, military barrack, cathedral, church – and library. ‘No other British architect’, it has been argued, ‘contributed such a range of work to the public building stock’.14 His canvas was that of ‘the ethos and needs of the post-war welfare state’,15 his projects arising from the large and revolutionary social programmes of the time. His architecture coincided with the new mood of social optimism. Exhibiting a strong sense of ‘vitality and mission’, he carried the message of modern design to royalty, ministers, government departments and local councils.16 By the time he came to design Hampstead Public Library, Spence had already established a ‘reputation for style and panache’.17 He had worked with Edwin Lutyens on the Viceroy’s House in Delhi. He had designed the Hall of the Future in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s ‘Britain Can Make It’ exhibition (1946)18 as well as the Sea and Ship Pavilion at the Festival of Britain (1951). Also in 1951, he submitted his first set of plans for the new Coventry Cathedral. Completed in 1962, Coventry Cathedral was at that time the most controversial building to be erected in post-war Britain. In the days following the release of the designs of Coventry Cathedral Spence received over 700 letters; some 200 of these were rude, he later revealed, and around 500 he described as ‘very, very rude’.19 Yet when it was finally opened people queued in large numbers to see the inside of the new cathedral. Though neither a ‘steel and glass’ man nor a brutalist (his flats in the Gorbals district of Glasgow were an exception),20 Spence was a champion of modern architecture. Given this, his support for the conservationist-minded Georgian Society – its actions, he said, could ‘do nothing but good at this moment in time when we are at the beginning of an age of tremendous reconstruction’ – might at first glance appear incongruous with his modernist inclinations. However, in addressing the Society in 1961, Spence declared himself to be in sympathy with its aims because when Georgian architecture emerged it had been viewed as ‘an extremely radical adventure’. This was linked to the fact that the Georgian mind was ‘an enquiring mind, a mind that accepted new ideas’. For Spence, therefore, there was much in the principles of the modern architecture of the post-war years that emulated the birth of the Georgian.21 Like much modern architecture itself, after the 1960s Spence became an ‘awkward relic of the recent era of optimism’.22 He suffered, in the words of one of his later assessors, ‘a generation of neglect and unpopularity’.23 Both his Hyde Park Barracks (1970) and British Embassy in Rome (1971) were heavily criticised. His brutalist Gorbals flats were demolished in 1993. His assertion that modern architecture would lead to ‘the acceptance of the architect as a matter of course by the average member of the public’ was unrealised, certainly in the short term.24 However, his belief that modernism could be ‘convenient’ and at the same time ‘speak to the spirit’,25 lived on in buildings like the Hampstead Public Library. Over the decades, opinions regarding the Hampstead Library design have varied wildly. At the positive end of the register the building has been described as ‘very solid and comforting … uncomplicated and well crafted’,26 exhibiting

176 Hampstead Central Library ‘consistency and simplicity’,27 a ‘showcase development’, in step with the miniskirted, ‘groovy’ society of the day.28 Some classed it as ‘the most impressive library of the decade’.29 At the negative extreme it has been viewed as ‘anonymous’,30 with a ‘solemn and heavy look’.31 There were two striking aspects to Spence’s exterior design. First, the structure was given rounded ends, the resulting cigar – technically obloid – shape accentuated by its first and second floors being cantilevered out five feet beyond the perimeter of the ground floor. Of course, circular and semicircular reading spaces had a long tradition in library design. However, if one considers the architect to be an important variable in any composition, then it is interesting to note that Spence had included protruding semicircular living rooms in some of his early house designs.32 Second, the first and second floors were linked by hundreds of mullions, or vertical fins (in Portland stone aggregate, 2 ft 5 in deep), stretching around the entire building at two-and-a-half-foot intervals. Colloquially, some staff referred to the fins as the ‘concrete ribs’ of the building.33 The fins generated a highly stylised, spiky facade. In addition, they rose above the roofline, giving the building a height in excess of its functional envelope. The external spandrels (the spaces framed by the fins and the sills and tops of the aluminium-framed windows) were filled with black precast concrete panels, which in tandem with the white of the concrete fins produced a powerful black-and-white image.34 The use of horizontal concrete louvres on the exterior of the library’s adjacent sister building on the site, the swimming baths, composed a ‘lively rhythm of verticals and horizontals’,35 unifying the two structures without overheating the aesthetics of the complex. The public entered the library along a broad, paved approach and through a colonnaded porch under one of the rounded ends of the building (Figure 6.4). Once in the entrance hall, access to the rest of the building was gained by a staircase to the first floor. One contemporary observer wrote that this was like having to enter the library ‘as one would [enter] a Cousteau underwater house, by creeping under the great curve end and plunging up a flight of stairs into the building proper’.36 The entrance hall itself was said to have commanded an ‘intimate sense of scale’.37 The main function of the entrance foyer was to house the library’s principal control counters. These had three purposes: enquiries; membership; and the issue and return of books and other materials. Separate ‘in’ and ‘out’ counters were custom designed to accommodate two photocharging (microfilm-based, book-issuing) machines, telephones, book storage, a fines box and a rotary filing unit containing the names and details of borrowers. Book hoists took returned items to the library floors above but they could only hold trolleys, meaning there always needed to be someone on hand.38 Two larger lifts were provided for readers. Locating the circulation-control area in an isolated ground-floor entrance foyer, connected to the rest of the building by a flight of stairs, was unusual. One of the reasons for this arrangement was that it would concentrate supervision in relation to book theft.39 Historically, supervision (or surveillance) of circulation and other user activities had often been combined in a single ‘overseeing’ librarian’s

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Figure 6.4 Entrance to Hampstead Central Library, photographed in 2013. Source: Photograph by Alistair Black.

enclosure, or station. On the one hand, the division of overseeing tasks at Hampstead might be construed as a dilution of library surveillance, those at the ground-floor circulation desk being unable to gaze upon users on the floors upstairs. On the other hand, the placing of an overseeing task in a space divorced from the main library, in which readers, despite a certain level of complexity designed into the building, had considerable power because of its public-sphere nature, possibly heightened readers’ perceptions of control, the entrance foyer becoming a symbol of the institution’s professional and civic power. In addition to the entrance/control foyer, the ground floor housed the reserve book store. The reserve store, fitted with adjustable shelving, was designed to house up to 200,000 volumes, as well as prints and paintings (for many years Camden operated a picture lending scheme). At the head of the stairs leading up from the entrance/control foyer (Figure 6.5) was a double-height exhibition space from which readers fanned out left to a periodicals room, right to a children’s library, or forwards or backwards to, respectively, reference and lending libraries each situated

178 Hampstead Central Library in semicircular spaces at either end of the structure. Access from the first floor to the second-floor perimeter mezzanine, was via pairs of impressive spiral staircases rising through open wells at either end of the building, in the lending area, to the south, and a reference area, to the north (these were a variation on the more typical ceremonial split-staircase, as used, for example, at Harlow and Luton) (Figure 6.6). On the mezzanine floor at the north end of the building readers would find more lending library accommodation, where the less popular material was shelved. The mezzanine floor above the reference library at the south end housed a research area with separate desks for forty students, nine study carrels (including an art carrel and a typing carrel) and a local history department. The floor also housed a music library, a philosophy library, and staff offices and workrooms. Supplementing the surveillance of readers operating in the entrance hall, the semicircular form at each end of the library permitted good supervision of the radial lines of shelving from the librarian’s desk at the ‘centre’ of each semicircle. Also, offices of the deputy librarian and secretary on the second floor were said to command, via open wells, good views over the library spaces on the first floor below.40 As one would expect in a modern building boasting flexibility and efficiency, although many bookcases were situated against the perimeter wall, some island bookcases were also provided to break up the floor space into informal seating areas. Shelf units were designed so that they could substitute as trays to transport books on trolleys.41

Figure 6.5 View from first-floor exhibition area, Hampstead Central Library looking down stairway to entrance foyer, photographed in 2013. Readers entering the main body of the library thus progressed from relative gloom into the light. Source: Photograph by Alistair Black.

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Figure 6.6 Twin spiral staircases connecting first and second floor, Hampstead Central Library, photographed in 2013. Source: Photograph by Alistair Black.

Given the library’s unusual external appearance, one might easily reach the conclusion, as some did, that this was ‘an architect’s rather than a librarian’s building’.42 There are a number of examples, however, of the external look resulting from primary consideration being given to user requirements; that is, interior function dictating exterior form. The facade’s multiple, regular and closely spaced vertical fins may have been aesthetically striking, conveying a certain severity and formality, but they were also responsible for lightening the mood on the inside, for giving a sense of seclusion, for diffusing large amounts of natural light, for shading the public areas from direct sunlight and for cutting out traffic noise from the adjacent main road artery to/from the newly opened M1 motorway linking London and the Midlands, later extended to the north (contrasting with the reality of this busy urban location, a contemporary photograph commissioned by Spence depicted a pastoral setting for the library) (Figure 6.7).43 The interior of the library was described as being full of ‘airy and agreeable spaces’ fashioned by an abundant supply of natural lighting.44 This sense of internal ‘lightness’ was to a large degree, counter-intuitively, facilitated by the external, densely-packed ‘prison-bar’ vertical fins. The unity of the facade and the arrangement of the fenestration both hid and facilitated a highly flexible layout within. It was a combination which accommodated the wide variety of rooms and open areas in the building and

180 Hampstead Central Library

Figure 6.7 Photograph of Hampstead Central Library depicting pastoral setting. Source: Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland.

which delivered a high degree of adaptability within these spaces. When opened, it was argued that the library’s external form ‘evolved from an analytical approach to the functional requirements of the internal spaces’.45 One of the jobs the fins did was to reduce, for the external observer, ‘the restless external effect’ of varying window heights. This variation was dictated not by a concern for the aesthetic of the elevations but by the internal placing of shelving against the outer walls (with small windows above to maximise book storage) mixed with ceiling-to-floor windows to enhance natural light.46 On viewing the interior of the library shortly after its opening, one observer detected a ‘sense of power’, the spaces combining to render it a ‘temple to the printed word’.47 But in truth, any sense of formality and seriousness was offset by a number of ‘democratic’ devices: notably, the pairs of open, spiral staircases at each end of the library linking first and second floors; and the glazed screens on the second floor that afforded views from study and lending areas and corridors down into the first-floor exhibition area, giving a strong impression of an interpenetration of space – a ‘continuous space through which the public is free to circulate’.48 ‘Beautifully spacious and well-equipped’,49 the interior of the library offered ‘breathing space’, and ‘a sense of calm’.50 The whole of the interior of the building was planned to create an ‘informal atmosphere’.51 Informality was accentuated by the choice of finishes. Colouring was restrained: the colour of deep purple was

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repeated throughout the building in the form of the covering for seating and noticeboards.52 Most ceiling areas were covered with sound-absorbing, white perforated aluminium strips, and housed recessed fluorescent lighting. In the entrance hall white beech ceiling slats concealed the fluorescent lighting fixture. Walls were plastered, and painted white; some were treated with natural woods. Internal finishes were ‘of the highest order’,53 and in combination gave ‘an impression of spaciousness’.54 A generation after its opening, having been subjected to two decades of heavy public use, it was possible to give a more objective assessment of the building’s worth. Those who worked in the library – spending as they did up to forty hours a week in it – were perhaps better placed than most to identify its shortcomings. By the late 1980s a number of deficiencies were readily observable: 1 it was built too close to one of the busiest roads in London and was thus plagued by noise, especially at peak traffic times and in the summer when windows needed to be opened; 2 cleaning of the outside of windows, which in the absence of roof-slung cradles could only be done by ladder, was made difficult by the facades’ vertical fins; 3 air-conditioning and heating systems were inadequate; 4 the children’s library was placed too close to the reference department, leading readers to avoid the latter because of noise; 5 making the first-floor exhibition space the major focal point through which most visitors passed (there was an alternative staircase by the lifts which bypassed the first-floor foyer but which only a minority used) meant it was supplied with too many exit doors, placing restraints on exhibition planners; 6 the varnished-wood steps of the two pairs of spiral staircases were unsafe and the space between rails on these staircases was wide enough to allow a small child to fall through; 7 lighting tubes were difficult to change in many parts of the building; 8 circulation of the public around the building was so good that it was difficult to make staff areas secure; 9 deliveries were hampered by both bridges to the swimming pool and the building’s overhang being too low; and 10 for many years after opening, the architect would not allow signs to be erected on, or in, the building without his permission (in fact, there was nothing on the outside of the building or near the front door to indicate it was a library and many people were unaware that the public lifts were for their use).55 In response to such criticisms and an inevitable ‘tiredness’ in the decoration, and notwithstanding the impossibility of rectifying certain of the building’s major deficiencies, in the early 2000s the building underwent an extensive renovation.56 As its ‘listing’ suggests, the library remains a nationally important building of special interest. Spaces within the building – for exhibitions, for the extensive storage of paintings and prints, for the study of local history and for group meetings

182 Hampstead Central Library – marked the library out as an authentic cultural centre. Spence’s design was, and continues to be, inspiring, aggressively defying the traditional image of the library. Yet the design was far from bereft of historical references. For example, the library’s rounded ends echoed the design of the Victorian, Italianate Birmingham Reference Library (see Figure 0.1). The most powerful historical reference, however, was the location of the control processes in a ‘submerged’ and secluded ground-floor entrance hall, requiring – tempting even – the majority of readers to climb a stairway corridor from a space with relatively subdued lighting into a welcoming spacious exhibition atrium-foyer flooded by day with natural light and copiously lit at night not only by its own lighting fixtures but also by light from spaces circling the atrium (glass screens were used instead of solid walls throughout much of the library). In this aspect of Spence’s accomplished design, as in Asplund’s Stockholm City Library and Aalto’s Viipuri Library, readers undertook a physical journey ‘into the light’, matching, figuratively, their intellectual journey towards enlightenment waiting for them in the materials housed in the library.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5

6

Contemporary accounts of the building include: Proposed civic centre for Hampstead, Architects’ Journal (29 January 1959); Metropolitan Borough of Hampstead, Hampstead Civic Centre: Stage 1 (1964); Library at Hampstead, Architects’ Journal (25 November 1964), 1245–1258; Swimming baths and library form the first stage of the new civic centre at Hampstead, Concrete Quarterly, 63 (October–December 1964), 14–18; Central library and swimming baths for the Borough of Hampstead, The Builder (27 November 1964), 1131–1135; Civic centre, Hampstead, Architect and Building News (11 November 1964), 923–936; The library was built by McAlpine and Sons: Hampstead Civic Centre, The Green Man [magazine of McAlpine and Sons] (January 1965), 1–5. A shorter version of this chapter appeared as: The design of Hampstead Public Library (1964), Camden History Review, 38 (2014), 10–14. Primary sources for this chapter were drawn largely from the following repositories: Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre; University College London, Special Collections (repository for the archives of the Library Association); and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), Edinburgh (repository for archives of Basil Spence). Reflecting the social importance attached to public libraries at the time, members of the royal family were frequently asked to open libraries. In what is now the London Borough of Camden, the Queen Mother opened Holborn Central Library in 1960, while Princess Anne opened the St Pancras Public Library (since closed) and the attached Shaw Theatre (still active at the time of writing) in 1971. Historic England, List entry: Swiss Cottage Library, retrieved 20 August 2015 from http://list.historicengland.org.uk/resultsingle.aspx?uid=1272259. Metropolitan Borough of Hampstead, Hampstead Civic Centre, op. cit., 8. More precisely, the brief was given to his partnership, Spence, Bonnington & Collins. Architect of cathedral may design town hall, Hampstead and Highgate Record (17 January 1958); Civic centre: Architect briefed, Hampstead & Highgate Express (15 August 1958); Proposed civic centre for Hampstead, op. cit., 185. Detailed plans for the Hampstead baths and library project can be found in RCAHMS 2329/ENG/57/3/189. A press briefing on the project is located in RCAHMS 2329/ENG/57/2-4. Hampstead scheme cuts out starch, London Evening Standard (23 January 1959).

Hampstead Central Library 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25

26 27

183

Proposed civic centre for Hampstead, op. cit., 185. Hampstead scheme cuts out starch, op. cit. 150ft tower for civic centre, The Times (28 January 1959). Hampstead plan not bold enough, Nottingham Guardian (16 February 1959); Hampstead Centre criticized, The Times (21 February 1959). Photographs of the model appeared in the local, national and architectural presses: e.g. At last, the civic centre, Hampstead News (23 January 1959); Designs for the new Britain, The Times (23 January 1959). On show: Camden’s £7 million scheme for art and sport, London Evening Standard (30 September 1969). Sir Basil Spence: ‘The’ architect, Hampstead & Highgate Express (24 November 1964). P. Long and J. Thomas, Introduction, in P. Long and J. Thomas (eds), Basil Spence: Architect (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2008), 9. L. Campbell, Basil Spence: An architect and his times, in L. Campbell, M. Glendinning and J. Thomas (eds), Basil Spence: Buildings and projects (London: RIBA, 2012), 7. B. Edwards, Basil Spence, 1907–1976 (Edinburgh: Rutland Press, 1995), 6. Ibid., 6. B. Edwards, Exhibition design, in Long and Thomas, Basil Spence: Architect, op. cit., 52–53. Professor Spence tells of 500 ‘rude’ letters, Coventry Evening Telegraph (22 July 1957). Gavin Stamp, Spence’s charm, Apollo, 557 (September 2008), 99: Stamp describes Spence as in some ways ‘a pioneer of post-modernism’. The monumental University of Sussex scheme, comprising dozens of buildings and a detailed landscaping, mixed unmistakably modern credentials with traditional references. Among the latter were its multiple rounded arches. Spence explained that these were in sympathy with the South Downs setting, its steep hills and abundance of tress that surrounded and framed the site. The type of materials used, and their colour, reflected those seen in many local historic buildings. His use of moats reflected the fact that the university was near the sea and subject to a rising water table. The campus was characterised by a series of small, intimate courtyards for peaceful reflection and quiet conversation, in the tradition of the Oxbridge colleges. On the University of Sussex scheme, see B. Spence, The planning and building of the University of Sussex, Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 41 (Part II) (1966), 198–211; L. Campbell, ‘Drawing a new map of learning’: Spence and the University of Sussex, in Long and Thomas, Basil Spence: Architect, op. cit., 97–103. At Sussex, Spence was said to have ‘blended echoes of a Roman coliseum into a magnificent landscape’: A. Marwick, Culture in Britain since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 130. In some respects, the university’s design appeared similar to Le Corbusier’s upmarket Maisons Jaoul, Paris (1954): see Maisons Jaoul (2013), retrieved 5 August 2015 from www.greatbuildings.com/ buildings/Maisons_Jaoul.html. B. Spence, Address to the Georgian Society Annual meeting, 1961, typewritten text, RCAHMS, MS2329/X/19/11/152-4. Campbell, Basil Spence: An architect and his times, op. cit., 8. Edwards, Basil Spence, op. cit., 5. Men of the year, Architects’ Journal (21 January 1960), 104. Spence, The planning and building of the University of Sussex, op. cit., 200, 202. Similarly he believed housing designs could be ‘unfussy and efficient’ and ‘homely and mellow’: Architects: Basil Spence answers some questions, Ideal Home (November 1958), 195. The opinion of fashion designer Margaret Howell, stated in: Learning curve, The Observer Magazine (19 September 2004), 40, 41. Metropolitan Borough of Hampstead, Hampstead Civic Centre, op. cit., 11.

184 Hampstead Central Library 28 N. Stungo, Tome capsule, RIBA Journal (August 2003), 30. 29 B. Platts, Patronage and pattern at the library, Country Life (2 March 1967), 476. 30 The words of a contributor to the Mass-Observation Archive, Directive on Public Library Buildings (2006). 31 Platts, Patronage and pattern, op. cit., 476. 32 Edwards, Basil Spence, op. cit., 21–28, 51, 53. 33 M. Holmes, Swiss Cottage: A library or a bibliographic cathedral designed for people to worship? Camden Libraries and Arts Staff Newsletter, 107 (May/July 1983), 33. 34 Central library and swimming baths for the Borough of Hampstead, op. cit., 1134. 35 Swimming baths and library form the first stage, op. cit., 14. 36 Platts, Patronage and pattern, op. cit., 476. 37 Library at Hampstead, op. cit., 1246. 38 Library control counter at Hampstead Public Library, Architects’ Journal, 141/12 (24 March 1965), 731. The trolleys designed by Spence were considered by staff to be heavy and unwieldy, and hard to steer. Following renovation in the early-2000s the entrance-hall counters were removed and replaced by a new island counter in the firstfloor exhibition area. My thanks to David Hayes for this information. 39 Library control counter at Hampstead Public Library, op. cit., 734. 40 Library at Hampstead, op. cit., 1248, 1249. 41 Ibid., 1249. 42 Platts, Patronage and pattern, op. cit., 476. 43 Swimming baths and library form the first stage of the new civic centre at Hampstead, op. cit., 18. 44 Hampstead Civic Centre: First part ready, The Times (10 November 1964). 45 Library at Hampstead, op. cit., 1250. 46 Swimming baths and library form the first stage, op. cit., 18. 47 Platts, Patronage and pattern, op. cit., 476. 48 Civic centre, Hampstead, op. cit., 933. 49 Swimming baths and library form the first stage, op. cit., 17. 50 The opinion of fashion designer Margaret Howell, stated in Learning curve, op. cit., 40, 41. 51 Library at Hampstead, op. cit., 1246. 52 J.M. Orr, Designing library buildings for activity (London: Andre Deutsch, 1972), 74. 53 Hampstead Civic Centre, op. cit., 3. 54 Swimming baths and library form the first stage, op. cit., 18. 55 Holmes, Swiss Cottage, op. cit., 32–35. On the air-conditioning, heating and ventilation systems generally, see Camden NALGO, Heating at Swiss Cottage Library (November 1988). 56 Building better libraries, Public Library Journal, 20/4 (Winter 2005), 4–6; Stungo, Tome capsule, op. cit., 24–32.

7

Bourne Hall Library Light from space

Opened in 1970, Bourne Hall Library, Museum and Social Centre, in the semirural Borough of Epsom and Ewell, was said to be futuristic due to its resemblance to a flying saucer (Figure 7.1).1 Designed in the round, it has been described as ‘a post-war pioneer of circularity’.2 Like Hampstead (Swiss Cottage) Library, the Bourne Hall development (hereafter simply referred to as the ‘Bourne Hall Library’) boasts a Grade II listing by Historic England which, in explaining the award, draws attention to the building’s ‘striking design, notable for its space-age flair and the generous, top-lit principal interior space’, its circular layout being ‘well-organised, legible and flexible’.3 Elaborating on the library as cultural centre, and leaning towards the development of the public library’s community identity, Bourne Hall Library comprised not only a variety of library departments but also a museum, exhibition hall and social centre, all under a single roof.4

Figure 7.1 Bourne Hall Library, reminiscent of a flying saucer. Source: Ewell Library and Museum.

186 Bourne Hall Library Although a building with an ‘advanced design’, Bourne Hall Library was situated in parkland close to the centre of the historic Ewell Village: a modern form in a pastoral setting (Figure 7.2).5 The many different functional spaces in the library were set on three levels and were sheltered under a copper-covered dome measuring 140 feet in diameter and 37 feet in height. A large, circular roof light topped the dome. The library occupied land that until its demolition in 1962 had been the site of an eighteenth-century mansion (Garbrand Hall, renamed Bourne Hall in 1926 when it became a school) and its various outhouses and stables, set in grounds which the Borough had bought in 1945.6 Surrey County Council gave approval for the erection of a library and social centre on the site in 1961, after which, in 1965, following local government reorganisation in London, the project was taken over by the Borough of Epsom and Ewell. Alwyn (A.G.) Sheppard Fidler, a veteran Festival of Britain designer, was appointed as architect in December 1965. From the outset the aim was to emulate the growing call for libraries that provided a wide range of cultural possibilities. The Libraries Committee stressed the lack of non-book-related cultural facilities in the area and

Figure 7.2 Aerial view of model of Bourne Hall Library and its parkland setting. Source: Ewell Library and Museum.

Bourne Hall Library

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cited the Roberts Report (1959) on the future of the public library, which drew attention to the potential of the local library as ‘a centre of cultural life’.7 Countering local politicians’ and librarians’ plans for a new building, local conservationists mounted a campaign to save Bourne Hall which, the protesters pointed out, was a fine example of the smaller mansion of the late eighteenth century. A petition was drawn up and the support of the Georgian Group was obtained.8 Resurrecting tentative plans first formulated in the mid-1950s, to adapt Bourne Hall into a library and public hall,9 the Ewell Residents’ Association expressed a desire to see the mansion restored and turned into a library and social centre.10 Opposition to a new-build library appears to have been influenced by general contemporary fears concerning the pace and direction of urban development and the perceived overbearing power of modernity (after the war the area became one of high population growth). One protester was bitter that the old Bourne Hall was not being protected by a local authority whose job it was, like others around the country, he believed, to safeguard such treasure which would otherwise, under the free play of the market, be sacrificed in the name of the ‘Traffic God, the Money God, the Phillistine God, the Subtopian God, [and] the Comfort God’.11 The Nonsuch Park and District Residents’ Association expressed its unanimous disapproval of the plan on account of its cost, size, function and inappropriate location.12 It wanted to preserve ‘the quiet, sylvan surroundings of Bourne Hall as a retreat from ever increasing noise and traffic’. Ewell Village, it believed, was ‘one of the last refuges from the encroachment of subtopia’ and by destroying its focal point, Bourne Hall, the community would be losing ‘something precious which no modern development can ever replace’. The Association didn’t criticise the design per se (early views of the Bourne Hall design likened it ‘to an imaginary craft from outer space’) but suggested it was out of place and out of scale and would destroy the quiet, peaceful character of the village, ‘which is still reminiscent of a more leisurely, bygone age’.13 The local authority was adamant that to renovate Bourne Hall – which by the 1960s, as a survey showed, was in a complete state of disrepair – would be extremely costly. It would be wasteful, it was concluded, to preserve, in the context of the purpose the library would need to fulfil, ‘an inconvenient and inadequate building’.14 Although there was considerable opposition to the planned project, many, perhaps the majority, were in favour of it. The Epsom and Ewell Art Group displayed support for the project, saying it was ‘money well spent’.15 Confident in the legitimacy of their plans, the Libraries Committee, led by the Borough Librarian, John Dent, inspected a number of plans of recent libraries as well as new libraries in the area, including Guildford, Egham and Chertsey.16 In October 1965 plans for, and a model of, the building were exhibited at Epsom Town Hall. Fifty-seven people attended, among them representatives of a total of ten local organisations. The ‘great majority’ were said to be ‘enthusiastic in their approval of both the design of the building and its functional aspects’.17 The architect, also present, reported that many in attendance expressed ‘praise’. What questions that did arise were not about the library’s style; people seemed more concerned about relatively minor aspects of the planned facilities: for example, some wondered if

188 Bourne Hall Library indoor bowls would be possible; others if organisations hiring a room could provide basic refreshments without having to hire the whole kitchen.18 The architect, A.G. Sheppard Fidler, was unapologetic about his creation. ‘In considering the design of this building’, he wrote to the County Planning Office, we felt that we wished to create something with its own definite character and detail, and not to produce a neutral building of no definite character, which would, undoubtedly, have resulted if we had attempted to reproduce the spirit of a bygone day. The accommodation required fitted extremely well into a basic circular shape and we think the degree of individuality produced will be very suitable to this location, and form a pleasing addition to the best buildings in the neighbourhood.19 This assertive defence of the design, especially its uncompromising, anti-historical non-neutrality, was not surprising given Sheppard Fidler’s modernist credentials: a Festival of Britain designer; Chief Architect of Crawley New Town in the late 1940s and early 1950s; and Chief Architect of Birmingham (1952–1964) during the planning of its grand redevelopment. The time from conceptualisation of the project to the opening of the building ate up the best part of a decade. The project was delayed less because of the controversy over siting, design or cost than uncertainties over the future control of the library service arising from plans to reorganise local government in and around London. Construction finally got underway in November 1967, the building eventually opening in January 1970. The public was allowed to tour the building before it opened. A major feature of the interior of the building was its division into concentric circles (Figure 7.3). Moving out from the circular central foyer, much of the inner circle was populated by the library accommodation. The lending library – misworded on the plan, in that this area was occupied by the entire adult library per se – was divided into interlinked recreational, information and reference/study sections, the last of these displaying a wide range of newspapers and periodicals. There were also reading rooms, study carrels, a rolling-stack book store and a central circulation-control area. The building created an ‘excellent opportunity for the interflow of diverse user interests’, claimed one review in the library press.20 Its shape enhanced its openness, readers being free to explore its spaces as if propelled by a spinning wheel. The library was fitted with flexible teak and metal furniture supplied by the Terrapin Reska company, famous for its prefabricated, quick-build classrooms and administrative cabins. There was interchangeability of components. For example, desk tops could be slotted into metal supports in place of shelves to produce a study area. On island shelving small hinged/collapsible desk tops permitted quick reference and note-taking.21 Ancillary rooms were positioned around the perimeter. These included offices for the administrative headquarters of the borough’s branch libraries. The perimeter was punctured in places, to bring the outside in. An outdoor reading

Bourne Hall Library

-_j,.__--

189

Exchange Dispatch Cata logue

Admin Deputy Borough librarian

Helping Children Helping Children

Figure 7.3 Plan of ground floor of Bourne Hall Library. Source: Redrawn by Daniel Cho, from H. Ward and S. Odd, Library buildings: 1972 issue, London: Library Association, 1973.

terrace for adults was provided. Past its lending section, projecting beyond the perimeter wall and into an enclosed garden, the children’s library included a study room and a club room, the two rooms being divided by a removable partition. From these perspectives readers could observe the attractive setting of mature trees, sweeping lawns and an ornamental pond, thereby partially fulfilling the architect’s intention to ‘create a building that would be a complement to the beautiful landscaping of the existing site’.22 The outside world was also admitted in the form of natural light, which flooded in through large windows running around much of the perimeter of the building. Windows were arranged in two tiers, the upper tier being the main source of light for second-floor rooms, both tiers, in the reference and study area for example, servicing much of the groundfloor accommodation (Figure 7.4). The upper tier of windows sloped inwards, providing a degree of top lighting. Light was also sucked in vertically, through a large, circular skylight of translucent fibreglass at the centre of the dome (Figure 7.5). The effect of the skylight was accentuated by spotlights near the centre of the dome mounted on a ring of projected aluminium fins, creating, it was said, ‘a central diffused light in the library’.23

190 Bourne Hall Library

Figure 7.4 Reference and study area, Bourne Hall Library. Source: Ewell Library and Museum.

In addition to the library, and seen as imperative, the building housed a large social suite.24 A banqueting hall (with kitchen) for 250 people and bar comprised the social accommodation. Complementing the social aspect of the project, a hundred-vehicle car park was provided. While realising the importance of a social suite, the Libraries Committee was intent on maximising the space for cultural activities.25 The scheme thus included a 360-seater assembly hall, sunk below ground level. A smaller assembly hall, with 110 seats, was situated on the ground floor. The original plan anticipated that the large hall would be used for large public lectures and meetings, conferences, gramophone recitals, amateur dramatics, lectures and film shows. The small hall would be suitable for talks and group and club meetings. The upper level, on a mezzanine floor directly above the ceiling of the large hall, overlooking the main library space, housed exhibition galleries and a local history museum. These were approached from the foyer by two staircases: a helical-shaped staircase, with a polished concrete spine beam; the other horseshoe-shaped, made of African hardwood, like the first. These areas benefited tremendously from the large perimeter windows. Almost immediately after it had opened its doors, the library was reporting heavy use, including large numbers availing themselves of the information service.26 Ever since the open-plan nature of the interior had first been announced, some had feared that the openness of the library would allow sound to travel too

Bourne Hall Library

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Figure 7.5 Study carrels (right) and central circular skylight (above), Bourne Hall Library. Source: Ewell Library and Museum.

freely. To a degree this is what ensued. There were occasional outbursts of noise. As the Library Committee noted: The child who has fallen over, or likes to hear his voice echoing round the building, can disturb everyone in the library. An audience chatting in the foyer after a function can create, for a short time, a considerable volume of sound.27 For the majority of users, however, these occasional discomforts, it was suggested, were a small disadvantage in relation to the excellence of the facilities they enjoyed overall.28 One remedial action taken after the library had been opened was to place roofs over the individual study carrels (which when still unenclosed can be seen in Figure 7.5).29 Two years into operations, the Libraries Committee congratulated itself for having created ‘a building such as they [local residents] would not find in a day’s

192 Bourne Hall Library travel’.30 Bourne Hall Library, internally and externally, was indeed a fairly unique, as well as an astonishingly adventurous, structure. It is one that remains, as Harrison stated in 1972, ‘attractive and deserving of study’.31 The building justifies Worpole’s assessment that its design represented a ‘bold re-working of the traditional prototype of the library as a domed reading room’ and, more generally, ‘an attempt to re-imagine the public library architecturally’.32 In some respects it was a design with a deeply ancient anchorage, in the tradition of the Pantheon, Rome (ad 126) or Hagia Sophia, Constantinople (ad 537). The ancient form of the dome had, however, been adopted and adapted by modernists, often to stunning effect, as in the case of Nervi’s Palazzetto dello Sport, Rome (1957), the Assembly Hall, University of Illinois (1963) and the Houston Astrodome (1964). Given Sheppard Fidler’s professional participation in the Festival of Britain, it might logically be suggested that the Festival’s centrepiece, the 365-foot-diameter Dome of Discovery, could conceivably have served as the template for the Bourne Hall Library dome. Tradition is also visible in the ‘Renaissance’ openness of the interior. Yet retro is not the primary sense one takes away from a first glance at the design. The initial and, indeed abiding, sense is one of space-age modernity. Resembling a craft that has landed from another world, it is perhaps no coincidence that the architect’s wife, the poet Margaret Sheppard Fidler, had been responsible for naming the Festival of Britain’s iconic Skylon installation, a 250-foot metallic spike not dissimilar in shape to both the space rockets of contemporary science fiction and those that had been developed in the wake of the Nazi V2.33 Internally also, the structure was forward-looking, in that the ample social spaces included in the scheme gave a nod to the concept of the ‘community library’ which was to gain momentum in the coming decades; although the social spaces at the time did not eclipse the primary purpose of fashioning a cultural centre with a library at its heart. A forward-looking aspect was also present in that circularity meant there could be expansion outwards ‘without disturbing the harmony of the whole’.34 Bourne Hall Library provides a window into the schizoid reaction to urban modernisation in the 1960s. On the one hand, the library’s design, and its size, prompted disquiet over the sweeping away of tradition and the rise of an anonymous subtopia under the steamrolling influence of the state and big business. On the other hand, the building symbolised a firm belief in modernisation, qualified by an understanding that its worst aspects could be ameliorated by increased provision of non-material culture. This latter motivation was encapsulated by the interior space in which library readers found themselves: one that was as unexpectedly airy, open and voluminous as that designed into the TARDIS time machine, also circular in shape (at least on the inside), featured in the popular science-fiction television programme Doctor Who, first broadcast in 1963. For the user of the time, the internal space-age feel – as if the external flying-saucer shape was not enough – would probably have been accentuated by the large central skylight and surrounding artificial-light fittings, beaming light down onto readers as if gathered from outer space.

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Notes 1 H. Ward and S. Odd, Reprint Review (October 1970), 7. The archival records cited in these notes were viewed in the Surrey History Centre, Woking. Ewell (Bourne Hall) Public Library itself holds various primary-source records relating to the building, including photographs. 2 K. Worpole, Contemporary library architecture: A planning and design guide (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 46. 3 Historic England, List Entry: Bourne Hall Library and Social Centre (2015), retrieved 28 August 2015 from http://list.historicengland.org.uk/resultsingle.aspx?uid=1425772. 4 Library and social centre under a single dome, The Municipal and Public Services Journal (13 March 1970), 607. Phase two of the site’s development was to be a new health centre. 5 Library of advanced design for Epsom and Ewell, Council (April 1970), 24–26. 6 Surrey History Centre, 6000/3/48. 7 Borough of Epsom & Ewell, Public Libraries Committee (9 September 1964); Ministry of Education, The structure of the public library service in England and Wales [Roberts Report], Cmnd 660 (1959). 8 Surrey History Centre, 6000/3/50. 9 Surrey History Centre, CC/6368. 10 Ewell Residents’ Association, Annual General Meeting, Chairman’s Report (14 April 1961). 11 Letter to Epsom & Ewell Town Clerk from D. Greenhalgh (10 June 1961). 12 As the start of construction loomed, some residents continued to express concern over the estimated cost: Letter from Nonsuch Park and District Residents’ Association to Town Clerk, Borough of Epsom & Ewell (6 April 1966). 13 Letter from L. Nettel, Secretary to the Association of Ewell Down Residents, to Surrey County Council (7 December 1965). 14 A report on Bourne Hall, Ewell, Surrey (1960); Borough Treasurer to Alderman Mann (10 April 1961). 15 Letter from F.C. Moyse MBE to Epsom & Ewell Town Clerk (21 April 1970). 16 Report from John Dent to Borough of Epsom & Ewell Public Libraries Committee (25 June 1964). 17 Borough of Epsom & Ewell Libraries Committee, Minutes (5 November 1965). 18 A.G. Sheppard Fidler, Bourne Hall project: Exhibition of plan and model at the Town Hall, 6–7 October 1965. 19 Correspondence from A.G. Sheppard Fidler to E.G. Sibert, Deputy County Planning Officer, Surrey County Council (15 December 1965). 20 H. Ward and S. Odd, Library buildings: 1972 issue (London: Library Association, 1973), 27. 21 Terrapin Reska: Complete library service, sales brochure of Terrapin Reska and Co. (c.1971). 22 Borough of Epsom & Ewell, Bourne Hall project: Notes on the proposal to erect a multi-purpose public building on the Bourne Hall site (July 1965). 23 Some delays in finishing the building, Surrey History Centre, P/3/4/1. 24 Bourne Hall project: Revision of plans to improve accommodation for social and cultural purposes (1967). 25 Borough of Epsom & Ewell Public Libraries Committee, Minutes (9 September 1964). 26 Borough of Epsom & Ewell Public Libraries Committee, Minutes (30 June 1970); Report by the Borough Librarian to the Borough of Epsom & Ewell Establishment Committee (May 1970). 27 Borough of Epsom & Ewell Public Libraries Committee, Minutes (12 September 1972).

194 Bourne Hall Library 28 29 30 31

Ibid. Borough of Epsom & Ewell Public Libraries Committee, Minutes (6 July 1972). Ibid. K.C. Harrison, Central public library buildings, in H.A. Whatley (ed.), British librarianship and information science 1966–1970 (London: Library Association, 1972), 196. 32 Worpole, Contemporary library architecture, op. cit., 46, 120. 33 H. Atkinson, The Festival of Britain: A land and its people (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 102. 34 J. Dent, Epsom and Ewell’s new library, The Library World, LXXI/840 (June 1970), 359.

8

Birmingham Central Library Light from within

In September 2013 a new central public library was opened in Birmingham. The choice of name, the ‘Library of Birmingham’, denoted a desire to make a clean break with the powerful but (for some) distasteful and overbearing image of its predecessor, the Birmingham Central Library (BCL), opened in January 1974 (Figure 8.1).1 The new Library of Birmingham, it was claimed during its planning stage, would be ‘welcoming and inviting to all, not a barrier to participation as with the current [1974] design’.2 Enshrined in this statement, issued by the City of Birmingham Council in 2008, was the belief that over the forty years of its existence (it was eventually closed in the summer of 2013) the BCL building had made a ‘poor visual impact’, and that this, moreover, was closely linked to the

Figure 8.1 Birmingham Central Library, with Chamberlain Memorial in foreground, photographed in 2013. Source: Photographed by Alistair Black.

196 Birmingham Central Library public feeling that the services provided within it were exclusive, lacking broad appeal.3 Paradoxically, similar things were said about the Victorian Birmingham Reference Library (see Figure 0.1) – outmoded and unfriendly to users, its exterior blackened by decades of city soot – in the years leading up to its replacement by the BCL. The redundancy of the Victorian library, nearly a century old by the mid-1970s, was much greater, however, than that of its 1974 replacement which was little more than thirty years old when the decision to replace it was made. Ultimately, it has been argued the fate of the 1974 library was sealed by a combination of two factors: first, the attraction of the revenue to be earned from a commercial property deal and, second, the desire to provide Birmingham with an iconic structure that would compensate for Britain’s second city’s reputation for being unloved and overlooked. The decision to replace the 1974 building was made shortly before the crash of 2008, but even though it could have been reversed planners ploughed on regardless, arguing that the new project would help pull the city out of the slump. The price paid for deserting the 1974 building was the loss of a library which symbolised, more than any other perhaps, the optimism of Sixties Britain.4

Planning Even before the Second World War it was appreciated that Birmingham needed a new central library, the existing Renaissance-style building by J.H. Chamberlain, dating from 1882, having become overcrowded and outmoded.5 In 1938 the City Council resolved that the Victorian facility was inadequate to meet the needs of the people of Birmingham or ‘provide for the many departments which claim adequate representation in the first [premier] municipal library in this country’.6 The following year the Council was told that conditions in the Birmingham Reference Library were ‘chaotic’.7 In the 1950s alone, the stock of the reference library had increased by 100,000 volumes. When one compares this with a stock increase of 43,000 volumes in the 1890s, the first full decade of the Birmingham Reference Library’s operations, it is easy to see how planners were eager to provide a new home for the reference collection – for soon there would be no room to house it.8 Also in the 1950s, issues of books grew across Birmingham’s large library system. But in the case of both library staff and expenditure per head of population, Birmingham remained well below the national average, thereby prompting calls for an expansion of library services to meet latent demand.9 In the late-1950s consideration was given, counter-intuitively, to the construction of a new ‘central’ library outside the city centre, where land would be cheaper and room for parking as well as expansion would be more ample.10 But eventually, as plans for the city centre emerged – a city-centre master plan was drawn up in the 1950s and was eventually approved by the City Architect’s office in April 196511 – it became clear that the city authorities envisaged a central library as an important part of a new urban centre plan; the new library was to be sited ‘at a nodal point where commercial, civic and cultural facilities meet’.12 The brief for what became the BCL was drawn up in 1960 under the supervision of the

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City Librarian Victor Woods, whose intention was to provide a library ‘in line with modern standards of library planning’, a building that would take account of the ‘tremendous developments in library activities and the variety of demands now made by readers in a city of over a million people’.13 A Central Library Building Sub-Committee was formed in 1960. At its first meeting it resolved that any new building should not simply be a larger version of the present one but had to respond to modern times, to recent shifts in reader requirements and to innovations in library design.14 At this point, the main service components of a new building were identified. These were: (1) a reference service, continuing the core work of the Victorian central library, known in fact as the Birmingham Reference Library (the new reference service was to be for ‘the average man, students of all kinds, and advanced research workers’); (2) a subsidiary ‘quick-reference and commercial’ reference service; (3) a lending service, one that could deal with heavy lunchtime demand from the tens of thousands of workers who commuted into the city centre each day to work; (4) an administrative headquarters to manage the city’s thirty-five branch libraries; (5) support services such as photocopying, photography and processing (acquisition, preparation and maintenance of materials); (6) cultural services beyond the provision of book and non-document material, including a record library (it was intended that the library should be a ‘cultural centre with a wide variety of activities, all related to the use of books, taking place within it, by means of exhibitions, lectures, films, recitals and group meeting’); (7) refreshment facilities; (8) lounges and kitchens for staff.15 In 1964 the City Council commissioned the Birmingham-based John H.D. Madin & Partners (later The John Madin Design Group) to deliver the library design and in the same year also appointed a new Librarian, William Taylor, who remained in the post until after the library opened.16 The first meeting between librarians, architects and interior designers took place shortly afterwards, and meetings became regular thereafter. The enduring relationship between these stakeholders was later described as a ‘remarkable co-operative undertaking’.17 Throughout the process Taylor repeated the mantra that the team: ‘Wanted to design the new library in line with modern thinking about libraries’.18 Taylor suggested three main changes to the existing brief. He sought the addition of a children’s department, in response to the intention, stated in the civic-centre master plan of April 1965, of providing mixed development in the city centre – that is, living accommodation as well as offices and civic buildings.19 Second, he devised the idea of a ‘readers’ lounge’ within the perimeter of the lending library, instead of a separate reading room in the tradition of the periodicals room; here, extensive supervision would be available to ‘discourage visits by social misfits and to eliminate the unfortunate aura of the old fashioned newsroom’.20 Third, Taylor wanted more emphasis placed on the library’s role as a facilitator of cultural activities beyond the use of library materials. He wanted to make the new library a focal point for the cultural activities promoted by the library service and also for cultural bodies in the city to consider it their ‘home and headquarters’.21

198 Birmingham Central Library The planning mentality reflected an emerging discourse at the time focusing on user needs. The Birmingham Public Library Service, said the library’s design team, had a ‘progressive outlook’ in that it was committed to planning the new building so that it would ‘not be rendered obsolete by the changing needs of the service as it develops in coming years’.22 Close attention was paid to the requirement stated in the 1964 Public Libraries Act that library authorities offer a ‘comprehensive’ service. Birmingham was well placed, it was believed, to deliver comprehensiveness. A large central library, combined with multiple branches, provided economies of scale and numerous options to provide a service that was ‘both extensive and varied in content’.23

Civic centre redevelopment Part of the folklore surrounding the demise of the Victorian reference library and its 1974 replacement is that the decision to demolish the old library was due to the need to make way for a new ring road as part of the city-centre development.24 In fact, the green light for a new library was illuminated by a powerful desire to reconstitute the city centre. Madin was given responsibility for planning one of the major zones in the new city centre, Paradise Circus, which to all intents and purpose was a roundabout with a half-mile perimeter on the inner ring road (Figure 8.2). In April 1965 he produced a large model of the Paradise Circus plan (Figure 8.3). Madin has been awarded by his biographer the status of being the undisputed master of post-war architecture in Birmingham. Among many projects, he was also responsible for the city’s Birmingham Post & Mail building, the Midland (Pebble Mill) headquarters and studios of the BBC and the extension to the Alexandra Theatre. Prominent projects outside Birmingham included the Yorkshire Post building in Leeds, the new towns of Telford and Corby, and the central library in Redditch New Town. Paradise Circus was located to the west of Chamberlain Place and its nearby civic hub. Buildings in and around the area included: the first Town Hall (1834, Greco-Roman); the Council House (1879, Renaissance style); the Art Gallery and Museum (1885, a classical extension of the Council House); the Hall of Memory (1925, a classical, domed octagon-shaped war memorial); Baskerville House (1938, classical with Art Deco references); and the Birmingham Reference Library (facade 1879, interior 1882, Italianate). The first three of these (and, before its demolition, the Reference Library) were visible from the main entrance of the BCL. The Paradise Circus plan included a School of Music and a public house. A drama centre and an athletic institute were also included but never built. The centrepiece of the plan was the new library, under and through which there was to be extensive pedestrian circulation. This was envisaged on three levels: linked passageways crossing an open atrium in the centre of the reference block; upper-level bridges and corridors linked to adjacent buildings; and tunnels and underpasses beneath the library, at road level. The world beneath the library was comprised not only of underground pedestrian services but also vehicular tunnels, parking space for 500 cars, plant rooms, service roads and, adjacent to the

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Helping

Helping Children

Children

Helping Children Helping

Children Helping Children Helping Children

Figure 8.2 Plan of Paradise Circus, with Birmingham Central Library. Source: Redrawn by Daniel Cho, from plans held by Library of Birmingham Archives.

submerged ring road, a large bus interchange.25 The bus interchange was never completed but the planning of it as an integral part of the library scheme is evidence of the importance planners attached to the new library (there are similarities here with Spence’s planning of Hampstead Library and Civic Centre with regard to the integrated underground station); while the inclusion of a large car park reflected the growing importance of the motor car in the minds of library planners (something that was increasingly being taken into account, as we have seen, in branch library design). The buildings in and around Paradise Circus were to be connected by a network of linked precincts and courts. One such ‘link space’ was to connect the library and an adjacent School of Music. ‘Linking’ was also to be achieved by the insertion of the type of high-level walkway that was so popular amongst Sixties planners. In the event, at Paradise Circus only one walkway – providing access to the library’s west entrance – was ever built. Commencing in May 1973, the stock of the old reference library – 900,000 books, 170,000 manuscripts and 415,000 photographs, records, tapes and illustrations – was transferred to the new building by means of a temporary footbridge. The Victorian interior of the Shakespeare Library (the largest collection of Shakespeare-related material outside the Folger Library in

200 Birmingham Central Library

Figure 8.3 Model of Birmingham Civic Centre, with Birmingham Central Library centre stage. Source: Frank Brophy; Birmingham & Five Counties Architectural Association.

Washington, DC) was dismantled, to be erected in another location. Collections previously warehoused in ten satellite locations around the city were also moved to the new library.26 A large number of extra staff were recruited to work in the new premises, the total number increasing from 153 to 277.27 The BCL was opened on 12 January 1974 by the leader of the Labour Party, Harold Wilson, who the following month became prime minister for the third time.

An introvert/extrovert design The new library was not just massive in its holdings of materials; it was massive in its architecture also. The main eight-storey reference block was a brutalist cantilevered structure, fashioned in the style of an inverted ziggurat. The major source of the inspiration for this choice of external expression is uncertain. However, it was a style that had become popular around the world. There was no shortage of completed or planned inverted ziggurats for the architect and planners to reference, for example: the Bodleian Law Library, Oxford (1964); Shapiro Hall, Wayne State University (1965); Boston City Hall (1967); the Languages Building, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1971); and the SimpsonSears’ Canadian Headquarters (1971). The State Library of Western Australia, Perth (1985) offered a good example of a tiered pyramid.28 In the interwar years, Paul Otlet’s design for a World City of Knowledge (the Mundaneum), an antecedent of the World Wide Web, and the design for a World Museum he commissioned from Le Corbusier had both taken the form of the ziggurat.29

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The design of the BCL in its final form was published in July 1966, one enticing image produced by the architect at the time being a sketch of the library with the octagon-shaped Hall of Memory war memorial in the foreground. The inverted ziggurat form was already visible in Madin’s model of the Paradise Circus scheme over a year earlier. Given the dates of the other ziggurats noted above it is likely that Madin arrived at the ziggurat form independently, but plans for them would obviously have been in circulation in the architectural press.30 Madin himself said he was not aware of the Boston plan until later, and declared his primary influences to be the Bodleian Law Library, St Cross, Oxford (1964), Denys Lasdun’s Royal College of Physicians (1964) and the Monastery of La Tourette, by Le Corbusier (1960).31 Birmingham’s new city-centre ziggurat was freely described as ‘brutalist’. Arguably, this description owed as much to the choice of cladding as its shape. Madin’s preference was for a superior exterior finish of Portland stone or Travertine marble. But the need to economise forced a cheaper cladding solution on the design, one of precast concrete finished in locally sourced aggregate and white cement. The brutalist style and finish of the main block offered, certainly at first glance, a striking contrast with the appearance of the historic civic structures nearby. However, it was the intention of the design team that the shape and scale of the BCL were to be ‘in sympathy with, and not to dominate’ the architecture of the older nearby buildings.32 This intention found expression in two ways. The external style of the reference block may have been heavy brutalism but it had one thing in common with the older buildings that surrounded it – monumentalism. This was certainly the case in respect of the classical neighbours, the ziggurat being a built-form also excavated from ancient times. The second way that the BCL empathised with its neighbours was via its secondary mass, sited to the east of the main block, which provided accommodation for the main entrance, lending library, readers’ lounge, a commercial information and quick-reference facility, and staff offices in a threelevel building with a curved facade. Fronting this modest, low-level block Madin designed a semicircular amphitheatre in Chamberlain Place which offered a functional and aesthetically pleasing transition between the space around the Gothic Chamberlain Memorial (which he had cleaned, repaired and supplemented with pools and a fountain) and the entrance to the library – in effect, a successful juxtapositioning of the Victorian and the modern. Recognising that they were charged with producing not only a ‘town’ library but also a great reference library, the designers consciously bestowed a schizoid personality upon the library’s interior: introvert in one aspect, extrovert in another.33 The secondary mass, containing the popular departments, was designed for heavy use and short visits, and was lit by large windows overlooking Chamberlain Place, as in the case of the quick-reference and information department. The ‘lively’, extrovert treatment of this wing of the library was not deemed appropriate for the reference block, which was conceptualised as a series of introverted spaces for serious study and intellectual contemplation. The floors of the reference block were designed around an open atrium above a public square

202 Birmingham Central Library (later, in the 1980s, covered by a glass roof)34 which could be entered from four sides and serve, potentially, as open-air exhibition space. This hollow square at the library’s centre was to be populated at ground level by garden courtyards, statues, sculptures and various water features (fountains, pools and waterfalls), in unison providing a ‘sympathetic setting’.35 The design team believed that the medium of water introduced ‘interesting effects of reflection’, thereby aiding concentration and boosting intellectual activity.36 Readers were able to look into the atrium through large windows (Figure 8.4). These provided large quantities of natural light, while the paucity of windows on the outside of the structure (narrow high-level openings) largely protected readers (and books) from glare, variations in temperature and noise. Artificial lighting was by warm-white fluorescent tubes, in most areas recessed into coffered ceilings, as in the case of the Shakespeare Library (Figure 8.5). As the Birmingham Mail put it, the positioning of most windows to face the inner courtyard was designed to defeat ‘those twin enemies of libraries – noise and sunlight’.37 The apparent introversion of the reference block was to a degree countered by the provision of three entrances to the library. Coupled, however, with the large size of the building this created security problems for the planners (it was acknowledged that sweeps of upper floors to clear them of the public would need to commence well in advance of closing times).38 Introversion was also offset by

Figure 8.4 Central open atrium, Birmingham Central Library. The atrium provided the public rooms with their main source of artificial light. Source: Frank Brophy; Birmingham & Five Counties Architectural Association.

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Figure 8.5 Shakespeare Room, Birmingham Central Library. Source: Frank Brophy; Birmingham & Five Counties Architectural Association.

the openness of the main access point. The double-height entrance hall was light and spacious, the side facing the atrium fully glazed; moreover, as one ascended the escalators, the historic buildings on the other side of Chamberlain Place were clearly visible. The new library had thirty-one miles of shelving, and capacity for 1.5 million books and tens of thousands of prints, maps, photographs, microfilms and other documents.39 Planners were conscious, however, of the need to avoid the look of a vast ‘information warehouse’. Notwithstanding the desire for open-plan floor layouts, the aim was to limit spaces to a size ‘which will not intimidate the reader by its vast proportions’.40 Vertical public circulation was by escalator, the speed and efficiency of which offset the library’s large size. It was felt that escalators opened up the library more than lifts could have done, achieving ‘maximum ease of movement’ (circulation of materials was via lifts, book hoists and a pneumatic tube conveyor).41 One architectural journal went so far as to say that the escalators were the ‘key to the building’s success’, allowing readers to glide ‘through the succession of volumes smoothly, sleekly’.42 In assessing the BCL, G.K.V. Tomlinson and Herbert Ward, both librarians experienced in the field of library design, expressed the belief that lifts tended to divide libraries into layers in the public mind, whereas escalators had an aesthetic benefit, enabling readers to ‘stand and quietly contemplate their movement through the building, to see the skilful interlocking of spaces and the subtle progression of the volume of the building’.43

204 Birmingham Central Library The problem of scale was also addressed by situating readers in touching distance of the book stock. In large central libraries the traditional means of storing the majority of materials was in a ‘central’ stack, either below or above the reading rooms. In the BCL no basement stack was possible because of the roads beneath the library. A stack above the reading rooms was not possible because of the need to keep the height of the building in proportion to surrounding structures. In any case, the emphasis on access in the design brief dictated that a large proportion of items in the reference block should be placed as close as possible to readers in its multiple specialist public departments. As this could not be entirely achieved via open-access shelves, compact reserve-stack space for books less in demand was provided on each level (a design feature, as we’ve seen, of the Bradford Central Library also).44 The library’s departments, in ascending floor order, depicted by Madin in a detailed cross-section, were: social science and music; fine arts, philosophy, religion, history and topography; science and technology; and rare books, local studies, languages and literature and the Shakespeare collection (with a store above for rare items within these top-floor, ‘rarefied’ collections) (Figure 8.6). Due to the inverted ziggurat form, floor space increased as one moved upwards through the building. Some might discern a ‘cultural hierarchy’, the Shakespeare Library and local and rare books collections being on the top level and being awarded the most space.

1) Social Science Department and Music Library

8) Processing Department

2) Fine Arts and Phi losophy and Religion , History and Topography Departmenls

9) Bags and Coats

16) Quick Reference and Commercial Information Department 17) Central Lending Library

10) Photographic Department 3) Science and Technology Department

18) Offices 11) Loading Bay Stores

4) Shakespeare Library- Rare Books- Local Studies Language and Literature Department

12) Bus Interchange

5) Archives Store

13) Road

6) Staff Lounge

14) Car Park

7) Stacks

15) Ch ildren's Library

Figure 8.6 Cross-section of Birmingham departmentalisation.

Central

Library

showing

Source: Redrawn by Daniel Cho, from plans held by Library of Birmingham Archives.

subject

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The lower ceiling heights in stack areas gave way to much higher ceilings in readers’ areas. Staff workrooms were provided on each floor so that staff would never be far away from readers and could be called upon at short notice. Exhibition facilities in each department would promote that department’s work.45 The aim, said Taylor, was ‘to provide a library for a million books and yet keep it to a human scale; to departmentalise, but not to isolate one department from another’.46 The children’s library, an afterthought grafted by the librarian planners onto the original scheme, had its own separate entrance. The new department afforded the opportunity of launching the collection of multicultural children’s books that had recently been assembled by the children’s librarian, Judith Elkin. In the tradition of the best children’s departments stretching back to the 1920s, it had a workshop area for painting, puppetry and other non-book activities. It also had a circular book pit for intimate reading and storytelling.47 Overall, it was observed, the ‘accent is on informality’.48 Given the rapid social change occurring during the planning stages in the 1960s and early 1970s, it is not surprising that the design team acknowledged that the future might bring a large growth – or indeed decline – in demand for library services. It was deemed important, therefore, to build ‘adaptability’ into the design. Madin was anxious to build a library with users’ needs in mind. His values were those of ‘simplicity and sincerity’.48 He had visited Sweden in the late 1940s and saw the value of clean lines and open plans. In the early 1970s he visited the United States to investigate the use of computers in libraries, and came away realising that plans had to be made for their future increased use in libraries: hence generous underfloor ducting for electrical and hardware cables was included in the BCL.50 Adaptability in the BCL would best be achieved, it was envisaged, through ‘greater freedom of layout’, something which was observed by the design team to have been evolving in library design in recent decades. Freedom in layout was delivered primarily through an economical use of columns in reading rooms, a move away from the familiar modular arrangements of modernism. Instead, twelve external columns were constructed to support cantilevered floors, a case of external form being derived from internal preferences.51 The resulting open plan for each floor was complemented by the deployment of movable furniture and partitions and electrical floor sockets. This approach would help ensure ‘interesting interior spaces for readers’.52 Inside, the impression was ‘one of one space flowing into the next in the depth of the huge structure’.53 To gather the best ideas on furniture, the design team visited other libraries in the UK as well as library furniture and equipment suppliers. Most of the furniture for the scheme was designed by Madin’s team, and was subsequently tested in the old central library before being installed in the new one. It was said that the furniture and fittings were intended to last a hundred years.54 Bookcases and shelving were in oak veneer, providing a contrast with the concrete surfaces of the interior walls. Desks were oak with black lino tops. Universal orange-red carpet contrasted well with the internal concrete finishes.55 The openness and flexibility of each department was accentuated by the central atrium, in that readers were afforded easy views of other floors and departments,

206 Birmingham Central Library a design solution which the design team said ‘unfolds the whole interior to view as readily as possible’.56 Moreover, the efficiency of the open and flexible reading spaces was matched by the promise of a speedy and efficient service, making use of sophisticated technology – computers, microfilm and photocopying.57

Reaction A stated aim of the design was to ‘sell the idea of library-going to the public’.58 The first borrowers certainly appeared to vote the new building a huge success.59 Visiting librarians were said to be ‘deeply impressed’ by what one of them described as a ‘mighty and complex building’, one that the citizens of Birmingham ‘can be justly proud’.60 The library profession was informed that the BCL would ‘arouse considerable interest among British librarians, since this will be one of the most important public buildings erected in this country since the war’.61 Librarians reviewing the building declared the outside appearance to be ‘awe-inspiring’, but it was not, they added reassuringly, a ‘dominating’ building, for once inside ‘the individual spaces are of comprehensible scale and size and of incomparable quality’.62 Upon seeing the library in operation, another librarian voice, wondering if readers felt like members of an ‘exclusive club’ or ‘cyphers among concrete’, concluded that in fact they felt ‘encouraged to enter and did not appear to be deterred by any suggestion of civic pomp or grandeur’.63 Authoritative architectural opinion described the library as ‘a visual relief in the sterile wasteland of superroads and filing cabinet office blocks’.64 Regarding the ambience of the children’s library, one local journalist was prompted to declare: ‘Gone is the old image of dark Victorian towers, where youngsters had to stand on tip toe to choose a book and were afraid to even squeak their shoes’.65 However, the library also attracted criticism. Doubts were raised regarding the BCL’s price tag and the choice of architectural style. Anxiety over cost was a recurring issue. The library’s planned cost was £3.5 million. As if this wasn’t high enough for some, there was eventually an overspend of between £500,000 and £1 million, depending on which particular piece of historical evidence one examines. One local resident baulked at the prospect of having to pay taxes for years to come for a new library that devoted such a large amount of space to popular fiction like romances, westerns and crime novels – or ‘camouflaged porn’, as he termed it. What added insult to injury, he continued, was the nature of the new building which he described as ‘this mammoth mushroom of cement, this concrete bunker of books’.66 Another local resident believed the building to be nothing more than ‘huge piles of concrete piled on top of one another’, reminding her of ‘a mausoleum’.67 Recalling the BCL thirty years after it opened, a contributor to the Mass-Observation Archive described it as the ugliest library she had ever seen.68 One observer thought the reference library looked like ‘a cottage pie with several layers of crust overflowing’.69 In a similar culinary mood, the Birmingham Mail believed the structure had taken on the appearance ‘of a huge layered gateau’.70 With the building under construction and taking shape (Figure 8.7), the same newspaper ran a long report that carried the headline ‘The building they love

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Figure 8.7 Birmingham Central Library nearing completion, viewed from the west. Source: Frank Brophy; Birmingham & Five Counties Architectural Association.

to hate’. The report described the new library as the city’s ‘most controversial building’. Liberal coverage was given to the views of ordinary Birmingham citizens. One described it as ‘a cross between an atom bomb explosion and an inverted Egyptian pyramid’. A taxi driver suggested that it looked ‘more like a prison than a library’. Another member of the public offered the opinion that the tower at the back of the library ‘looks far too much like a left-over from the Hittite empire’. The report suggested that architects didn’t seem to know what people were saying about their work, while the public had little idea of what was in the architect’s mind when shaping a building.71 In A Vision of Britain, a television documentary broadcast in October 1988, Prince Charles attacked the BCL saying it looked like ‘a place where books are incinerated, not kept’. He considered the library to be ‘an ill-mannered essay in concrete “brutalism” intended to shock’. The library was, he believed, representative of a determination among Birmingham’s planners to turn their back on the city’s Victorian past, the result being a ‘monstrous concrete maze’ – a lesson in how not to ‘develop’. The new library had been built on the site of the demolished Mason College, ‘an exuberant example of the Gothic Revival’ he so revered. The BCL was, in short, an ‘insult to the grand civic buildings amongst which it squats’.72 The castigation of modern architecture and the celebration of historic styles in which Prince Charles indulged himself had also been to the fore in conservationists’ opposition to the BCL a decade earlier. The old reference library was seen by a

208 Birmingham Central Library significant number of local conservationists – including Birmingham’s Victorian Society73 – as a building of outstanding architectural and historical interest and thus worthy of rescue from the developers. It was said to be a building that represented the best of Birmingham’s past excellence in design, in terms of both culture and industry. A resident of nearby Solihull, who worked in the art department of a print and design firm, informed Birmingham’s Town Clerk that the library dated from a time when Birmingham design ‘had never been more distinctive and successfully imaginative’. The Victorian library was, he continued, ‘a treasure trove of craftsmanship’, especially in respect of its ironwork and ceramics.74 One idea which was floated was to keep the old library and link it to the new building so that it could serve as an extended cultural centre. It was proposed that the old library could be adapted to various cultural uses: meeting rooms, exhibition areas and a conference and concert hall. Birmingham’s conservationists believed it important to dampen the passion for destroying all that was old by being equally passionate about the city’s impressive built heritage, especially its Victorian legacy.75 The only obvious nod to the past by the planners was the installation of a cast-iron spiral staircase removed from the old library – ‘like a lock of hair from a dead friend’76 – to connect the reference block’s ‘history floors’, ascending from the level housing the Shakespeare collection, local history materials and rare books to the level storing archival records. On hearing of the plan to demolish the old reference library, one local resident deplored the decision and asked: ‘Have all the planners gone mad?’77 A few months later the same resident, in sarcastic mood, argued that it was appropriate for the leader of the Labour Party (former prime minister Harold Wilson) to open an ugly building, for it was not beautiful enough for any member of the Royal Family to do so (the idea of inviting royalty to undertake the task had been floated).78 So fond were some of Birmingham’s library users of historic library buildings that traction was gained for the highly ambitious idea of bracing, jacking and dragging away the city’s endangered Spring Hill branch library (a Victorian Gothic folly if ever there was one) and relocating it on a site where it would be safe from bulldozers and the plans of redevelopers.79 History having turned full circle, it was the BCL that in the early-twenty-first century became the subject of conservationists’ attention. After English Heritage had advised the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport that the BCL met the criteria for Grade II listing (not a preservation order, merely an indication of a building’s special interest), in 2011 the library merely received a five-year ‘Certificate of immunity from listing’ after pressure from Birmingham City Council. This brought the prospect of demolition closer. The Council’s case for immunity was supported by the Birmingham Civic Society, whose Chair, reprising the words of Prince Charles, said: ‘This monumental, brutalist incinerator has no place in the centre of our city, flanked by the glorious nineteenth-century architecture and sculpture of our other civic buildings. Visitors to the city walking through Victoria Square and into Chamberlain Place from New Street are confronted with this import from post-revolution Russia’.80 The BCL closed on 29 June 2013 and, as I write, is scheduled for demolition. With poor environmental

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conditions within, the building would have been, it was argued, too expensive to repair and update for the new century. Externally, the continuing criticism of the building’s brutalism, as well as of the interruption it was said to cause to the ‘flow’ of the civic centre (notwithstanding the original plan’s inclusion of crosswalks and elevated walkways), proved too strong.81

Assessment Love it or hate, the BCL was a formidable expression of faith in the possibility of building a new Birmingham, of rebranding the country’s second largest city and resurrecting the glory of its pioneering Victorian civic past. The 1950s saw the beginnings of a flood of redevelopment in the city centre. In the 1960s Birmingham aimed to convey an image of what one account of its history has referred to as ‘transatlantic modernity’, and found itself ahead of other provincial centres in this regard.82 By the 1970s Birmingham had won a reputation as one of Britain’s most ‘visually dynamic’ provincial cities, with structures such as the Bull Ring Shopping Centre (1964) and, three miles from the city centre, Spaghetti Junction (1972), a motorway interchange that attracted international fame (or infamy, depending on one’s perspective). The post-war period, to 1970, has been seen as one of the more distinguished, and certainly more adventurous, in Birmingham’s architectural history (its tradition over the long term, with the exception of the late nineteenth century civic centre, being judged by some as inauspicious).83 The BCL was a significant part – at the forefront even – of Birmingham’s post-war redevelopment. Even before it opened, however, the aesthetics of the BCL prompted debate. As time moved on, despite the presence of a vocal lobby in support of the library’s brutalist style, the criticism if anything grew louder. Had Madin’s first choice for the building’s cladding (marble or high-grade Portland stone) been realised, then perhaps opinion would have been less negative. A generous treatment of the exterior might have enhanced the building’s monumentality, subtly persuading onlookers that its ancient pyramid form had something in common with adjacent classical buildings and even those of the medieval revivalist kind; in other words, that there was, as library opinion found, ‘no incongruity between the new and the old buildings’.84 As it was, the BCL moved through the years with its concrete cladding panels becoming increasingly stained. Originally white but never cleaned, these panels – the look of which was rendered much worse on a wet, grey day – delivered for many a ‘concrete monstrosity’85 as opposed to a cherished monument. This potential flaw in the design was spotted early on by one librarian surveying the building who commented on Britain’s ‘delicate and pale light against which concrete appears so alien’.86 This missed opportunity to secure a monumentality that could be looked upon favourably was all the more frustrating given that the BCL was in good faith built to last. It was a forward-looking building, specifically designed to withstand heavy use, incur low maintenance costs and enjoy a long life. The open-plan system was critical to the planned longevity, advocated because it was thought that it would

210 Birmingham Central Library ‘give the building a longer useful life by making it possible to adapt and re-distribute space to meet changes in requirements and activities as the years go by’.87 The challenges that planners of the BCL faced were considerable, and different from most elsewhere at the time in Britain. This was because they were designing first and foremost the housing of a major reference collection. They had few examples to follow. The last large public research library to have been built in Britain was the Manchester Central Library (1934). The need was to combine the reference collection with a popular library. This explains the extrovert/introvert nature of the scheme which, on balance, resulted less in a conflict of personalities than a mutually beneficial relationship based on the idea of the library as ‘cultural centre’. When it opened, the BCL was the largest public library in Europe, with a floor area of two hectares and seating for 1,500 readers. On the one hand, it housed collections (including the Shakespeare Library) that made it a leading research library with a national, even international, reputation, used by scholars from all parts of Britain and from abroad. On the other hand, the conecpt of a town library was a core element of the BCL scheme: popular services for home readers and information seekers.88 Lying across these two functions, however, was a range of facilities for non-print cultural activities which, together with the provision of print materials, formed ‘a complete cultural centre’, more than just a place to read and borrow books.89 The librarian, William Taylor, explained that the BCL was part of a new concept of the public library that had gained momentum since the end of the Second World War: that is, the public library ‘is now seen, by Government and local authorities alike, not simply as a source of books and information, but as a cultural centre for the community it serves’.90 Rooms were allocated in the plan specifically for ‘informal discussions and social meetings’.91 A 200-seat theatre was completed between the School of Music and the reference library block in 1986 (the design was in Madin’s original plan but he had no involvement in its construction). A substantial record library was included in the low-level structure. These cultural spaces to a degree accommodated popular culture. The record library included a good amount of pop music. The theatre was equipped for showing films and relaying television and radio broadcasts. Meeting spaces were intended to cater for the growth in more ‘democratic’ local societies. In the postwar decades Birmingham’s cultural societies began to change. While large, general societies like the Birmingham Literary Association and the Birmingham Society went into decline, smaller organisations such as the Birmingham Writers’ Group grew in popularity.92 In the final analysis, however, the cultural spaces in the design were not a response to Birmingham’s working-class heritage and certainly not a reflex to the emergence of postmodern – including an alternative and multicultural – society in the city. After all, it was the hope of William Taylor, who had made his name as Librarian of St Pancras in London for the part he played in the foundation of the local arts festival, that by increasing local-authority spending on the arts ‘we shall move much closer to European countries, where the maintenance of orchestras and opera and theatre companies by local municipalities is accepted without question’.93

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A library of light born in darkness The timing of the opening of the Birmingham Central Library should not pass without comment. The library was opened in the middle of a severe economic and political crisis revolving around a dispute between the National Union of Mineworkers and the Conservative government. To conserve supplies of coal the country had been reduced to a three-day working week, the speed limit to fifty miles per hour. The streets lights of Britain had been extinguished, shops were dimly lit and each night television was closing down at 10:30. A State of Emergency had been imposed. Unemployment had reached 2.25 million.94 For these reasons: ‘It is remembered as the darkest day (literally) in the story of mid-seventies Britain’.95 The physical ‘brightness’ ascribed to the new library thus offers a poetic counterpoint to the social darkness of the times. The word ‘bright’ was frequently used by the architectural press to describe the BCL’s interior spaces. The Architects’ Journal drew attention to the ‘bright bustle of the lending library’, the ‘crisp’ and ‘bright’ ambience of the commercial and reference section and the ‘brightness’ lent by the red carpeting deployed in many parts of the library. ‘A great deal of the power of the interiors’, the Journal claimed, ‘is due to the furniture and the lighting’.96 It is possible that being born into such a bleak social climate scarred the library for life. Yet the library was conceived in more optimistic times. Against a backdrop of national renewal, planners of the library and other city-centre developments were informed and invigorated by Birmingham’s industrious and, indeed, nonconformist past, and what that past meant in terms of a culture of innovation, ingenuity and social mobility. This indirect but powerful influence was articulated by the Architects’ Journal in what at first glance appears to be an out-of-place cultural-history commentary: Always a city of ingenuity rather than assets, it [Birmingham] opened its doors to the [religiously] deprived in thousands, and found itself as a consequence in a golden age of wealth and inventiveness, its products in insatiable demand throughout Europe, its philosopher manufacturers friends of Jefferson and Franklin.97 Similarly (and more obviously), said the Journal, the BCL was pioneering a wider role for the public library in Britain, along the lines seen in the United States and Scandinavia.98 Further, in many respects the BCL’s planners were echoing the thoughts of the civic-minded Baptist minister George Dawson who at the opening of Birmingham’s first reference library in 1866, in preaching a civic gospel later so boldly enjoined by Joseph Chamberlain, proclaimed that: a great town exists to discharge towards the people of that town the duties that a great nation exists to discharge towards the people of that nation … a great town is a solemn organism through which should flow, and in which should be shaped the highest, loftiest and truest ends of man’s intellectual and moral nature.99

212 Birmingham Central Library The BCL was very much in the same pioneering civic tradition, even if it fell short of echoing the near metaphysical nature of nineteenth-century civic administration.100 Had Dawson been resurrected and been able to speak at the opening of the BCL his bright enthusiasm for the civic realm would have been in stark contrast to the physical darkness and enforced redundancy into which Birmingham and the rest of Britain had been plunged in the early months of 1974. For many, however, the new BCL building would have stood out from the gloom as a kind of beacon of hope for the future strengthening of a public sphere of information provision, rational recreation, culture and learning. This hope would have been complemented by the library’s physical brightness achieved in the reference block by a combination of an open-plan layout, fluorescent lighting and generous windows looking into a roofless atrium. Light flooding in through the public-square atrium lit the library from within, a mechanism that can be associated with the ‘light from within’ that serves as a metaphor for the considerable investment that had been made in Birmingham in the power of reason and in the efficacy of a vibrant public sphere from the Enlightenment onwards.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5

The official name was Birmingham Central Libraries, reflecting the multiplicity of departments, collections and services it offered. Core sources for examining the design of the 1974 library include: Birmingham City Council, The new library of Birmingham: Prospectus (2002); City of Birmingham Council, The Library of Birmingham: A centre for knowledge, learning and culture: Strategic design brief (April 2008); Birmingham Central Libraries, Report of the design team (The John Madin Design Group, June 1973); Birmingham Central Library: Architects: John Madin Design Group, Architects’ Journal 159/21 (22 May 1974), 1137–1157; Birmingham’s new heart, Building, CCXXV/49 (7 December 1973), 87–94; A. Clawley, John Madin (London: RIBA, 2011); E. Hargreaves, The mechanics, in Amy Mason (ed.), The new Birmingham Central Libraries: Proceedings of the twenty-first annual study group, Worcester, April 6–9, 1973 (London: Library Association Reference, Special and Information Section, 1975), 27–33; T.I. Bell, Foreword, in Mason, op. cit.; S.G. Berriman, A view of paradise: Birmingham Central Libraries, Library Association Record, 76/3 (March 1974), 37–38; W.A. Taylor, The new Birmingham Central Libraries, in Mason, op. cit., 7–11; G.K.V. Tomlinson and H. Ward, Birmingham Central Libraries, in H. Ward, New library buildings 1976 issue: Years 1973–1974 (London: Library Association, 1976), 3–8; Birmingham Central Libraries: Architects: John Madin Design Group, Interior Design (May 1974), 292– 295; Libraries News Cuttings, Library of Birmingham Archives. Many of these sources and other relevant records are deposited in the Library of Birmingham Archives. City of Birmingham Council, The Library of Birmingham, op. cit., 14. Ibid., 6. A. Clawley, Library story: Birmingham Central Library 1974–2015 (Birmingham: The Author, 2016). Birmingham’s first purpose-built central library was designed by E.M. Barry (facade), and J.H. Chamberlain and William Martin (interior). It was destroyed by fire in 1879 just thirteen years after it opened. The shell of the library remained intact, so Barry’s facade was retained for the 1882 building, the remainder being entirely reworked by

Birmingham Central Library 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34

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Chamberlain. Clawley, John Madin, op. cit., 107, describes the 1882 library as being built in a ‘boisterous Italianate idiom’. Hargreaves, The mechanics, op. cit., 27. A. Sutcliffe and R. Smith, History of Birmingham, Volume III: Birmingham 1939– 1970 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 289. Birmingham Public Libraries, Notes on the history of the Birmingham Public Libraries, 1861–1961 (Birmingham, 1962), 24. Sutcliffe and Smith, History of Birmingham, op. cit., 287, 288. Hargreaves, The mechanics, op. cit., 28. The plan envisaged high-rise offices, mixed residential accommodation and ring roads separated from pedestrians who would negotiate the city via subways and elevated walkways. Birmingham Central Libraries, Report of the design team, op. cit., 4; Sutcliffe and Smith, History of Birmingham, op. cit., 289. Birmingham Central Libraries, Report of the design team, op. cit., 1. Hargreaves, The mechanics, op. cit., 27. Birmingham Central Libraries, Report of the design team, op. cit., 2. John Madin commenced practice in 1952 and in 1961 formed the partnership John H.D. Madin & Partners, reorganised in 1967 to form the John Madin Design Group. Hargreaves, The mechanics, op. cit., 33. Big Birmingham on show, Liaison: News-Sheet of the Library Association (December 1973), 83. Taylor, The new Birmingham Central Libraries, op. cit., 8. Ibid., 8. Big Birmingham on show, op. cit., 83. Birmingham Central Libraries, Report of the design team, op. cit., 8. Ibid., 9. W. Maidment, Librarianship (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1975), 18. G. Stamp, Lost Victorian Britain: How the twentieth century destroyed the nineteenth century’s architectural masterpieces (London: Aurum, 2010), 129, argues the Birmingham Reference Library was demolished less because it was impractical or redundant, more because it didn’t fit with a car-obsessed city vision. Birmingham’s new heart, op. cit., 89; Birmingham Central Libraries: Architects: John Madin Design Group, op. cit., 292. City library on the move, Birmingham Mail (29 May 1973); W.A. Taylor, Designed with 21st century in view: World showpiece houses over a million books and manuscripts, Birmingham Mail (22 November 1973). Hargreaves, The mechanics, op. cit., 32. This was much more than the increase of sixty new staff planned two years before the BCL opened: Extra staff for new central library unnecessary, Birmingham Mail (21 June 1972). G.S. Wagner, Public libraries as agents of communication: A semiotic analysis (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992). C. van den Heuvel, Architectures of global knowledge: The Mundaneum and the World Wide Web, Volume, 15 (2008) (Special issue entitled ‘Destination library’), 49–50. The BCL having been deemed a great success, Madin was asked to design a library for Redditch New Town: Clawley, John Madin, op. cit., 115. In red-brick and not concrete, it was also not a ziggurat, but it was brutalist in style and, with an overhang offering a covered area for pedestrians, had some similarity with the ziggurat family. Clawley, John Madin, op. cit., 109. Birmingham Central Libraries, Report of the design team, op. cit., 6. Ibid., 13. The atrium was enclosed by a glass roof, and renamed Paradise Forum, to accommodate small-scale fast food and other retail tenants. In 1999, a member of the public was

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35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

almost hit by a small piece of concrete that fell from a cladding panel. Concerns over the condition of the precast cladding panels required the installation of netting to retain any further erosion, and this, in turn, further eroded the image of the safe haven the designers had initially planned. Berriman, A view of paradise, op. cit., 38. Birmingham Central Libraries, Report of the design team, op. cit., 6. City library on the move, Birmingham Mail (29 May 1973). Hargreaves, The mechanics, op. cit., 31. Birmingham Mail (n.d. [c.1972]), News Cutting, Library of Birmingham Archives. New central libraries for Birmingham (United Kingdom), UNESCO Bulletin for Librarians (January–February 1976), 61. Birmingham Central Libraries, Report design team, op. cit., 14. Birmingham Central Library: Architects: John Madin Design Group, op. cit., 1148. Tomlinson and Ward, Birmingham Central Libraries, op. cit., 5. New central libraries for Birmingham (United Kingdom), op. cit., 61. Birmingham Central Libraries, Report of the design team, op. cit., 10. Big Birmingham on show, op. cit., 83. New library a great place, say the children, Birmingham Mail (4 July 1973). Tomlinson and Ward, Birmingham Central Libraries, op. cit., 5. Clawley, John Madin, op. cit., vii. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 109. Birmingham Central Libraries, Report of the design team, op. cit., 10. Birmingham Central Libraries: Architects: John Madin Design Group, op. cit., 1148. Ibid., 294. Tomlinson and Ward, Birmingham Central Libraries, op. cit., 6. Birmingham Central Libraries, Report of the design team, op. cit., 11. Taylor, Designed with 21st century in view, op. cit. New central libraries for Birmingham (United Kingdom), op. cit., 61. New library borrowers, Birmingham Mail (16 June 1973). Bell, Foreword, op. cit., 5. £2¼ m. open-plan project for Birmingham’s new central, Liaison: News-Sheet of the Library Association (February 1963), 10. Tomlinson and Ward, Birmingham Central Libraries, op. cit., 3. Berriman, A view of paradise, op. cit., 37–38. Birmingham Central Library: Architects: John Madin Design Group, op. cit., 1137. New library a great place, say the children, op. cit. Do we really need miles of books? Birmingham Mail (n.d. [c.1972]), Libraries News Cuttings, Library of Birmingham Archives. Letter from Mrs I. Jones, Birmingham Mail (16 November 1972). Mass-Observation Archive, University of Sussex, Directive on Public Library Buildings (2006). Building like a cottage pie, Birmingham Mail (16 November 1972). Birmingham Mail (n.d [c.1972]), untitled article, Libraries News Cuttings, Library of Birmingham Archives. The building they love to hate, Birmingham Mail (19 December 1972). H.R.H. The Prince of Wales, A vision of Britain: A personal view (London: Doubleday, 1989), 32–33. Library protest may delay city project, Birmingham Mail (18 July 1973). Plea to council over fate of old library building, Birmingham Post (23 July 1973). This passion for destroying all that is old, Birmingham Post (27 June 1973). Clawley, John Madin, op. cit., 114. Letter from Jean Townsend to the Birmingham Mail (29 May 1973).

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78 Letter from Jean Townsend to the Birmingham Mail (8 December 1973). The royals mentioned in this context were Prince and Princess (Richard) of Gloucester. 79 An old library may find a quieter home, Birmingham Post (18 May 1973). 80 Birmingham Central Library: Immunity from listing (n.d.), retrieved 17 September 2013 from www.birmingham.gov.uk/cs/Satellite?c=Page&childpagename=LibLibrary-of-Birmingham/PageLayout&cid=1223092589081&pagename=BCC/ Common/Wrapper/Wrapper. 81 K. Worpole, Contemporary library architecture: A planning and design guide (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 16. Pedestrian movement across the site was a major intention. The tentacles of pedestrian communication, it was believed, enabled the building to sit well with the surrounding nineteenth-century structures ‘without brashness or ostentation’, according to Berriman, A view of paradise, op. cit., 38. 82 Sutcliffe and Smith, History of Birmingham, op. cit., 468. 83 Ibid., 461. 84 Tomlinson and Ward, Birmingham Central Libraries, op. cit., 3. Regarding monumentality and heritage institutions, it has been suggested that the new National Museum of African American History and Culture (2015) in Washington, DC breaks with the tradition of monumental museum architecture in the Washington Mall. In fact, however, in terms of exterior shape the Museum bears a resemblance to the BCL. See M. Wilson, Other monumentalities (2014), retrieved 5 March 2015 from http:// csrpc.uchicago.edu/docs/Wilson_essay1402.pdf. 85 Clawley, John Madin, op. cit., 110. 86 Berriman, A view of paradise, op. cit., 37. 87 £2¼ m. open-plan project for Birmingham’s new central, op. cit., 10. 88 Birmingham City Libraries was keen to develop popular information services. For example, in 1972 it took the decision to allow the display of publicity giving contraceptive advice in its service points, one local newspaper explaining that libraries were ‘information centres’ and not just places for books: City to allow contraceptive advice in public libraries, Birmingham Mail (9 August 1972). 89 Birmingham Central Library; Architects: John Madin Design Group, op. cit., 1141. 90 Taylor, Designed with 21st century in view, op. cit. 91 Birmingham Central Libraries, Report of the design team, op. cit., 10. 92 Sutcliffe and Smith, History of Birmingham, op. cit., 287. 93 Quoted in N. Holdsworth, Joan Littlewood’s theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 47. Having served his apprenticeship at various London libraries, Taylor became Deputy Librarian at St Pancras in 1947 and Chief Librarian in 1953, before moving to Birmingham in 1965. He retired in 1976 and died six years later. 94 P. Gregg, A social and economic history of Britain 1760–1980, 8th edition (London: Harrap, 1982), 573–574. 95 A. Marr, A history of modern Britain (London: Macmillan, 2007), 340. 96 Birmingham Central Library: Architects: John Madin Design Group, op. cit., 1448, 1152. 97 Ibid., 1448. 98 Ibid., 1448. 99 G. Dawson, Opening of the Free Reference Library … inaugural address (Birmingham, 1866), quoted in W. Wright, The life of George Dawson (Birmingham: Percival Jones, 1905), 122. See also, J.A. Langford, The Birmingham Free Library, the Shakespeare Memorial Library and the Art Gallery (Birmingham: Hall & English, 1871), 31–32. 100 As expressed by the planners: Birmingham Central Library: Architects: John Madin Design Group, op. cit., 1141.

Conclusion

Despite the coverage given here to the work of eminent architects such as Basil Spence, Alwyn Sheppard Fidler, Sydney Cooke, John Madin, Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya as well as the myriad of city and borough architects charged with designing libraries, and notwithstanding the large amount of evidence presented from the contemporary architectural press, readers of this book will by now have construed that its major optic has been the culture of Sixties professional public librarianship. This means there is scope for further research on the topic from the architect’s point of view, not to say from that of the civic planner and local politician too. In addition, while accepting that there are difficulties in seeking out records that illuminate the past ‘from below’, future research might also give a louder voice to users of libraries rather than to those who ran, planned and designed them. The prioritising of the library optic is not an indication, however, that attention has not been paid in the preceding pages to historical and theoretical contexts. The methodology that has informed this study plainly foregrounds investigation that is enriched by an exploration of contexts that can illuminate the central research topic. This study proceeded on the premise that architecture is largely a public art, its presence mostly ‘inescapable’.1 Every object, every building within the world, the built-form of the humble public library included, has a story to tell.2 The communication medium that is a library, defined by the materials it contains, is also, as a container, a system of communication, a text to be read and decoded as readily as the graphic objects within its shell. Such analysis should always be assisted by a discussion of the social determinants, or causes, of library design. Hence, this book has addressed a series of contexts, from the centuries-long evolution of library spaces and the rise of architectural modernism to the successful, or merely attempted, social, economic and cultural modernisation of Britain in the long 1960s, including the changing posture of the library profession. In 1961, the architect Michael Brawne, an energetic writer on library buildings, judged that libraries essentially shared the same problems as supermarkets – how to improve ‘movement, supervision, storage, enticement’.3 The tasks that faced Sixties libraries (and supermarkets), therefore, can be roughly divided, notwithstanding overlaps between the two, into those revolving around efficiency and those linked to attraction. Librarians recognised that many of the libraries that

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arose in the 1960s were, as one of their number, an expert in library planning, put it, ‘striking pieces of architectural design – adventurous, attractive, original’.4 There was a conflicting feeling, however, that too many designs had proved ‘unsatisfactory as libraries’, and a few of these, including some by leading architects, in fact deserved ‘enrolment in the record of monumental howlers’.5 This dissatisfaction implied a continuation of the stereotypical divide and poor cooperation between librarian and architect, the latter seeing the librarian as a client rather than as an equal and deserving partner in the design team, the former unconvinced that the architect truly understood the nature and purpose of library operations. It also implied a persistence of the division of labour between the architect as ‘artist’, essentially interested in aesthetic appeal, and the librarian as ‘technician’, mostly concerned with functionality, processes, space allocation and traffic flow – that is, with the ‘plan’. It is a division of labour that would appear, indeed, to have lasted into the twenty-first century. As K.C. Harrison, a long-time observer and assessor of library buildings, noted in 2003, librarians’ attempts to influence architects has been ‘a slow process’ and ‘instances still occur of buildings that reflect the personality and ideas of their architects more than librarians’ practical needs’; the librarian–architect relationship, he concluded, had improved but was still imperfect.6 A depiction of librarians and architects as warring factions oversimplifies the culture that surrounded Sixties library design. Librarians were aware that the structures they were helping to erect were bold and substantially and qualitatively new – in effect, statements of art, though art that was also highly functional. Architects, for their part, clearly attempted to listen to librarians more carefully than they had in the past. Both professions accepted they were contributing to an exciting new social architecture melded with the changing culture and sociopolitical impulses of the time. Over the decades, Sixties libraries have famously suffered from certain inbuilt technical deficiencies (although to be fair, a great many have also stood the test of time well, including, prominently, three of the book’s case studies, Hampstead, Holborn and Bourne Hall). But leaving these deficiencies to one side – something that, admittedly, the purist might find hard to do – Sixties libraries were a great success. Their great achievement was their value as symbols of a deep desire to build a New Jerusalem – to modernise Britain and embed and extend its infant welfare state. Modernist library architecture was emblematic of the progressive zeitgeist of the 1960s, representing, as Ken Worpole has put it, ‘some of the brightest, unalloyed hopes of modernism’.7 Driving a large nail into the coffin of the ‘temple’ or ‘treasure-house’ library,8 Sixties library buildings marked a sharp break with library designers’ past preoccupation with the past, with backwardlooking, historic compositions that for many Sixties observers conveyed an inappropriate and incongruous conservative image of the purpose of the public library because they were based on the model of the baroque library, ‘splendid, flowing, spatially voluptuous’, fixed in the public imagination as the quintessential library form.9 As such, refreshingly new Sixties library buildings offer a small but not insignificant contribution to the rehabilitation of Sixties Britain, a society

218 Conclusion which some have portrayed as ‘damaged’ in terms of hedonism, a decline of authority, excesses of big government and an appeasement of organised labour, but which others view as refreshingly liberating, socially minded and exciting. On balance, having weighed negative issues like shortcomings in the fabric and technology of buildings, some librarians’ reservations regarding internal plans and the public’s uncertainty (as in the case of Birmingham Central Library) about some later styles, this book is mostly aligned with the positive take on the 1960s, as its title, Libraries of Light, implies. Sixties libraries were light-drenched. This was the case figuratively, their modernism, reflecting the spirit of the age, being the physical embodiments of: (1) a determination not to return to the ‘gloom’ of a pre-war society marked by unemployment, poverty and cultural insularity; (2) the triumph that the war had represented for freedom of thought over the dark, menacing forces of authoritarianism; (3) a range of bright and hopeful modernising aspirations; and (4) a desire to build a better, more equal Britain which, in the context of the public library, often found expression in the term national health service for reading. The 1960s also brought libraries – mythically places of subdued illumination – into the light literally. Sixties libraries were ‘physically’ light, in terms of: (1) many of their external styles appearing ‘light of weight’ in contrast to the heavy styles of yesteryear; (2) their interiors being open, bright and luminous, lit by new artificial-lighting technologies, glass walls, innovative and strategically placed skylights and generous window apertures, and decorated with furniture, fittings, colour schemes and floor coverings that were positively ‘featherweight’ in substance and tone compared to those of the Victorian and Edwardian periods. The elegant ensemble of new public libraries designed in the 1960s was truly a breath of fresh air, a leap into a future, the path of which had been brightly illuminated, or at least predicted, by Britain’s politicians, professionals, planners and technologists. Optimistic supporters of the new library look – majority opinion appeared heartened by it, with hesitancy creeping in only later in the period under consideration – included not only library providers (librarians, civic planners and architects) but also, if popular reports in newspapers are anything to go by, the general public. The overall feeling was that people were experiencing a great advance in the library built-form. The 1960s was a time when, in a number of ways, British librarianship also experienced an advance. But we should be wary of coupling these two developments together too securely. We should avoid jumping to the conclusion that it was a progressive library profession that was largely responsible for the modern, progressive look of the buildings it helped create, for the evidence presented in this book shows that the new look for libraries was as much a reflection of traditionalism and conservatism in British librarianship as any desire that existed to rejuvenate or reorientate the profession and its purpose. In a nutshell, like many of the new buildings they celebrated, Sixties librarians were more square than hip. Three arguments are important here. First, streamlined Sixties libraries, with their clean lines, lack of fuss and openplan interiors chimed precisely with the traditional, technocratic nature of the

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librarian. When approaching the matter of library design, librarians immersed themselves in what Guillén, as we have seen, termed the ‘Taylorized beauty of the mechanical’,10 or what Michael Harris imaginatively termed ‘the dream of the physics of librarianship’.11 Of relevance here is the image of the librarian as gatekeeper of positivist knowledge. The modern view of knowledge encompasses the notion that it is scientifically derived by detached, neutral experts and to be accessed must be equally scientifically organised by meta-scientists like librarians. Like the ‘scientific’ process itself, therefore, librarians are depicted as rulegoverned, emotionless, cold, disconnected and mechanistic.12 Such unattractive characteristics were, of course, eventually grafted onto perceptions of modernist architecture. For many, the modernist mantra of ‘less is more’ came to mean ‘less is a bore’;13 while Ian Nairn’s warning about the creep of subtopia – ‘the steamrolling of all individuality of place to one uniform and mediocre pattern’14 – also gained in popularity. In short, many modernist library designs resonated with the notion of ‘library as factory’. Even when library design did depart from this mechanistic metaphor in order to address culture, another materialist metaphor often sprang to mind: that of the supermarket, wherein cheap culture (popular literature) was peddled. Second, although ‘supermarket-style’ leisure and culture was made available in new library buildings, librarians continued, as they had done for over a century, to ride another horse, that wearing the colours of ‘solid’, intellectual culture. Hence, the 1960s saw the rise of the public library as ‘cultural centre’, a brand that revitalised the earlier image of ‘palace of culture’. In the 1960s librarians appeared to become more progressive in their attitudes to their users, repositioning libraries as democratic cultural centres and making a better fist of public relations. Librarians, especially those more senior in years and thus in rank also, were not, however, entirely at ease with the new popular culture, and certainly not the counterculture, of the age. The cultural spaces that were designed into new buildings did not arise from any great enthusiasm on the part of librarians for culture that was highly commercialised, youth-orientated or alternative. They emerged, rather, to invoke the language of Pierre Bourdieu, from librarians’ investment in elite ‘cultural capital’ and from their self-positioning in a highbrow ‘cultural habitus’, even if few librarians could claim to belong to any ‘cultural nobility’. In truth, Sixties librarians seemed more interested in Beethoven than in the Beatles. The age of the community librarian, a professional who sought to respond to alternative culture and subcultures and who pursued a redistribution of power, wealth and opportunity, lay in the future. Third, although the status of, and respect for, public libraries undoubtedly increased in the 1960s, the confidence of the library profession was never entirely secure. This was reflected in librarians’ tendency to celebrate the appearance of central and larger district libraries, as opposed to branch libraries which, although built in large numbers, were constantly criticised by senior librarians as ‘uneconomical’ and thus unfit to be part of the library system. It was the flagship library, visibly contributing to a prestigious borough- or city-regeneration project, which was seen by librarians as important in raising their professional status.

220 Conclusion Community library development brought less kudos for the library profession, but more for the crusading local politician who would gain credibility, and votes, from helping to provide a new local library. New library buildings, the prestigious ones at least, were thus less about reinventing librarianship than about reinventing the librarian. Whatever degree of reinvention of the library profession was engineered in the Sixties, it did not match that achieved in the realm of library buildings, which, it would not be an exaggeration to say, underwent a renaissance in design. The legacy of that modernist renaissance can be seen in a number of aspects of today’s library design, from the open plan and informal furniture to the free use of glass and the adoption of expressionist styles. Designers of recently crafted library buildings have also inherited a respect for light from their Sixties forerunners. Twenty-first century library buildings have excelled at ‘letting the light in’.15 Recent changes in lighting technology have been astonishing, and can make interior spaces seem more like outdoor, daylit spaces.16 The new multimedia library in Le Marsan, France (2012) is said to be so full of light that users feel they are reading in the open air.17 Like their Sixties progenitors, today’s library buildings are said to ‘sparkle’.18 Further, in connection with recent library buildings ‘light’ also continues to be used in a figurative sense. In 2010, regarding the new central library in Newcastleupon-Tyne, the former Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, commented that the new building was: ‘A shining light and a beacon for what a library should be doing in the 21st century’.19 Not dissimilarly, a new initiative for freedom of information and expression launched by the National Library of Norway has been termed the ‘Beacon for Freedom’, drawing on the ethos of the ancient Library of Alexandria in this regard.20 Gunnar Birket’s new building for the National Library of Latvia, opened in 2014, was dubbed the ‘Castle of Light’.21 In the case of these grand national and civic projects, light has clearly been used as a metaphor to assist marketing and promotion; for it increasingly appears that libraries today are not only ‘intellectual centres’ but also identity-creating symbols, for nations, universities, cities and towns.22 In creating a social identity through a new library building, planners are in effect building and strengthening what Benedict Anderson termed ‘imagined community’ – a community, the majority of whose members never meet or communicate directly with each other but who nonetheless feel part of a particular ‘communion’.23 Long before Anderson theorised the imagined community, however, sociologists were exploring the similar concept of ‘community of interest’.24 Such a community is characterised by its members sharing a social interest, or making a social investment, in an activity or institution. This is an ethos that mid-nineteenth century pioneer promoters of the public library well understood. The core rationale of the early public library, which provided an unprecedented open portal to the world of knowledge, was that use of it was free, this word being written in stone in its guiding philosophy as well as, literally, above many of the doorways of its builtform. Joseph Chamberlain recognised the efficacy of this collectivist free access to education and culture when at the opening of the new central library in

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Birmingham in 1882 he proclaimed that the public library was ‘a kind of communism which the least revolutionary of all of us may be proud to advocate’.25 It was upon the collectivist ethic that generations of librarians and civic leaders built a national library system that acted as a unifying national cultural force – a force that during and following the war became a symbol of democracy, tolerance and freedom (a lesson that might be taken on board today in confronting those who have no respect for such principles). Twenty-first century librarians have attempted to reinvigorate the ‘shared resource’ philosophy of the public library by adopting brands for library buildings evocative of communal purpose and activities. Thus, libraries have become: (1) hives (whose members contribute to the common good); (2) hubs (to which people gravitate and associate); (3) living rooms in the city (where, like members of a family, citizens congregate informally); (4) civic public squares (wherein freedom of thought and expression thrive); or (5) idea stores (in which individuals transfer their commonly held skills as consumers to the consumption of cultural goods).26 Serving as an umbrella concept for all these new terms is the proposition that the public library is first and foremost a ‘place’ of social interaction and intellectual exchange, and more specifically an informal ‘third place’ that is not the home and not work.27 Unfortunately, this language of shared values and communal purpose has had to compete with a consistently negative message about the value of public services that over the past generation has been a main feature of economic neo-liberalism and the philistinism and social atomism that has accompanied it. Despite reassurances that the public library in Britain remains ‘a golden thread … throughout our lives’, a transformative institution which serves as ‘a supplier of an infrastructure for life and learning’ and which, despite the growth of digital technologies, satisfies a continuing demand for ‘modern, safe, non-judgemental, flexible spaces’, the decades-long trend in cutting spending on the institution has escalated sharply in the wake of the banking crisis of 2008. The library establishment views these latest cuts as less to do with money than ideology; an excuse, in effect, for rolling back the state.28 But whatever the reason for the retrenchment, key statistics tell a sorry story.29 According to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, in the calendar year 2013 just over a third of adults visited a public library at least once, a significantly lower figure than the 48 per cent who did so in 2005.30 Between 2008 and 2013 items borrowed from Britain’s public libraries decreased from 307 million to 162 million, the number of service points fell from 4,540 to 4,191 (the figure slipped below 4,000 in 2015), total staff declined from 25,768 to 20,302 (and are now outnumbered by volunteers) and, perhaps most worryingly, the cohort of qualified professionals collapsed from 5,298 to 3,557.31 Across Britain’s public library system, therefore, the lights are going out, literally and figuratively, as a result of deprofessionalisation, reduced opening hours and services and outright closures. Austerity measures – implemented by a political elite whose members have probably rarely, or in some cases possibly never, used a public library and who, some might argue, recognise the cost of everything, including what

222 Conclusion the rich would pay in fairer taxes, but the value of much less – have dimmed the shining example to the world that was once set by a proud and well-funded service. This decline appears at odds, it is true, with the fact that in recent years librarians, civic leaders and architects have been jointly responsible for planning, designing and opening a great many outstanding library buildings.32 Many new library projects, however, have not been at the very local, community level. Rather, choices have favoured the medium-size and big city library, the publicising of which diverts attention from the crumbling of services elsewhere (although in the case of the new, highly acclaimed Library of Birmingham, opened in 2013, services even there, as I write, are being severely cut).33 In architectural terms, the new libraries of the past twenty years have been as novel as, and perhaps even more glittering than, those of the 1960s. With their new lighting technologies, including environmentally friendly high-tech glass, they may even be more physically light-drenched. As a group, however, they have surely not emulated the great leap forward, the revolution, in library design that took place in the 1960s. Arguments revolving around both the tangible and the symbolic can be mobilised here. Even taking into account the improvements in library lighting that had occurred before the war, especially the large strides taken in the decades immediately prior to 1914, the 1960s saw the public library enter an entirely new world of light, something which cannot quite be said of the upgrade that has occurred since the 1960s. More critically, the Sixties physical upgrade was accompanied, even when librarians’ residual conservatism is factored in, by a radical ideological recalibration that positioned the public library as a major institution in the post-war quest for cultural enlightenment and social justice, in what was widely judged to be a new age of communication. As befitted this raised status, the Sixties public library clothed itself in a range of bright, ‘modern’ architectural outfits that drew on, and reflected, the ‘light’ that comes from social optimism and the hope of progress.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

M. Webb, Architecture in Britain today (Feltham: Hamlyn Publishing, 1969), 5. A. Ferebee, A history of design from the Victorian era to the present, 2nd edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), 9. M. Brawne, Libraries 2: Communicating with individuals, Architectural Review, 130/776 (October 1961), 245. G. Thompson, Planning and design of library buildings (London: The Architectural Press, 1974), 7. Ibid., 7. Thompson does not identify any unsuccessful buildings nor the architects responsible for them. K.C. Harrison, Library buildings, in J. Feather and P. Sturges, The international encyclopedia of information and library science, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2003), 379. K. Worpole, Contemporary library architecture: A planning and design guide (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 188. Preface, ‘Destination library’, special issue of the journal Volume, 15 (April 2008), 2. M. Brawne, Off the shelf, Architectural Review (July 1971), 51.

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10 M.F. Guillén, The Taylorized beauty of the mechanical: Scientific management and the rise of modernist architecture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 11 M. Harris, State, class and cultural reproduction: Towards a theory of library service in the United States, in W. Simonton (ed.), Advances in Librarianship, 14 (New York: Academic Press, 1986), 217. 12 G.P. Radford, Positivism, Foucault, and the fantasia of the library: Conceptions of knowledge and the modern library experience, Library Quarterly, 62/4 (October 1992), 408–424. 13 Guillén, The Taylorized beauty, op. cit., 147. 14 Quoted in S. Parnell, Nairn mania, Architectural Review (May 2014), 118. 15 Worpole, Contemporary library architecture, op. cit., 83. 16 S. Cannell, A great opportunity: Redeveloping library space, in G. Matthews and G. Walton, University libraries and space in a digital world (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 111. 17 Le Marsan’s multimedia library, or reading in the open air, IFLA Congress Magazine (Lyon: IFLA, 2014), 19. 18 R. McMaster, Adding sparkle to Suffolk, Public Library Journal (Summer 2009), 25. 19 Quoted in D. Fay and A. Forster, Newcastle’s shining light, Public Library Journal (Spring 2010), 2. 20 National Library of Norway, Beacon for freedom of expression: Dedicated to the Library of Alexandria, retrieved 1 November 2015 from: www.beaconforfreedom. org/liste.html?tid=415&art_id=552. 21 National Library of Latvia, National Library of Latvia Building, retrieved 1 November 2015 from: www.lnb.lv/en/about-library/nll-building. 22 E. Mittler, The postmodern library: Changing patterns, continuing challenges, Liber Quarterly, 7/1 (1997), 302. 23 B. Anderson, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). On the public library and imagined community, see W. Wiegand, Main street public library: Community places and reading spaces in the rural heartland, 1876–1956 (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2011). 24 On communities of interest and other sociological categories of ‘community’, see A. Black and D. Muddiman, Understanding community librarianship: The public library in postmodern Britain (Aldershot: Avebury Press, 1997), 1–5. 25 Quoted in T. Greenwood, Free public libraries (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1886), 75. 26 Other ‘rebrandings’ operating today include: media lounges; library café; learning zone; discovery centre; resource centre; and simply the highly postmodern ‘explore’, as in the renaming of the York Central Library, ‘York Explore’ (here ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’ appear highly disconnected). 27 J.E. Buschman and G.J. Leckie (eds), The library as place: History, community, and culture (Westport, CT and London: Libraries Unlimited, 2007); R. Oldenburg, Celebrating the third place: Inspiring stories about the ‘great good places’ at the heart of our communities (New York: Marlow and Co., 2001). Although the book remains central to the image of the library in terms of the latter’s perceived purpose, people still strongly associate the library brand with the ‘physical’. In addition to accessing materials and technologies in them, it is argued, libraries should be branded as places ‘to get work done’: See OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), At a tipping point: Education, learning, and libraries (Dublin, OH: OCLC, 2014). 28 Nick Poole, Chief Executive of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, speaking at the ‘Speak Up For Libraries’ Conference (14 November 2015), retrieved 19 November 2015 from: www.cilip.org.uk/news/speak-librariesspeech-nick-poole?utm_source=Communicator_membership_list&utm_ medium=Email&utm_content=Untitled11&utm_campaign=Weekly+News+from+C ILIP%2c+19+November+2015.

224 Conclusion 29 Department of Culture, Media and Sport, Independent Library Report for England [Chaired by William Sieghart] (18 December 2014), 5. See also, L. Macdonald, Public libraries: Briefing paper (Dunfermline: Carnegie UK Trust, 2011). 30 Statista (2014), retrieved 11 February 2015 from: www.statista.com/statistics/290193/ public-library-usage-uk-england/. It is only recently that library visits were in fact increasing (although over the long term, it is true, they have declined). According to one study, between 2007 and 2009, visits, as well as book issues and membership, actually increased. This is in line with the librarian’s axiom that in a recession use increases, a theory first put forward in the mid-1980s. When times are bad, people need libraries even more, not only as places of refuge and diversion but also because of their free resources: see S.E. James, Economic hard times and public library use: A close look at the librarian’s axiom, Public Library Quarterly, 7/3&4, 61–70. The picture of declining visits needs to be qualified. If visits decline by a certain percentage, but length of stay increases by more than that percentage, then use can be said to have increased. In fact, this could well have been happening, as over the decades the prevalence of simple in-and-out book borrowing has fallen away. More research on this issue is needed. The correlation between declining visits and shrinking budgets over the medium term, since 2008, is clearer. 31 Library and Information Statistics Unit, University of Loughborough, Trends in UK library and publishing statistics (2015), retrieved 12 February 2015 from: www. lboro.ac.uk/microsites/infosci/lisu/lisu-statistics/lisu-statistics-trends.html; Chartered Institute for Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA), Latest public library statistics released (2015), retrieved 12 February 2015 from: www.cipfastats.net/news/ newsstory.asp?content=16056. 32 As depicted in Reflections: Libraries (Dublin: Roads Publishing, 2014). 33 H. Furness, Outrage as city with new £188m library asks readers for help buying books, Daily Telegraph (12 August 2015), retrieved 25 August 2015 from: www. telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/11798961/Outrage-as-city-with-new-188m-libraryask-readers-for-help-buying-books.html.

Select bibliography

The post-war public library Bebbington, L. The British public library scene in 1966, in W.L. Saunders (ed.), Librarianship in Britain today (London: Library Association, 1967), 27–43. Benge, R.C. Libraries and cultural change (London: Clive Bingley, 1970). Black, A. The public library in Britain, 1914–2000 (London: The British Library, 2000). Black, A. and Hoare, P. (eds). The Cambridge history of libraries in Britain and Ireland, Volume 3: 1850–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Department of Education and Science. Public libraries and their use (London: HMSO, 1973). Department of Education and Science. Public libraries and their cultural activities (London: HMSO, 1975). Department of Education and Science. The public library service: Reorganization and after (London: HMSO, 1973). Groombridge, B. The Londoner and his library (London: Research Institute for Consumer Affairs, 1964). Hall, B. Libraries in New Towns, in H.A. Whatley (ed.), British librarianship and information science 1966–70 (London: Library Association, 1972), 464–479. Hung, M. English public libraries, 1919–1975: Vocation and popularisation (unpublished PhD, Leeds Metropolitan University, 2015). Jefferson, G. Libraries and society (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1969). Jolliffe, H. Public library extension activities (London: Library Association, 1962). Lamb, J.P. Commercial and technical libraries (London: Allen & Unwin and The Library Association, 1955). Luckham, B. The library in society (London: The Library Association, 1971). Maidment, W. Librarianship (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1975). McColvin, L. The public library system of Great Britain: A report on its present condition with proposals for post-war reorganization (London: The Library Association, 1942). Ministry of Education. Inter-library co-operation in England and Wales [Baker Report] (London: HMSO, 1962). Ministry of Education. Standards of public library service in England and Wales [Bourdillon Report] (London: HMSO, 1962). Ministry of Education. The structure of the public library service in England and Wales [Roberts Report] (London: HMSO, 1959).

226 Select bibliography Muddiman, D. The public library in an age of inclusion: Edward Sydney, Harold Jolliffe and the rise and fall of library extension, 1927–72, Library History, 18 (July 2002), 117–130. Murison, W.J. The public library: Its origins, purpose, and significance as a social institution (London: George Harrap, 1955). Sykes, P. The public library in perspective: An examination of its origins and modern role (London: Clive Bingley, 1979). Worsley, P.M. Libraries and mass culture, in H. Ward (ed.), Library buildings: Design and fulfilment (London: Library Association London and Home Counties Branch, 1967), 5–25.

Post-war public library buildings and design Ashburner, E.H. Modern public libraries: Their planning and design (London: Grafton, 1946). Barnard, T.D.F. (ed.). Library buildings (London: Library and Home Counties Branch of the Library Association, 1967). Berriman, S.G. and Harrison, K.C. British public library buildings (London: Andre Deutsch, 1966). Black, A. ‘New beauties’: The design of British public library buildings in the 1960s, Library Trends, 60/1 (August 2011), 71–111. Brawne, M. Libraries: Architecture and equipment (London: Pall Mall Press, 1970). Clawley, A. Library story: Birmingham Central Library 1974–2015 (Birmingham: The Author, forthcoming). Harrison, K.C. Central public library buildings, in H.A. Whatley (ed.), British librarianship and information science 1966–1970 (London: Library Association, 1972), 192–203. Harrison, K.C. Libraries in Scandinavia, 2nd edition (London: Andre Deutsch, 1969). Harwood, E. The English public library 1945–1985 (London: English Heritage, 2013). Jones, A.C. Public libraries in Britain (i): Urban libraries, in P.H. Sewell (ed.), Five years’ work in librarianship 1961–1965 (London: Library Association, 1968), 215–231. Kelly, T. A history of public libraries in Great Britain, 1845–1975 (London: Library Association, 1977). Kelly, T. and Kelly, E. Books for the people (London: Andre Deutsch, 1977). Library Association. Public library buildings: The way ahead (London: Library Association, 1960). London and Home Counties Branch of the Library Association. Design in the library (London, 1960). London and Home Counties Branch of the Library Association. Library buildings: Design and fulfilment (London, 1969). London and Home Counties Branch of the Library Association. New London Libraries (London, 1969). Longworth, A. British public library buildings, in H.A Whatley (ed.), British librarianship and information science 1966–1970 (London: Library Association, 1972), 204–212. Newbury, K.M. (ed.). Looking ahead: Techniques and buildings of the future (Gillingham: London and Home Counties Branch of the Library Association, 1956). Ray, C. Public libraries in Britain (ii): County libraries, in P.H. Sewell (ed.), Five years’ work in librarianship 1961–1965 (London: Library Association, 1968), 231–248. Reynolds, J.D. The future of library buildings (London: Library Association London and Home Counties Branch, 1968).

Select bibliography 227 Reynolds, J.D. (ed.). Library buildings 1965 (London: Library Association, 1966). Thompson, A. Library buildings, in P.H. Sewell (ed.), Five years’ work in librarianship, 1951–1955 (London: Library Association, 1958), 278–291. Thompson, A. Library buildings, in P.H. Sewell (ed.), Five years’ work in librarianship, 1956–1960 (London: Library Association, 1963), 268–283. Thompson, G. Public library buildings, in W.L. Saunders (ed.), Librarianship in Britain Today (London: Library Association, 1967), 44–49. Ward, H. (ed.). Better library buildings: Architect/librarian co-operation in their design (London: Library Association London and Home Counties Branch, 1969). Ward, H. (ed.). New library buildings 1976 issue: Years 1973–1974 (London: Library Association, 1976). Ward, H. and Odd, S. (eds). Library buildings 1972 issue (London: Library Association, 1973).

Other texts useful for the history of library design American Library Association. The library building (Chicago: American Library Association, 1947). Black, A., Pepper, S. and Bagshaw, K. Books, buildings, and social engineering: Early public libraries in Britain 1850–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009). Dahlkild, N. Biblioteket I tid og rum: Arkitektur, indretning og formidling [The library in time and space: Architecture, design and communication] (Copenhagen: Danmarks Biblioteksforening, 2011). Department of Education and Science. The design of libraries in colleges of education (London: HMSO, 1969). Desmond, R.G.C. Some unquiet thoughts on public library architecture, Library Association Record, 59/3 (March 1957), 79–88. Garrett, J. The legacy of the Baroque in virtual representations of library space, Library Quarterly, 74/1 (2004), 42–62. Libraries (Dublin: Roads Publishing, 2014). ‘Roads Reflections’ series. Orr, J.M. Designing library buildings for activity (London: Andre Deutsch, 1972). Prizeman, O. Philanthropy and light: Carnegie libraries and the advent of transatlantic standards for public space (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012). Thompson, A. Library buildings of Britain and Europe: An international study with examples mainly from Britain and some from Europe and overseas (London: Butterworths, 1963). Thompson, G. Planning and design of library buildings (London: The Architectural Press, 1974). Wagner, G.S. Public libraries as agents of communication: A semiotic analysis (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992). Wheeler, J.L. and Githens, A.M. The American public library building: Its planning and design with special reference to its administration and service (Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 1941). Worpole, K. Contemporary library architecture: A planning and design guide (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). Yenawine, W.S. Contemporary library design (Syracuse University Press, 1958).

228 Select bibliography

Modernism Beanland, C. Concrete concepts: Brutish buildings around the world (London: Frances Lincoln Publishers, 2016). Blake, P. Form follows fiasco: Why modern architecture hasn’t worked (Boston, MA: Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown and Company, 1977). Bullock, N. Building the post-war world: Modern architecture and reconstruction in Britain (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). Burns, W. New towns for old (London: Leonard Hill Books, 1963). Calder, B. Raw concrete: The beauty of brutalism (London: Cornerstone, 2016). Clement, A. Brutalism: Post-war British architecture (Ramsbury: Crowood Press, 2011). Darling, E. Re-forming Britain: Narratives of modernity before reconstruction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007). Elwall, R. Building a better tomorrow: Britain in the 1950s (Chichester: Wiley-Academic, 2000). Ferebee, A. A history of design from the Victorian era to the present, 2nd edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011). Frampton, K. Modern architecture: A critical history, 2nd edition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985). Fraser, M. Architecture and the ‘special relationship’: The American influence on post-war British architecture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007). Gold, J.R. The experience of modernism: Modern architects and the future city 1928–1953 (London: E&FN Spon, 1997). Grindrod, J. Concretopia: A journey around the rebuilding of postwar Britain (Brecon: Old Street Publishing, 2013). Guillén, M.F. The Taylorized beauty of the mechanical: Scientific management and the rise of modernist architecture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Harwood, E. Space, hope and brutalism: English architecture 1945–1975 (London: Historic England, 2015). Hatherley, O. Militant modernism (Winchester: O Books, 2008). MacEwen, M. Architecture in crisis (London: RIBA, 1974). Massey, A. Interior design in the twentieth century, 2nd edition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001). Mattson, H. and Wallenstein, S. (eds). Swedish modernism: Architecture, consumption and the welfare state (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2010). Millais, M. Exploding the myths of modern architecture (London: Frances Lincoln, 2009). Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Principles of modern architecture (London: Andreas Papadakis, 2000). Pevsner, N. Pioneers of the modern movement (London: Faber and Faber, 1936). Powers, A. Britain: Modern architectures in history (London: Reaktion Books, 2007). Powers, A. Modern: The modern movement in Britain (London: Merrel, 2005). Relph, E. The modern urban landscape (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1987). Rykwert, J. Architecture, in B. Ford (ed.), The Cambridge guide to the arts in Britain, Volume 9: Since the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 253–277. Saint, A. New Towns, in B. Ford (ed.), The Cambridge guide to the arts in Britain, Volume 9: Since the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 147–159.

Select bibliography 229 Saint, A. Towards a social architecture: The role of school-building in post-war England (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1987). Stamp, G. Anti-ugly: Excursions in English architecture and design (London: Aurum, 2013). Stamp, G. Lost Victorian Britain: How the twentieth century destroyed the nineteenth century’s architectural masterpieces (London: Aurum, 2010). Swenarton, M., Avermaete, T. and van den Heuvel, D. (eds). Architecture and the welfare state (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015). Wall, C. An architecture of parts: Architects, building workers and industrialization in Britain 1940–1970 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). Webb, M. Architecture in Britain today (Feltham: Hamlyn Publishing, 1969). Weston, R. Modernism (London: Phaidon Books, 1996). Whyte, I.B. (ed.). Man-made futures: Planning, education and design in mid-twentiethcentury Britain (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007).

Post-war Britain A policy for the arts: First steps (London: HMSO, 1965). Atkinson, H. The Festival of Britain: A land and its people (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012). Banham, M. and Hillier, B. A tonic to the nation: The Festival of Britain, 1951 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976). Barnett, C. The audit of war: The illusion and reality of Britain as a great nation (London: Macmillan, 1996). Barnett, C. The lost victory: British dreams, British realities 1945–1950 (London: Macmillan, 1995). Black, L. The political culture of the Left in affluent Britain, 1951–1964: Old Labour, new Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Conekin, B.E. ‘The autobiography of a nation’: The 1951 Festival of Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Department of Education and Science. Adult education: A plan for development (London: HMSO, 1973). Glennerster, H. British social policy since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). Hennessy, P. Having it so good: Britain in the fifties (London: Penguin, 2007). Hill, M.J. The welfare state in Britain: A political history since 1945 (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1993). Hopkins, H. The new look: A social history of the Forties and Fifties in Britain (London: Secker & Warburg, 1963). Jones, H. and Kandia, M. (eds). The myth of consensus: New views on British history, 1945–64 (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1996). Jones, H.R. The Russell Report on adult education in England and Wales in the context of continuing education, Paedogogica Europaea, 9/2 (1974), 65–75. Kavanagh, D. and Morris, P. Consensus politics from Attlee to Thatcher (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). Kynaston, D. Family Britain, 1951–1957 (London: Bloomsbury, 2009). Labour Party. Leisure for living (London: National Executive of the Labour Party, 1959). Lowe, R. The welfare state in Britain since 1945, 3rd edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Marwick, A. A history of the modern British Isles 1914–1999: Circumstances, events and outcomes (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

230 Select bibliography Marwick, A. Culture in Britain since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Marwick, A. The Sixties: Cultural revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States c.1958–c.1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Noble, V. Inside the welfare state: Foundations of policy and practice in post-war Britain (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2009). Pope, R. The British economy since 1914: A study in decline (London: Longman, 1998). Pope, R. War and society in Britain 1899–1948 (London: Longman, 1991). Rennie, P. Festival of Britain 1951 (London: Antique Collectors Club, 2007). Sandbrook, D. White heat: A story of Britain in the swinging Sixties (London: Abacus, 2006). Sinfield, A. Literature, politics and culture in post-war Britain (London: Athlone Press, 1997). Wilkie, T. British science and politics since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

Cultural theory Bourdieu, P. Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). Hoggart, R. The uses of literacy: Changing patterns in English mass culture (Fair Lawn, NJ: Essential Books, 1958). Leavis, F.R. and Thompson, D. Culture and environment: The training of cultural awareness (London: Chatto & Windus, 1933). Reed-Danahay, D. Locating Bourdieu (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005). Williams, R. Communications (London: Chatto & Windus, [1962] 1966). Williams, R. The long revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961).

Index

Locators in italic refer to figures/diagrams Names of libraries are abbreviated in subheadings A Policy for the Arts: The First Steps White Paper (Lee) 58 A Vision of Britain television documentary 207 Aalto, Alvar 37–9, 41, 62, 108, 111, 164, 182 Abraham Moss Centre 132 Acomb Branch Library, York 93, 94 adaptability see flexibility aedicular furniture 130 Agricultural House, London 11 air conditioning 124, 125, 148, 181 Air Ministry, Whitehall 12 airiness xi, 4, 43, 45, 9, 76, 81; Bourne Hall 192; Hampstead 179; interior design features 104; and space utilisation 122 alcove libraries/alcoves 12, 30, 108, 124, 168 Allerton District Library, Liverpool 4, 5, 109 Alton East estate 101 The American public library building (Wheeler and Githens) 82, 124 An Overture for Founding and Maintaining of Bibliothecks in Every Paroch Throughout the Kingdom (1699) 22 Anderson, Benedict 220 Aneurin, John 151 antisocial public behaviour 42, 116–17 see also surveillance/supervision Anti-Ugly Action (AUA) group 11–13, 14 Architects Journal 211

architectural beauty see beauty architectural history see library design history architecture: and the library profession 217, 218–19; new 59–64; serving user needs see functionality Architecture in Britain Today (Webb) 92 art works, loan 69, 177 artificial lighting see lighting and illumination arts facilities 118, 128, 131 see also cultural centres Ashburner, E. H. 24, 41 Asplund, Gunnar 37–8, 93, 164, 182 Assistant Librarian Journal 72 Association of Assistant Librarians 71 atriums: Hampstead 182; Birmingham 198, 201–3, 202, 205–6, 212 AUA (Anti-Ugly Action) group 11–13, 14 aura, libraries 10, 41, 43, 197 austerity: post-war xi, 4, 6, 55, 56, 76–7, 93; twenty-first century 221 automation, circulation control 65–6 Baillieston Library, Glasgow 104 Baltimore, Enoch Pratt Free Library 37 banking crisis 221 see also austerity Barcelona Pavilion 96, 98 Barclays Bank, City of London 12 Barking Central Library, Essex 45, 102, 103 baroque libraries 8, 12, 217 see also grand-hall libraries Bauhaus style 95

232 Index Beaconsfield Library 121 beauty, architectural 11, 13–14, 31, 64 see also Anti-Ugly Action group Bebington Central Library, Wirral 102 Beckenham Public Library, Kent 1, 3, 93 Bedford County Library Headquarters 102 Benge, R. C. 70 Berelson, Bernard 67 Berriman, George 103 Berriman, S. G. 80, 81, 121 Bertram, Anthony 121 Betjeman, John 64 Beveridge, William 23 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris 39, 99 Bilton, Harold 146–7 Birmingham Central Library 8, 16, 78, 195, 195–6, 207, 220–1; assessment 209–10; atrium 202; brightness amidst austerity 211–12; civic centre redevelopment 198–200, 200; cost 206; design features 200–6, 203, 204; plan of 199; planning 196–8; reactions to 206–9; style, siting and space utilisation 102, 109, 111, 118–20, 128; subject departmentalisation 204 Birmingham Reference Library xii, 1, 2, 182, 196–8, 207–8 Blackhall Branch Library, Edinburgh 96, 97 Blackman, M. H. G. 141 Bodleian Library, Oxford 10, 29, 200, 201 Bodley, Thomas 10 book borrowing statistics 64–5, 72 see also use of public libraries book covers, colour 45, 127 Books, Buildings and Social Engineering (Black, Pepper and Bagshaw) xi, xii, xiii, xiv Bostwick, Arthur 37 Boty, Pauline 12 Boullée, E.-L. 29, 38 Bourdieu, Pierre 70–1, 219 Bourne Hall Public Library 16, 109, 185–92, 190, 191, 217; flying saucer appearance 185; pastoral setting 186; plan of 189; reference department 190; space utilisation 128 Bowater House, London 11

Bowen, Elizabeth 79 box-like designs see glass-and-steel box libraries; tower blocks Bradbury, Ronald 109 Bradford Central Library xii, 15, 204; as flagship building 141, 146–8, 147, 148, 159; style, siting and space utilisation 96, 97, 109, 110, 118, 119, 128 branch libraries 1, 15, 16, 35, 37, 219; New Towns 117, 118; style, siting and space utilisation 78, 81, 98, 109, 110, 113, 114, 116 see also specific examples branding of libraries 4, 10, 75, 118, 132, 221 Brawne, Michael 130, 216 brightness xi, 10, 14, 15,45, 218; Birmingham 211–12, 205; Bourne Hall 192; Enlightenment designs 25, 28–30; and space utilisation 121 see also light theme Britain, post-war modernisation 54–9 British Embassy, Rome 175 British Library xiv, 39 British Museum Reading Room 32 British Public Library Buildings (Harrison and Berriman) 80, 81 British Standard see standards for public libraries Bromley Central Library 15, 109, 141, 150–2, 151 Bromley Road Branch Library, Lewisham 16, 96, 141, 157–9, 158 Brooklyn Public Library 119 Broome, E. M. 78 Brown, James Duff 152 brutalism xi, 15, 16, 45, 63; Birmingham 200, 201, 209; style 92, 93, 95, 100–4, 102, 103 bungalow-pavilion style 98 Burgoyne, F. J. 10, 32 Burnham Library, Buckinghamshire 108 Bush Hill Branch Library, Edmonton 100, 121 cafes and restaurants 56, 124, 132; Bradford 146, 147; Bromley 152; Hampstead 172; space utilisation 128, 130, 130 Caltex House, London 11

Index Camberley Central Library, Surrey 93–4, 94 Cambridge college libraries 28 Camden Library 81 car ownership/car parks 93, 98, 109–11; Birmingham 199; Bourne Hall 190; Jesmond 155; Norwich 145 Cardonald District Library, Glasgow 102, 102, 104, 104, 106, 109 Carlton-in-Lindrick library 111 Carnegie libraries xi, 8, 10, 21, 30–2, 37, 45 Carnegie United Kingdom Trust 36 Carter, E. J. 82 case studies see Birmingham Central Library; Bourne Hall Library; flagship buildings; Hampstead Central Library; Holborn Central Library Castlemilk District Library, Glasgow 36, 36, 109, 113, 114 catalogues, computerisation 65, 170 central library projects 109–13, 219; New Towns 117, 118 see also specific examples Chamberlain, J. H. 196, 211, 220 charging for public library services 76 chartered public librarians 109 see also library profession Chesterfield Public Library 42 children’s libraries: Birmingham 197, 205, 206; Bourne Hall 189; Bromley 152; Hampstead 177, 181; Holborn 165, 169; Luton 143; space utilisation 121, 124, 125, 126–8, 127; Pimlico 113, 126–8 Churchill Gardens housing estate 126–8 see also Bromley Central Library circular reading spaces 176, 185, 188 circulation control, automation of 65–6 City of London Business Library 119 civic centres: Birmingham 197, 198–200, 200; Hampstead 172; siting of libraries in 111, 112 civic public squares 221 cladding: Birmingham 201, 209; Burnham 108 CLASP system, prefabricated structures 99 classical design features see neo-classical styles cleanliness 33, 42, 81

233

Clerkenwell Central Library 152, 153 closed-access collections 30; Birmingham 204; Holborn 163 coffee bars see cafes and restaurants collectivist ethic 221 Collison, Robert 82 colour use in libraries 105, 127, 218; Birmingham 205, 211; book covers 45, 127; Hampstead 180–1 Columbia Library School 30 communication age, new 72, 74, 92 communication elite 67–8 see also high culture Communications (Williams) 57 communities of interest 220 community librarianship 74–5, 192, 220; Bourne Hall 192 comprehensive education 59, 67, 69 computerisation 9, 65, 66, 170 conservatism, library/architectural 12, 15, 217–18, 222; Holborn 163–4; and post-war public library projects 54, 59, 73, 93 Cook, Sydney 16, 77, 164–5, 216 Cooke, A. S. 35 Corbett, E. V. 75 council estates see housing estates County of London Plan (Abercrombie and Forshaw) 165 Coventry Cathedral 113, 141, 175 Coventry Central Library, plans for 111–13, 112, 118 Crewe Central Library 109 Crosby Public Library 43 cultural capital 70–1, 219 cultural centres, libraries as 10, 15, 16, 73–5, 81, 192, 219; Birmingham 197, 208, 210; Bourne Hall 185, 186–7, 190, 192; flagship libraries 142, 143, 147, 148, 154, 157, 159; Hampstead 172–3, 182; space utilisation 118, 131–3 cultural contexts xi–iii, 4, 7, 9, 10, 15, 16; interwar design 37; new era for libraries 67, 68–73; space utilisation 126, 130; welfare-state public library 21 see also high culture; popular culture cultural revolution 56, 58 Cumbernauld Library, Scotland 114 cuts in library expenditure see austerity

234 Index Dana, John Cotton 45 Darnton, Robert 26 Davies, W. G. 124 Dawson, George 211, 212 Denmark, public libraries 79, 80, 81, 120, 126 Dennistoun Branch Library, Glasgow 109 Dent, John 187 deprofessionalisation 221 see also library profession Derby Central Library 35 design see library design history Desmond, R. G. C. 7, 37, 80 Dewey, Melvil 30 Dickerson, D. W. 78 dinginess see gloom divisional-unit plans 123–4 see also modularisation Dome of Discovery, Festival of Britain 106, 192 Doncaster Central Library 109, 111 Drumchapel District Library, Glasgow 100, 109, 113 Dudley Arts Council 68 Düttmann, Werner 116 Eastbourne Central Library 81, 109, 121 Easterhouse Branch Library, Glasgow 109, 113 Eastham Branch Library, Bebington 111, 116 economic austerity see austerity economic growth: rebuilding of Britain, post-war 55 EDSs (expandable and divisible spaces) 126 Education Act (1944) 65 education, comprehensive 59, 67, 69 educational role of libraries 72, 118, 132 Edwardian public libraries 1, 8, 10, 14, 35, 107 Edwards, Edward 32 egalitarianism 4, 23, 46, 54 El Escorial Library, Madrid 28, 29 Elder Park Branch Library, Glasgow 109 electric lighting see lighting and illumination elitism see high culture Elkin, Judith 205

English Heritage 208 Enlightenment 15, 21–5, 28–30, 212 Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore 37, 122 entertainment vs. enrichment role of libraries 57, 58, 71, 75 see also fiction debate entrance halls: Birmingham 203; Bourne Hall 190; Bradford 148; Hampstead 176, 177, 177; Holborn 165, 166; space utilisation 122, 122, 123 Everton Public Library 33 Ewell Residents’ Association 187 see also Bourne Hall Public Library Exeter Lending Library 4 exhibition areas: Birmingham 205; Hampstead 177–8, 178; space utilisation 128, 129 expandable and divisible spaces (EDSs) 126 expressionist style of libraries 92, 99, 99–100, 100, 101 extension activities 68, 70, 73–4, 75, 133 see also cultural centres; role of libraries/librarians extrovert style, Birmingham Library 201, 210 factory analogy 126, 142, 219 failure, sixties public libraries xii, 6–9 falsehood 77 Faulkner Brown, Henry 155 Featherstone, Tom 10 Festival of Britain 60, 93–6, 101, 104, 106, 175, 192 fiction debate 9, 56, 72, 206 film showings 69, 128, 197, 210 Filon, S. P. L. 64 Finland, public libraries 80 see also Viipuri Library Finsbury Public Library 15–16, 128, 141, 152–4, 153, 154, 155, 159 flagship buildings 15–16, 141, 159; Bradford 146–8, 147, 148, 159; Bromley 150–2, 151; Bromley Road branch 157–9, 158, 159; Finsbury 152–4, 155, 155, 159; Jesmond branch 155–6, 156, 157, 159; Luton 141–4, 143, 144; Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Index 148–50, 149, 159; Norwich 145, 145–6, 159 see also Birmingham; Bourne Hall; Hampstead and Holborn Central Libraries flexibility 43, 80; Birmingham 205; Hampstead 178–80; Holborn 169; open plan designs 45, 104, 121; space utilisation 118, 121–6; systemsengineering principles 126 Flintshire Miners’ Institute 58 flow charts, space utilisation 125–6, 216 fluorescent lighting see lighting and illumination flying saucer appearance, Bourne Hall Library 185, 185, 192 see also space-age modernism Folger Library, Washington 199–200 Forwood, William 33 Foucault, Michel 26 foyers see entrance halls Franck, C. L. 152 Frederiksberg Library, Copenhagen 81 French National Library 29 Fry, W. G. 42 Fullwell Cross Library, Redbridge 99, 99 functionality, library buildings 63, 79, 82, 217–19; Birmingham 201; Bourne Hall 187; Hampstead 176, 179, 180; Holborn 165, 170; space–function relationship diagrams 125–6 furniture, library 10, 30, 45, 127, 218, 220; Birmingham 205; Bourne Hall 188; Holborn 165, 166, 167; modernist 60, 61, 79; style, siting and space 103–5, 109, 120, 121, 127, 130; Victorian 33, 35 garden cities 117 see also New Towns garden patios 122 see also outdoor reading rooms Gardner, Frank 35, 79, 143 gas-lit libraries 31–3, 34, 46 see also lighting and illumination Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris 106 Georgian Society 175, 187 see also neo-Georgian styles Gerard, David 82, 141, 144 German Pavilion, Barcelona 96, 98 Gilbert-Scott, Giles 60

235

Gillmoss Branch Library, Liverpool 95, 95 Githens, Alfred 37, 82 Glasgow, siting of libraries 109, 113–14 see also specific examples glass-and-steel box libraries xiii, 16, 82, 92, 96, 97, 98, 98–9 see also light theme; tower blocks gloom: discourse of 218; Victorian public libraries 33–5 gold standard, siting of branch libraries 109, 110 golden age of public libraries xiii, 6–8, 21, 25, 55, 76 Gorbals flats, Glasgow 175 Gothenburg Library 80 Govanhill District Library, Glasgow 107, 108, 109 gramophone (music) libraries 69, 169, 210 grand-hall libraries 28–31, 131, 192, 220 Great Missenden Branch Library, Buckinghamshire 108 Grecian styles see neo-classical styles Greenwood, Thomas 1, 33 Grimsby Library 81 Guggenheim Gallery, New York 99 Guildford Central Library 13, 109 Guillén, M. F. 10, 219 Habermasian public sphere 22 Haddenham Branch Library, Buckinghamshire 108 Hadleigh Library 93 Halmstad Public Library 79–80 Hammond Library, United States 79 Hampstead Central Library 16, 172–82, 173, 179, 199, 217; entrance hall 177; exhibition area 178; model 173, 174; pastoral setting 180; shortcomings 181; style, siting and space utilisation 109, 110, 113, 118, 128 Hansa quarter, Berlin 116 Harlow Central Library 119, 121 Harris, Vincent 12, 14 Harrison, K. C. 80, 110, 130 Hendon Library 80 high culture xiii, 15, 56, 57, 58, 67–75 see also middle-class bias Hillhead Branch Library, Glasgow 109 Hilton Smith, R.D. 35

236 Index history see library design history hives, public libraries as 221 Hjelmqvist, Bengt 79, 81 Hobsbawm, E. 6, 60 Hoggart, Richard 56 Holborn Central Library 1, 16, 77, 163–70, 166 , 167, 168, 217; style, siting and space utilisation 96, 109, 110, 128 Holden, Charles 93 Hopkins, Harry 60 Horley Public Library, Surrey 122, 122 Hornsey Central Library 109 The House: A Machine for Living In (Bertram) 121 housing estates, siting of libraries in 113–14, 116, 131–2, 133 hubs, public libraries as 221 Huddersfield Central Library 24, 41 Hull Central Library 96, 96 Hulme District Library, Manchester 105, 111, 130–1 human rights 22, 70 Hume, David 11 Hunstanton School, Norfolk 100–1, 106 Hutchings, F. G. B. 25 ‘hutment’ libraries 93 Hyde Park Barracks 175 idea stores, public libraries as 221 identity-creating symbols, public libraries as 220 Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago 98 illumination see lighting and illumination; night illumination imagined community 29, 220 inclusiveness 24, 82 informal atmosphere 80, 82, 220, 221; Birmingham 205; Hampstead 178, 180; Holborn 167, 170; style, siting and space utilisation 92, 120, 121, 130 information technology 9, 65, 66, 170 information warehouses 92 Ings Branch Library, Hull 120, 120 interior design 144, 218; curved shelving 107; Holborn 167, 168; Jesmond 157; Luton 143–4; style of libraries 103–8, 104, 106, 108; Swedish library buildings 142

interwar period, library design 35–41, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41 introvert style, Birmingham Library 201, 202, 210 Islington West library 128 Jesmond Branch Library, Newcastle-uponTyne 16, 141, 155–6 , 156, 157, 159 jewels in the crown 32 John Madin Design Group 197 see also Madin Jolliffe, Harold 70, 73 Jones, Ken 25 Kant, I. 23–4 Kelly, Thomas 45 Kensington Central Library 12–14, 13, 14, 109, 110 Kent County Library Headquarters, Maidstone 96, 99, 102, 109, 113 Killingworth Library, Northumbria 111 Kirkegaard, S. 79 Knightswood Branch Library, Glasgow 109, 114, 115 Labour Party policy statement, Leisure for Living 58 Labrouste, H. 31, 39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence) 72 Lakeshore Drive Apartments, Chicago 98 Lamb, J. P. 66 Lansbury Estate, East London 93–4, 101 Larkin, Phillip 118 Latour, Bruno 26 Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard JeanneretGris) 38, 39, 40, 61, 62, 95, 101, 200, 201 Le Marsan multimedia library, France 220 Leavis, F. R. 56 lectures/lecture halls 69, 129, 132, 158 see also cultural centres Lee, Jennie 58 Lee, Roger 131 Leeds, siting of libraries 98, 98, 114, 116, 122, 123 left wing culture, post-war Britain 57–8 Leisure for Living (Labour Party policy statement) 58 leisure society 118

Index Lewisham, Bromley Road Branch Library 16, 96, 141, 157–9, 158 Leyland, Eric 73 liberalism 23 see also neo-liberalism Librarian and Book World journal 118 Librarians for Social Change journal 74 librarian(s) roles see role of libraries/ librarians Libraries and Archives in Sweden (Ottervik, Möhlenbrock and Andersson) 79 Libraries in Scandinavia (Harrison) 80 libraries of light see light theme Library Association 8, 10, 21, 64, 66–7, 75, 126; new library buildings 76, 77, 78, 81 Library Association Record 79, 142, 146 Library Buildings Information Centre 78 library catalogues, computerisation 65, 170 library design history xi–xii, 1, 21; influence of Enlightenment 21–5, 27, 28–30; interwar period 35–41, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41; modernisation and modernism 76–82; nineteenth century 30–3; oligoptic society 25–7, 28, 31; renaissance 220; sixties public libraries 41–6, 44; Victorian public libraries 33–5 see also light theme Library Journal 79 Library of Birmingham (current) 9, 195, 222 library profession 109, 216; and architecture 217, 218–19; conservatism 12, 15, 217–18, 222; status/ deprofessionalisation 74–5, 221 library siting 15, 109–18, 112, 114, 115, 116 library-systems engineers 126, 216, 217, 219 library use see use of public libraries The Library’s Public (Berelson) 67 light theme: oligoptic society 25–7; sixties libraries xi, xiii, xiv, 4, 10, 14–15, 25, 218; twenty-first century libraries 220, 222 lighting and illumination (natural and artificial) 14, 25, 27, 33, 35–6, 42–3, 46; Birmingham 202, 212; Bourne Hall 189, 190, 191, 192; Bradford 147;

237

Bromley 151–2; gas-lighting 31–3, 34, 46; Hampstead 181, 182; Holborn 165, 166, 167, 169, 170; interwar design 37, 38, 39, 41; Jesmond 156; Luton 144; new library buildings 81, 82; open plan designs 121 style, siting and space utilisation 92, 107, 121, 122, 124; Victorian public libraries 30–3 see also night illumination Lighting Services Bureau 42 Lillington Library, Leamington Spa 96 Liverpool Branch Libraries 109 Liverpool (Roman Catholic) Metropolitan Cathedral 99 living rooms in the city, public libraries as 221 Lloyds Building, London 106 Local Government Act (1948) 68 London City Business Library 119 London, local government reorganisation 65 London Underground stations 93 long 1960s xi, 1, 6–7 see also post-war public libraries Long Room, Trinity College, Dublin 30 low culture 56, 57, 58, 60, 68–74, 219 lucidity 10–11, 25, 35 see also light theme Luton Central Library 15, 69, 70, 81; as flagship building 141–4, 143, 144; style, siting and space utilisation 96, 109–10, 118, 128 Lutyens, Edwin 175 Macmillan, Harold 55 Madin, John 16, 197, 198, 201, 204, 205, 209, 210, 216 Maidenhead Central Library 106 Maidment, William 75 Malbon, Ralph 110 Manchester Central Library 12, 35, 66, 210; fiction debate 72 Manor Branch Library, Sheffield 124–5, 125 Martin Luther King Public Library, Washington, DC 98 Marwick, Arthur 56, 58 mass culture 56, 57, 58, 60, 68–74, 219 Mass-Observation Archive 105, 206 McColvin, Lionel 24, 35, 72, 79, 110, 127, 133

238 Index Merton College, Oxford 29 mezzanine galleries 81, 121; Bourne Hall 190; Bromley 152; Bromley Road 158; Hampstead 178; Holborn 166, 167; Luton 144; Norwich 145 middle-class bias 67, 71, 74, 110, 157 see also high culture Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 96, 98 Milton, John 25 Mitchell Library, Glasgow 33, 34 mobile library services 109 modernism xi, 1, 4, 6–10, 42, 217, 218; Anti-Ugly Action group 11, 12–13; and architecture 59–64; Enlightenment roots 24; oligoptic society 25–6; principles of 60–3; Sheppard Fidler 188; space utilisation 121, 122, 127; Spence 175 see also post-war public libraries modular systems/assembly 63, 93, 98–9, 101, 107, 188 see also prefabrication modularisation 42, 82, 100, 108, 118, 119, 122–5, 168, 205 monumentalism, Birmingham Library 201 morality, principles of modernism 62 Morris, William 25–6 Motion, Andrew 220 Moya, Hidalgo 126, 216 Mullins, J. D. 33 multi-media resource centres 132, 220 see also cultural centres Munford, William 64 Murison, W. J. 72–3 music libraries 69, 169, 210 Nairn, Ian 12, 218, 219 National Central Library 64 national health service for reading, library analogy xi, 8, 22, 218 National Library of Latvia 220 National Library of Norway 220 natural environment, embracing see pastoral settings natural lighting see lighting and illumination Naudé, Gabriel 28 neo-classical/neo-Georgian styles 1, 3, 11–13, 28, 35, 37, 93, 217; Bourne Hall 192 neo-liberalism 221

New Architecture Group 12 see also Anti-Ugly Action (AUA) group new beauties 13–14 see also beauty, architectural new empiricism 95 new towns 1, 77, 98, 114, 117–18, 198 New Towns Act (1946) 62–3 Newcastle-upon-Tyne Central Library 15, 16, 109, 118, 220; as flagship building 141, 148–50, 149, 159 see also Jesmond Branch Library newspapers in libraries 72 night illumination 26, 43, 98, 116, 146, 147, 159, 182 nineteenth century, artificial lighting 30–3 no frills style of libraries 92, 93–5, 94, 95 nocturnal public sphere of leisure and culture 26–7 see also night illumination noise issues 43, 132, 146, 152; Birmingham 202; Bourne Hall 187, 190–1; Hampstead 179, 181; Holborn 168 The Nonsuch Park and District Residents’ Association 187 Norwich Central Library 1, 15, 39, 43, 44, 98, 109; as flagship building 141, 145, 145–6, 159 nostalgia, for golden age of public libraries xiii, 7 Noyce, John 74 ‘Of the standard of taste’ (Hume) 11 oil crisis (1973) 55 see also austerity oligoptic society/oligopticon 15, 25–7, 28, 31, 45 open-access collections 30, 73; Birmingham 204; Finsbury 152 open plan design xiii, 4, 10, 21, 25, 45, 104, 115; Birmingham 203, 205, 209; Bourne Hall 190; principles of modernism 61; space utilisation 118–23 opening ceremonies, royalty 109–10, 131, 141, 146 openness xi, 10, 14, 15,45, 218; Birmingham 211–12, 205; Bourne Hall 192; Enlightenment designs 25, 28–30; and space utilisation 121 Opera House, Sydney 99 operations research (OR) 125

Index optimism, age of xi, xii, 4, 7, 8, 11, 14, 54, 222; Birmingham 196; Spence 175 Otlet, Paul 200 outdoor reading rooms: Bourne Hall 188–9; Finsbury 154; space utilisation 122, 122, 126–7 see also pastoral settings ‘Outrage, Outrage, Outrage’ slogan 12 Paimio Tuberculosis Sanatorium 37, 62 paintings, loan 69, 177 Partick Branch Library, Glasgow 109 Passmore Edwards, John 30–1 pastoral settings 29, 31, 43, 45; Birmingham 202; Bourne Hall 186, 186, 187, 189; Hampstead 180; interwar design 37, 38; principles of modernism 62; space utilisation 122; twenty-first century libraries 220 patios 122 see also outdoor reading rooms Patterson, E. F. 77 Percival, David 145 Permanent Supplementary Artificial Lighting in Interiors (PSALI) 125 Petts Wood Branch Library 36 Pevsner, Nikolaus 4 Philanthropy and Light: Carnegie Libraries and the Advent of Transatlantic Standards for Public Space (Prizeman) xiv Phillpot, J. C. 70 Picton, William 32 Pimlico Library, Westminster 45–6, 113, 126–8 Pite, Beresford 1 Plaistow Library, East London 10 planning, urban xii–xiii, 4, 7 plans, library 120, 124, 128; Birmingham 196–8, 199; Bourne Hall 189; Finsbury 155; flow charts 125–6; systemsengineering principles 126 see also space utilisation Plovgaard, Sven 120 Plymouth Central Library 76 A Policy for the Arts: The First Steps White Paper (Lee) 58 politics, role in libraries 74 Pollock District Library, Glasgow 100, 100, 101, 109, 113

239

Pollockshaws Branch Library, Glasgow 109 Popper, Karl xiii popular culture 56, 57, 58, 60, 68–74, 219 Portsmouth Central Library 105 post-modernism 6, 45, 64, 106–7, 210 post-war public libraries xi–xiv, 4, 6–11, 14, 15; Enlightenment roots 25; as libraries of light 41–6, 44; modern architecture 59–64; modernised library buildings 76–82; new era for libraries 64–76; rebuilding of Britain 54–9; shortcomings 181, 218 see also modernism Powell, Philip 126, 216 PR (public relations) 66–7, 219 pram towns 98 prefabrication 63, 93, 99, 101, 188 see also modular systems/assembly presentism 9–11 profession, library see library profession Prudential Assurance Company 11 PSALI (Permanent Supplementary Artificial Lighting in Interiors) 125 public attitudes to libraries 8, 206–9 Public Libraries Act (1964) 15, 59, 64, 68, 72, 74, 198 Public Libraries in Denmark (Kirkegaard) 79 public libraries see library/libraries Public library buildings: The way ahead (Library Association) 78, 81 The Public Library (Murison) 73 public relations (PR) 66–7, 219 public-sphere of libraries ethos 14, 46, 212; Hampstead 177; library design history 22, 23, 24, 26–7, 31, 32 publicity value, glass-and-steel box style 98 see also night illumination ramp provision 45, 112 Randall, William 24 Reading Room, British Museum 32 reading rooms, open 28, 29 record (music) libraries 69, 169, 210 Redcar District Library 106–7, 128 Redcliffe-Maud report, local government 117 ‘regal display’ 123 Regent’s Park Library 113

240 Index Renaissance-hall libraries 28–31, 131, 192, 220 renovation projects 107; Glasgow 109; Hampstead 181 restaurants see cafes and restaurants Reynolds, J.D. 82 Richardson, Sir Albert 142 Roehampton Branch Library, London 39, 40, 41, 101–2, 113 Roehampton housing development 101 role of libraries/librarians 68–75, 128, 197, 210; educational 72, 118, 132; entertainment vs. enrichment 57, 58, 71, 75 see also cultural centres; fiction debate; film showings Ronan Point tower block 63 roof gardens see outdoor reading rooms Rotherham Central Library, South Yorkshire 102 Royal College of Art (RCA), Kensington 11 Royal Institution 41 royal opening ceremonies 109–10, 131, 141, 146 Russell Report, adult education 59 St John Wilson, Colin 39, 41 St Luke’s Branch Library, Finsbury 113, 114, 128 St Pancras Arts Festival 68 St Pancras Public Library 110, 131, 131 Säynätsalo complex, Sweden 108, 111 Scandinavian architectural influences 15, 16, 37, 41, 79–81; Birmingham 205, 211; Holborn 164, 170; interior design features 103, 104; Luton 141–2, 144; principles of modernism 60; space utilisation 119–20, 121–2 see also Denmark; Finland; Sweden ‘Scandinavian light’ style of libraries 92, 95–6, 96, 102 see also Holborn Central Library SCOLA system, prefabricated structures 99 Scotland, siting of libraries 109, 113–14 see also specific examples Seacroft Branch Library, Leeds 98, 98, 114, 116, 122, 123 Seattle Public Library 100, 113 Selsey Branch Library, West Sussex 99

Shakespeare Room, Birmingham 199–200, 202, 203, 204 Sheffield Central Library 24, 33, 35, 66 shelving: Birmingham 203; branch libraries 109; curved 107; Hampstead 177; Holborn 170 Sheppard Fidler, A. G. 16, 186, 188, 192, 216 shopping centres, siting of libraries 111, 117–18, 142 silence in libraries see noise issues Simon, A. D. 54 siting of libraries 15, 109–18, 112, 114, 115, 116 sixties public libraries xi, 1, 6–7 see also post-war public libraries skylights, Bourne Hall Library 189, 191, 192 slogan, Anti-Ugly Action (AUA) group 12 Smithson, Alison and Peter 100, 106 Snead Macdonald, Angus 42, 122–4 Snow, C. P. 9 social: architecture 4; engineering xiii; library 27 socialism 6, 23 sound transmission see noise issues Southborough Library, Bromley 104, 105, 106, 121 Southey Branch Library, Sheffield 93 Southfield Branch Library, Leicester 93 space-age modernism 16, 82, 185, 192 see also Bourne Hall Library space–function relationship diagrams 125–6 space utilisation 15, 118–33; Birmingham 203; Bourne Hall 188, 190; children’s libraries 125, 127; coffee bars 130, 130; entrance halls 123; exhibition areas 129; garden patios 122; Hampstead 179–80; lecture halls 129; Newcastleupon-Tyne 150; plans 120 Spence, Basil 16, 113, 148, 199, 216; Hampstead Central Library 172, 173–5, 182 Spring Hill Branch Library, Birmingham 208 square designs see glass-and-steel box libraries Stained Glass Department, Royal College of Art 11 standardisation of culture 56, 73 standardisation of library services 65

Index standards for public libraries 126, 168 Stanton Hill Branch Library, Sutton-inAshfield 100 State Library of Western Australia, Perth 200 status, library profession 74–5, 221 Stepney Central Library 43 Stevenage New Town 117 Stockholm Public Library 37–8, 93, 164, 182 Stockton-on-Tees Central Library 1, 3, 98, 111, 128, 129 Streatfeild, Noel 102 study carrels, Bourne Hall Library 191 style of libraries 15, 92; expressionist 92, 99, 99–100, 100, 101; glass-and-steel box style xiii, 16, 82, 92, 96, 97, 98, 98–9; interior design features 103–8, 104, 106, 107, 108; no frills 92, 93–5, 94, 95; post-modernist 106–7; ‘Scandinavian light’ 92, 95–6, 96, 102; utilitarian 10, 22, 32, 92, 93, 119 see also brutalism subject departmentalisation: Birmingham 204; Bradford 148; space utilisation 119, 120 supermarket-style of libraries 106, 121, 141, 149, 156, 219 Surrey, branch libraries 109 surveillance/supervision 27; artificial lighting 42; Birmingham 202; Hampstead 176–7 Sutton Coldfield Library 45, 131 Sweden: library buildings 79, 80, 81, 141–2; social housing 95 Swedish Public Libraries in Pictures: Hjelmqvist, Bengt 79 Swift and Company Library, United States 37 Swiss Cottage see Hampstead Central Library Sydney, Edward 73 systems-engineering principles 126, 216, 217, 219 systems-method construction see modular systems Tang Hall Library, York 43, 44, 111 TARDIS time machine 192 see also space-age modernism

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Taylor, William 197, 205, 210, 219 techno-bureaucratic machine mentality xiii, 59–60 technological development, rebuilding of Britain 10, 55 see also information technology television, entertainment vs. enrichment controversy 71 Thatcher, Margaret 6, 58 theatres, library 15, 26, 27, 68–9, 110, 128, 131, 152 Thompson, Anthony 46 Thompson, Godfrey 92, 96 Tilton, Edward 37 Tomlinson, G. K. V. 203 Tomlinson, O. S. 72 Tonight television programme 11 torch of learning symbol 36, 36 tower blocks 63–4, 96; Birmingham 200, 201; Finsbury 152; Norwich 145 transparency 11, 26, 27, xi see also light theme Trevitt, E. H. 81 Trinity College Library, Cambridge 28 Turner, Derek 108 twenty-first century library buildings 220, 221, 222 United States: fluorescent lighting 42–3; new library buildings 78–9; subject departmentalisation 119 University of Illinois Library xiv Unwin, Raymond 24–5 urban planning xii–xiii, 4, 7 use of public libraries 64–5; middle-class bias 67; statistics 72, 221 user needs, architecture serving see functionality utilitarianism 10, 22, 32, 92, 93, 119 utopianism 9, 46 Van de Velde, Henry 77 van der Rohe, Mies 1 vandalism 42, 116–17 see also surveillance/supervision vernacular modernism 93, 108 Victorian age 7, 169 Victorian public libraries 1, 8, 10, 14, 33–5 views from the windows see pastoral settings

242 Index Viipuri Library (now Vyborg), Finland 37, 38, 38, 41, 164, 182 A Vision of Britain television documentary 207 Waldon, Freda F. 79 Walsall Library 128 war damage, library buildings 76 Ward, Herbert 203 Webb, Michael 145 welfare state xi, 4, 6, 15; library design history 21–5, 27, 54; national health service for reading xi, 8, 22, 218 Wellard, J. H. 24 Wells, H. G. 152 Wells, J.P. 77 West Byfleet Branch Library, Surrey 99 West Ham Central Library, London 30–1 West Hill Library, Wandsworth 33, 34 Wheeler, Joseph 28, 82 white heat of the technological revolution 10, 55 Williams, Raymond 54, 56–7 Wilson, Alexander 68, 70

Wilson, Harold 55, 200, 208 windows: natural lighting see lighting and illumination; views from see pastoral settings wood in interiors: Bourne Hall 190; Holborn 170; Norwich 146; Scandinavian influences 81 Woods, Victor 197 working-class: areas 110, 128, 210; public library use 67 see also popular culture World City of Knowledge (Mundaneum) 200 Worpole, Ken 15, 192, 217 Worsley, Peter 67 Worthing Central Library, West Sussex 102, 103–4 Wright, Frank Lloyd 61, 120 Wythenshawe Library, Greater Manchester 131–2 zeitgeist of the age 128, 217 see also modernism ziggurat form, Birmingham Library 200, 201, 204, 207