Love letters to libraries

So, for a nice change, libraries have got some press attention and some rather glamorous cheerleaders at the moment. Neil Gaiman has spoken out in their favour, describing being left alone in a library as an inquisitive 8-year-old as akin to being given “the keys to the kingdom.” Caitlin Moran, Malorie Blackman and Carol Ann Duffy have raised their voices in support of endangered Liverpool libraries; and the Guardian have seized the zeitgeist by asking their readers to submit their ‘love letters’ to the libraries that have loomed large in their lives.

Unsurprisingly, quite a lot of these love letters are from we librarians – unsurprising because let’s face it, none of us are in this job to get rich. Underneath our sensible cardigans, librarians are by and large a passionate breed – passionate about people, passionate about public services, and passionate about information. And we tend to be passionate about the places we work as well. Be it in concrete campus block or art-deco edifice, city centre or stately home, when people think of libraries – even now in the digital age where so much of the resources we offer are virtual – it’s primarily as physical spaces, places to escape to, to study in, to take refuge from life’s distractions.

So here’s my love letter to libraries – the physical spaces rather than the abstract idea. I can’t claim to have been faithful, but I have loved many sincerely. And I hope to love again.

I’ve been lucky enough to work and study in some amazing library spaces. The University of East Anglia, where I did my first degree, was designed by brutalist architect Denis Lasdun. Dismissed by the ignorant as ‘ugly grey boxes’, the campus buildings, including the Library, have a stark, uncompromising beauty to them, particularly when juxtaposed with the surrounding greenery and glittering artificial ‘broad’.

I spent many a happy hour gazing out of the windows of the little carrels on the second floor at drizzling rain or drifting snow, flurried leaves or sparkling sunlight. From the right window, you could catch the view of Norfolk Terrace, one of the two distinctive ziggurat-shaped halls of residence that appear on all the university’s publicity materials. While the Library itself might not have been much to look at, it provided the perfect vantage point to see the best of what there was to see – a sort of concrete metaphor for the function of libraries (and librarians) in general.

My next library of note was the first one I worked in – the University of Oxford’s Vere Harmsworth, serving the students and staff of the Rothermere American Institute. It was a lovely building, laid out in interleaved layers in a way that made the big, glass-and-steel space feel curiously cosy and intimate. However, at this point I was living in Oxford, so was a bit of a library slut – I may have earned my crust at VHL, and done quite a bit of studying there (sometimes at the same time – good old late shifts on the enquiries desk!), but I also cheated on it with the Radcliffe Camera, Worcester College, and of course that ultimate doomed library love affair, the Bodleian. Like a bad but charming boyfriend, it left me breathless and elated and utterly out of my depth, but I just couldn’t help but come back for more.

Upon moving to London and looking for a library traineeship, I struck gold with the Foreign Office Legal Library. The Legal Department had managed to secure a plum set of offices off the corner of the famous Durbar Court, and in one of these was the small yet perfectly formed Legal Library. Walking into the King Charles Street building each morning, clipping across the courtyard and up the grand staircase, strolling through the marble colonnades to a high-ceilinged, gilded room full of books, spending the day helping people to answer questions that would literally change world affairs – sometimes I had to pinch myself to believe that this was actually my job (although the pretty much perpetual infestation of incredibly impertinent mice did help to keep my head out of the clouds).

There was another library space at the FCO, the grand Ansel Library, a great wood-paneled room, all wrought-iron staircases and galleries. Unfortunately, after the controversial closure of the FCO’s library in 2007, the dispatch of its physical holdings to King’s College London, and the ‘rationalisation’ of its staff into an e-library service, its only permanent inhabitant was a large stuffed anaconda called Albert, which had been presented to Queen Victoria by a Guyanese bishop some hundred years before and hung up in the FCO for want of anything better to do with him. Although Albert himself could not be blamed, it was perhaps ironic that the FCO signed off a £10,000 taxidermy bill to have the ragged reptile re-stuffed at around the same time civil service jobs were cut in half to meet the call for cuts.

Having emptied the purpose-built library space of books and librarians, the administrators of the FCO’s estate seemed to be at a loss for what to do with it. The occasional forlorn cluster of hot-deskers huddled in from time to time with laptops, wrapped in scarves against the perennial cold, but on the few occasions I contrived to go in there (mainly to fulfil my lust for oak paneling) the room was almost completely empty, the silence that of absence rather than of feverishly scribbling pens and busily revolving thoughts. Although the Library was beautiful, it was the beauty of ancient Egyptian death mask – all lacquer, no love. Some time after my traineeship ended, the main Library was finally repurposed to house a book-heavy directorate (including a few librarians!). To the best of my knowledge, Albert the serpent still presides, a silent ‘ssssssshhh’ always poised on his tongue.

More recently, I have been working in the library of the London School for Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Yes, I am aware that I have been spoilt. The Library Reading Room is the finest room in a building positively dripping with art-deco style, occupying almost the whole South-West side of the insanely beautiful Keppel Street building. Everything about the room is striking: the high, wide windows facing onto Malet Street Gardens; the painstakingly maintained shellacked cork floor with its original geometric pattern (echoed by the decoration of the gallery railings, which includes some alarmingly swastika-like twists and turns); the serried rows of individual wooden tables; the pampered pot plants scattered between oxblood armchairs; the bust of Richard Doll benignly regarding the room from its perch on the old card index cabinet.

There are more study spaces – the Wellcome Gallery above where group work and quiet conversations are permitted; the Barnard Room (named after the School’s first Librarian, Cyril Barnard) where users can plug in their computers – the Reading Room being listed, it isn’t possible to just install plug sockets any old where. But when LSHTM alumni think back to ‘The Library’, this is the image that will come to mind, as good as unchanged since the School opened in 1929.

I will sadly be moving on from LSHTM in the new year, to the Library of the University of West London. At first I will be based at the Brentford campus; but in the summer, UWL will be opening a new library for the future campus at Ealing, and I will move there bag and baggage. A brand new library space, designed with the needs of the modern reader in mind rather than struggling to keep up with them, will be an unfamiliar environment. I have already been poring over the architect’s imaginings of how the space will appear when complete, and daydreaming about sunshine streaming through plate glass. I feel the beginnings of excitement, as at the outset of a burgeoning relationship, when nothing is yet known, and anything is possible…