Feature

‘Take a break from shopping’

Saturday, 10th September 2005

Josie Appleton on how libraries are becoming things of the past. Enter, instead, the Idea Store

We shouldn’t stick to the 19th-century model; many local library buildings are indeed leaky and decrepit, and could do with being replaced. Moreover, the Victorian legacy is a mixed one. The founders of libraries had a respect for knowledge, but they were often paternalistic and wary of the common man. Readers weren’t quite trusted with books — the first open-access library didn’t come into being until 1893, in Clerkenwell, London. We need a new breed of universities of the street corner, which aim to inspire rather than moralise. The demand is there: a survey in Tower Hamlets found that people’s top priority for the service was ‘buying books and increasing book stock’.

Some people will always use libraries to hang out in. That’s fine, so long as others are given the opportunity to read and think. The librarian Larkin once wrote that ‘...someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious’. When that someone is brought up in Tower Hamlets rather than in Kensington, he or she has often sought refuge in the local library. Whitechapel library alumni include the playwrights Arnold Wesker and Bernard Kops, and the scientist and historian Jacob Bronowski. Whitechapel’s new Idea Store will have a good café, but let’s hope that those hungry for something more will not leave with empty bellies.

Josie Appleton is assistant editor of spiked.