Hearts starve as well as bodies
Give us bread, but give us roses too.

Greater Manchester have held a Festival of Libraries over the summer and I was asked to take part in a conversation with a wonderful spoken word artist, Nasima Begum,  about the importance of public libraries and what they mean to people.  We were keen for the conversation, hosted in Tameside at Ashton Library, to not just be a nostalgia-fest, but a celebration of the vibrancy of these community spaces as they exist now, serving as they do as advice centres, public computer banks, scanning and printing facilities, and even hubs for classes and events. Most libraries have sections for readers of Gujarati or Urdu, or whatever languages are spoken locally.   In Ukraine right now, libraries are being used as places of sanctuary too, and there were discussions around this also.

Preparing for the talk got me thinking a lot about my own relationship with Libraries I Have Known, and the importance of them in my own life.  My Dad started taking me to the majestic Accrington Library on Saturday mornings when I was a very little girl in the early ‘70s. He would let me loose on the huge collection of stories in the designated space that was the Children’s Library, where I would later do my work experience week as a fourth year at Moorhead High School. After choosing a book or two and having them stamped at the librarian’s desk, the ticket taken from its pocket in the front cover and placed in my ticket pouch in the filing box, I would then sit in the grand space that was the adult section, reading, while my Dad would head to the dark wood rostra lined up by the entrance, to stand alongside lines of (usually) men reading the weekend papers which were laid out under heavy wooden batons to hold them in place.  This is where Dad would pick up his racing tips for the afternoon, noted down in one of his omnipresent pocket diaries.

Recently I returned to the library with Murray from Amazing Accrington, to visit a fantastic installation called Women’s Work, a talking chair, inspired by Barbara Castle’s Equal Pay Act of 1963, upholstered in fabric made by Lantex, a Hyndburn company, and narrated by women of the town, talking about their experiences of local working life in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  Although I live in Manchester now, I will of course always be an Accy Lass, but it had been years since I’d entered that beautiful building, famously gifted to the town as a philanthropic act by the Carnegies in 1904 and opened to great celebration in 1908, under the safe-guarded open access system. In other words, anyone could borrow a book but had to return them safely after use.  Back then, the library housed 11,000 volumes plus 2,000 children’s books, as well as books in Braille.

Naturally the library has changed beyond recognition in some respects.  The world moves on and there is now no need for the vast collection of discs and cassettes to borrow for example, or for the astonishing reference library upstairs.  The space felt lighter and friendlier, definitely noisier, and I was chuffed to see so many people of all ages and backgrounds using the resources there.  But the majestic stone stairwell remains with its iconic stained glass window, stating “Knowledge is Power, A Light to Guide”. What an asset to Accrington that building is.

So many of us from our town who have gone on to carve out a life and career in words and culture, spent many happy hours there, discovering the joy of reading, all completely free of charge.  The internationally lauded writer Jeanette Winterson escaped her difficult ultra-religious childhood and adolescence by taking refuge within those walls; famously working her way through the entire fiction section from A-Z.  In her autobiography, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She writes:
  
“I began to realise that I had company.  Writers are often exiles, outsiders, runaways and castaways.  These writers were my friends. Every book was a message in a bottle.  Open it.
...So I read on. And I read on, past my own geography and history, past the foundling stories and the Nori brickworks, past the Devil and the wrong crib.  The great writers were not remote.  They were in Accrington.”

I’m a big believer in the idea of our need for Bread and Roses - a political slogan evoked in many poems, songs and movements - the notion that  as humans we need the basics of existence (food, water, shelter, etc) but we also need knowledge, art, culture, beauty, BOOKS, in order to be a truly healthy society.  The two have to co-exist.  With austerity cuts from central government, local councils have too often had to make difficult choices about which services to prioritise.  Those that might fall more into the “Roses” category have more often than not been the first to be sacrificed as a result of slashed budgets. The idea that art, music, theatre, literature, are a luxury has been presented to us as a reality for so long that we’ve started to believe it.  There have been brutal cuts to art in education at state level while private schools continue to invest, knowing as they do that these subjects bring a return that is unquantifiable in terms of wellbeing and self-esteem. There have been swathing cuts to libraries since 2013, with many smaller local services disappearing, and with volunteers staffing lending services, rather than experienced librarians.

As life-enhancing as my Saturday trips to the palatial Accrington Carnegie Public Library were; equally important were my fortnightly after-school trips with my Mum to our smaller, more modest library in Church, closer to home, where I would sit in the children’s annexe leafing through Secret Seven books and Mallory Towers adventures, while Mum chose large print hardbacked novels for Grandma.  I can almost smell the place as I type these words, and if I close my eyes I can picture the cover of my library copy of Little Women.  That one-storey modest little resource is long gone. Like so many smaller services.

But we are so lucky to still have our majestic Accrington Library.  It is still possible for anyone to go there and become a member and enter a million different worlds through the joy of reading; and all for free. 
I’d encourage anyone who hasn’t visited for a while (or ever!) to pop in and to feel the history within those walls and the legacy of all the lives that have been changed because of the service it provides. And to pick up a book.  Knowledge is power, a light to guide...who knows where you might end up!