Shaldon, Devon

Reuse it!

In the list of things that need to be done but which are better put off till tomorrow, book-weeding is near the top. When bookpiles stealthily grow like silent stalagmites on the bedroom floor, it’s an indication that there’s no let-up in the book-buying. My shelves of English architectural history, of English literature, of books about places, music, art, keep growing. And the Resident Wise Woman is adding to the accumulation with her collection of contemporary poetry. Our house is not of infinite size. It’s not even large. So occasionally, I try to go through my shelves, weed out some volumes I think I no longer need, and make room for the recent acquisitions.

The few that make it off the shelves and into cardboard boxes go either to second-hand booksellers or – mostly these days – to charity shops. That way, I feel better about things by telling myself I’m doing some good with these rejected treasures. There has been the odd one – usually an obsessively re-read book that has actually fallen to pieces – that has had to go into the fortnightly recycling collection. But on the whole, if my redundant books eventually reach new homes, that’s a plus as far as I’m concerned. Re-use is better than recycling.

It’s similar with redundant buildings. If a building is no longer needed for its original purpose, there’s often an impulse to demolish it and start again. But often it’s far less wasteful to find a new user who’ll take it on, fill it with activity, and maintain it. Years ago I wrote a trio of books to accompany the BBC’s series Restoration, about rescuing historic buildings that were empty, abandoned, or at risk. I quickly realised that the key step in this process was working out what each structure’s new use could be.

The buildings in those programmes ranged from large country houses to modest workshops. But none of them was as modest as a telephone kiosk. Red telephone boxes are vanishing from Britain’s streets. They’re out of touch with the times now we all have mobile phones and some of them are hardly used at all.

The telephone box was brilliantly designed by Giles Gilbert Scott. Its curving roof, glazed doors and sides, its sign, and its red paint make it instantly recognisable – it’s almost as powerful a symbol of our country as a Union Jack or the clock tower of the Houses of Parliament. The red box is ideal for its intended purpose. It must have seemed that such a tiny structure could do little else if it was ever found to be redundant. And yet the truth has proved very different. Communities that want to save their telephone boxes have found all sorts of uses for them – miniature libraries or art galleries, places to house defibrillators, village information hubs, mini-museums, even planters . I’d need quite a few telephone boxes to house even the books I ought to get rid of. But when I saw this box in Shaldon, with its shelf of books, I was impressed. It’s a charity shop in little, with a bit of this, a bit of that, books included, to raise money for a local good cause. Creative re-use exemplified.* When I passed it a while back, both the idea and its realisation shed some welcome light on a dull and rainy day.

- - - - -    

* With the exception of the clunky font used for the signage, which could be much better.

Coleford, Gloucestershire

Writing the Forest, 2

Tom Cousins’ second Forest of Dean mural is on one the side of a former pub in Coleford. It shows three more writers, all linked with the local area, who put the place into their work – or for whom the place lies at the heart of their work. Joyce Latham (1932–2007) grew up near Berry Hill. She wrote poetry and memoirs about her childhood in the Forest. She’s not widely known now, but in her time was a much loved Forest figure. F. W. Harvey (1888–1957) was a poet of the First World War. He was one of the important group of poets of that war who served as private soldiers, unlike many of the most famous war poets who were officers, and like one of my favourites, Ivor Gurney, who was a close friend of Harvey’s. Both wrote movingly of the wartime lives of the troops, and although Gurney is the greater poet, some of Harvey’s works, including the famous ‘Ducks’, still appear in anthologies of war poetry. Harvey spent much of his life as a solicitor, but continued to publish. He also wrote a prose memoir of his time in a PoW camp, which was praised when it came out just after the war. As a young man, Dennis Potter (1935–94) produced one of the best books about his local area, The Changing Forest. He wrote it having left the Forest to go to Oxford and to begin a career in television (he also covered the area in a TV documentary), and could write about his home territory from a special combination of intellectual detachment and deep emotional involvement. He became famous for writing a string of television plays and serial dramas – Stand Up Nigel Barton, Blue Remembered Hills, The Singing Detective, for example – that were controversial and changed the medium. This work was often criticised for both its subject matter and its frankness, but was, rightly I think, very widely praised too. Several of the series and plays were at least partly set in the Forest and in some cases filmed there on location. He never left the place emotionally and lived in later life not far away from it in Ross-on-Wye. Like all the writers celebrated in these murals, the Forest stayed with him,* and he took the place into the consciousness of so many more.  

- - - - -

* It remained with Potter until the very end of his life. The memories of the Forest in his last interview with Melvyn Bragg, just a few weeks before his death, were for me the most moving sections of that most moving of interviews.

Cinderford, Gloucestershire

Writing the Forest, 1

The Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire’s least known part, is perhaps also the least easy to know. It is long stretches of achingly beautiful woodland – a rich mix, with notable stands of oaks and hollies, to name two of my favourite species; it is also sites of abandoned industry, from Roman ironworking to 20th-century coal-mining. It is mostly rural – even the mining was rural – but there are towns too. If the countryside is visually gorgeous, towns like Cinderford and Coleford are apparently unprepossessing, the kind of places any guidebook with gloss over, or simply pass by. Tourists are directed to the rural Dean Heritage Centre to learn about the area’s history and for refreshments too – and in normal times they’ll be nurtured well there, in both ways. The comedian Mark Steel, arriving in the Forest, asked the whereabouts of the local bookshop, usually a good place to find out more about an area that’s new to you. ‘Bookshop?’ they said. ‘You’ll have to go to Monmouth for a bookshop.’ And Monmouth is in Wales.

But there is always a but, isn’t there? There’s much of interest in these places: medieval and Victorian churches; nonconformist chapels, some repurposed, some still in devoted and devotional use; a town hall or two; other incidental pleasures. Foresters are proud of their history, and some, at least, are proud of their buildings. And of those who’ve written in and about the Forest, which is where the mural in my photograph comes in.

In 2018, an organisation called Reading the Forest commissioned two murals – this one in Cinderford and another in Coleford – from the artist Tom Cousins. Each mural bears portraits of three Forest writers. The idea of the murals was both to celebrate the local literary heritage and to encourage and inspire local young people who might have an interest in writing themselves. The three writers in the Cinderford mural, the first to be painted, all lived in the town, and all their work features the Forest in one way or another. The poet Leonard Clark (1905–81) worked as a teacher and then an inspector of schools. He wrote prolifically, and a lot of his poetry was written especially for young readers; he also edited collections of poetry for children. Quite a lot of his poetry reflects on the life of the Forest and its people, and the area also plays a key part in his autobiography. Winifred Foley (1919–2009) came to fame when her stories of her youth in the Forest were broadcast in BBC Radio’s programme, Women’s Hour. Her stories, collected in such books as A Child in the Forest and In and Out of the Forest vividly recount her young life as the daughter of a miner (who was killed in a mining accident) and her time ‘in service’, performing the expected domestic drudgery for families in London, Gloucestershire and Wales. These books still find readers and are still fresh, decades after they were published. Jack Beddington (1901–86) focused his work single-mindedly on Forest life, to the extent of writing most of it in Forest dialect. Living in Cinderford for nearly all his life, he knew the place inside out (he wrote for the local newspaper for years). If the popularity of his stories and anecdotes was limited mainly to the local area, his plays reached a wider audience, as did his radio appearances.

None of these people were world renowned celebrities. But that, in a way, is the point. Writers like Clark, Foley, and Beddington deserve commemoration on their home patch. At a time when young people in deprived areas face difficulty in finding any job, let alone one that takes them into faraway worlds, the fact that people like this, from families like theirs, could make it as writers, ought to be cause for hope – that writing can be a life, and that pride in your local area isn’t a bad thing.

Love and outrage

For ten days or so, English Buildings turns into a book blog as I review some of the new publications that have struck me this year. To begin with, a book about a presiding spirit of this blog, the writer and broadcaster, Ian Nairn...

Gillian Darley and David McKie, Ian Nairn: Words in Place
Published by Five Leaves Publications

There's a YouTube video in which Iain Sinclair and Jonathan Meades discuss their work. Before long, the name of Ian Nairn comes up, an inspiration for both writers for his fresh reactions to places, his combative stance towards architects, and his bracing prose style. His guidebook to London (Nairn's London, 1966) is singled out for particular praise. In the comments accompanying the video, some young, interested watchers exchange views: 'Who is that bloke they talked about? Ian Nunn? Ian Nenn?' Ian Nairn: Words in Place tells them what they need to know, combining a study of his work with such biographical facts as are useful for an understanding of the man and his writing.

Briefly, born in Bedford in 1930 and raised in Surrey, Nairn read mathematics at Birmingham University before going into the Royal Air Force. As he flew, he looked down towards England's towns and villages and landscapes: the first of the series of views from odd angles that drove his career. He realised that his aerial views of England gave him unique insights into the buildings on the ground – that he could often see what earthbound architectural historians could not. Oddly, he could do the same thing when standing on terra firma too. By the early 1950s he was sending articles to the Architectural Review.

Ian Nairn: Words in Place describes this unusual career. It begins with the story of how Nairn exploded on to the scene of architectural writing in 1955 with his first masterpiece, Outrage. Outrage was Nairn's special edition of the Architectural Review chronicling the destructive effects on the environment of the tendency to reduce once-individual places to the same mediocre and uniform pattern. To make this point, Nairn drove from Southampton to Carlisle, taking photographs of everything grim and similar – lamp posts, semi-detached houses, telegraph poles, badly designed signs, misplaced factories, gauche roundabouts, wires, wires, wires. For the result he coined a new term, subtopia, a word that suggests suburbia and well as dystopia, and that was intended to embody the fact that soon 'the end of Southampton will look like the beginning of Carlisle' with everything in between looking the same too. Outrage, trenchantly argued, angry, emotional, laid out with the graphic flair that characterized the AR in the 1950s, caught the imagination and fired people up. It was soon republished as a book, and spawned a sequel, Counter-attack, which suggested what to do about the mess, with examples of good planning and design. Outrage and Counter-attack were Nairn's seminal early works.

Darley and McKie chronicle the creation and impact of these early triumphs (the formation of the Civic Trust was one result). They continue with the other landmarks of Nairn's career – his book on America, The American Landscape; his work with Pevsner on the Buildings of England volumes for Sussex and Surrey; his guidebooks to London and Paris; his relationship with the professions; his journalism; and his television work. Each chapter is accompanied by a short commentary in which another writer describes their response to a specific part of Nairn's oeuvre – Jonathan Meades on Nairn and the Buildings of England, Owen Hatherley on Nairn and the Professions, and David Thomson and Andrew Saint on Nairn's London, for example.

It's Nairn's London that stands out as the other masterpiece, a love-song to a great city in the form of a guidebook, as radically and whackily positive as Outrage was negative. As ever with Nairn, what stand out are the unusual choices of buildings (27 pubs, a timber merchant's, the Agapemonite Church in Clapton, gloomy alleys, a boat-builder's Swiss chalet, the odd council estate, Eros House in Catford), the striking and sometimes assertive prose, the insistence on the importance of being moved, emotionally, by what he sees. It's that emotion that's the key. When a building moves him, when he loves a place, his prose takes off and you want to dash out and look at the place yourself. How could one resist a church that resembles an orgasm, or a bank that looks like something left when the seas receded, or a bit of public art that is 'energy made visible'? The arresting prose can be mind-boggling, but it always conveys something about the place. Nairn's London can still tell you more about the capital than a dozen newly-minted, media-savvy, buzzword-saturated guidebooks. It is good to know that there are plans to reprint it.

Ian Nairn: Words in Place is a celebration of all this, but it's also an elegy to a man who died too soon. Alcoholism got him, and, with a sheaf of ideas in his trademark raincoat pocket for further, unwritten books (Nairn's Industrial North – if only), he died, at just 53. His books, very much of their time, have been little reprinted, but Nairn should remain important to all who think about Britain's places and buildings. Never a favourite with architects (though appreciative of many modern buildings, he wrote a famous Observer article headed 'Stop the architects now!') he has always been read by people who, like himself, care about architecture but have no architectural qualifications. He still deserves to be read, and so does this engaging account of his work.

Making and mourning

Christmas books: 3

The next of my handful of Christmas books is the biography of a little known amateur architect who was responsible for the design of one of the most extraordinary buildings of the 19th century. When I learned that Jenny Uglow – author of excellent biographies of William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, and others – was tackling this subject I was eager to get my hands on the book. My eagerness was justified…

Jenny Uglow, The Pinecone
Published by Faber and Faber

The Pinecone is a biography of Sarah Losh, heiress in a prominent family in the northwest of England, and creator of the church of St Mary in the village of Wreay, south of Carlisle, one of the most extraordinary buildings of the 19th century. Sarah Losh is interesting for all kinds of reasons – for her local philanthropy, for her connections with many of the luminaries of the 19th century from the poet Wordsworth to the engineer George Stephenson, for her role as a woman architect in a man's world. and for the visionary design of her church, a building that has been puzzling people ever since it was built in the 1840s.

Jenny Uglow tells this story with intelligence and verve. She is sometimes hampered by the fact that most of her subject's papers have been destroyed – never mind the creation of a remarkable building, Uglow's biographical task occasionally seems to be like making bricks without straw. But she is helped by being able to look at Losh through her links with others. So we see Losh hearing poems read by Wordsworth and Coleridge before publication, paying calls in Carlisle and in Newcastle, where her family were prominent manufacturers, learning from her radical uncle James (friend of William Godwin), and interacting with her beloved sister Katharine, whose early death cast such a shadow over her life. For this is also one of the great sibling-bond stories, joining William Wordsworth and Dorothy, Jane Austen and Cassandra, William Herschel and Caroline.

Above all there is her church. St Mary's Wreay looks more like a work of the Arts and Crafts period of the1880s than a building of the 1840s. But not even the Arts and Crafts produced a structure quite like this, covered with carvings that are far outside the usual church orbit – a tortoise gargoyle, a crocodile, a dragon, lotus buds, gourds, and pinecones (the latter symbolic variously of creation, reproduction, enlightenment, the spirit of man, and the expansion of consciousness). There are carved angels, it is true, but you have to look hard to find much traditional Christian imagery. It is as if Sarah Losh, having daringly entered the male preserve of architecture, looked at the whole business from a different viewpoint, that of a kind of pan-religious perspective, where all faiths are as one.

By describing Sarah's church in such detail, Jenny Uglow also describes her somewhat elusive subject, Sarah herself and her concerns. The church is an act of making and also an act of mourning (for Sarah's parents and sister and other family members); it is both a gathering together of diverse religious symbols and a very specific act of benevolence to the village of Wreay itself, to which Sarah also contributed a school and numerous hand-outs in times of need; it is both a display of traditional craftsmanship and an artistic bolt out of the blue. Uglow's book nails all this – but does not lose sight of the oddity of the place or the elusiveness of its creator.

Not boring

 Christmas books: 2

This next in my series of December books is the work of a writer and broadcaster I've admired for years. I watch out for his pieces in the press, which are not infrequent, although a book by him is a rare event. The man in the dark suit: Jonathan Meades...

Jonathan Meades, Museum Without Walls
Published by Unbound

It's not like London buses. You wait for years for a book by Jonathan Meades and then just one arrives. Museum Without Walls.† It's a collection of pieces – essays, TV scripts – some of which the dedicated follower will have encountered before. A grab-bag then,  containing 54 bits of journalism and six  scripts. What unifies them is a preoccupation with places, which Meades calls the "greatest free show on earth". Peel off the jacket of this book and you will see embossed into the cloth of the binding a guiding maxim: "There is no such thing as a boring place." The book richly embodies this notion. A grab-bag? It's the commodious valise of a thoroughgoing topophile.

They're not the usual guidebook places and they are not, for the most part, the places seen or valued by architects. A lot of what interests Meades lies at what some writers call "marginal" places and spaces: asbestos dumps, collapsing Nissen huts, stretches of tidal mud, flaking Portakabins, allotments, "a petrol pump pitted and crisp as an overcooked biscuit". To many of course this kind of thing is far from marginal, it's just marginal to "heritage", to architectural commentary, to curatorial neatness. Such places need a keen eye to notice them and a bracing prose style to conjure them up in our mind's eye, our mind's nose, and the rest. Like Iain Sinclair (and like Richard Mabey in such books as The Unofficial Countryside) Meades has what it takes.

A lot of the familiar Meades themes are here: the centrifugal quality of London, the similarities between the 1860s and 1960s, the ignorance of the countryside that lies behind the Picturesque movement and the corrosive effect of that movement, the deleterious consequences of our love affair with the suburbs, the delusions of the religious, the scandal of regeneration disguised as atrocious government-funded sub-architecture, the tiresomeness of lowest-common-denominator postmodernism ("oafish pediments"), the blinkers through which we see building materials (why is stone better than concrete or corrugated iron?), the delusive hierarchy of building types (why are churches better than factories or sheds?), the glories of shacks and bricolage, the fascination of terrain vague, and so on. And all of this is described, discussed and dissected in prose that is assertive, bracing, in-your-face, logophilic, and sometimes very funny. There are also some tender passages in which Meades writes about his boyhood – First Love, First Shack – and places that played a special part in his young life – pub car parks near Evesham, the confluence of the Wiltshire Avon and the Nadder, Salisbury, Portsmouth, the New Forest, a valley that the young Meades identified as the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

Many of Meades's interests are interests of my own – Victorian rogue-architects such as Samuel Sanders Teulon, the beauties of Birmingham and Bristol, corrugated iron, the work and sad decline of that great architectural writer Ian Nairn. But there is persuasive writing about unfamiliar territory too – Buenos Aires, the architecture of Rodney Gordon. Fascinating places and spaces and true to the maxim on the cover: never boring. I learned plenty while enjoying myself reading this book, and I think many others will too.§

* * *

†Is this title derived from The Voices of Silence, the vast theory of art by French writer and politician André Malraux, which has a section called "Museum Without Walls"? Maybe. It's a long time since I read Malraux, but "Museum Without Walls" is his term for the illustrated art book, and he shows (amongst other things – Malraux's is a long and complex and, some would say, windy book) how it liberated us from the confines of the art museum, allowing us to put art in new contexts and to see it free from the blinkers of convention. Meades, on television and in his journalism, does something similar. But to write about buildings and call your collection Museum Without Walls is of course to play both on words and on walls.

§Museum Without Walls is published by Unbound, the crowd-funded publisher. I must declare an interest in that I was a member of the large crowd who helped fund the publication.

Paddy

Christmas books: 1

For the next ten days or so, the English Buildings blog becomes a book blog, as I look back at a few of the books I've enjoyed this year, potential Christmas presents, perhaps. I've chosen books relevant in some way to the main concerns of this blog – buildings, history, places – and, to begin with, a biography of one of the greatest writers about places of the last hundred years or so.

Artemis Cooper, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure
Published by John Murray

Left as an infant to grow up with strangers, expelled from various schools, cast adrift and footloose in London, walked from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople aged 18–19, slept in barns and castles, fell in love with Rumanian princess, joined Greek cavalry charge, kidnapped German general in occupied Crete, won DSO, travelled in Greece, settled in Greece with Joan Rayner, wrote award-winning travel books, lauded as best travel writer of his generation, swam the Hellespont aged 69, died aged 96 after a triumphant life lived on his own terms.

Something along those outlines represented what most of us knew of the life of Patrick Leigh Fermor (Paddy, universally) – that, and what mattered: his two stellar books on Greece, Mani and Roumeli, and his luminous account of his walk to Constantinople in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, the first two parts of a projected trilogy, the third part of which never appeared. The baroque prose, the breadth of learning, the delight in and knowledge of languages, the sense of place, the understanding of people: all were in a class of their own.

In Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure Artemis Cooper has filled in the outline and fleshed out the life behind the works. It must have been a challenging task, given that Paddy has said so much about his life in his own books. His bejewelled prose is a tough act to follow. But she has done well, building up the details, throwing light on some of the obfuscations, and maintaining a pace that makes the book compulsively readable. Her biography gives us: a clearer account of Paddy's infant life with his surrogate parents in Northamptonshire than the brief one in A Time of Gifts, plenty of detail about his wartime service and life, a moving description of his reunion with Princess Balasha after war and the corrosive effects of communism had kept them apart for decades, quite a bit on his colourful love life, and plenty of detail about the gestation – both painstaking and painful – of his books.

I have enjoyed discovering that my hero had his faults, which were the ones, mostly, that I'd suspected – a certain thoughtlessness sometimes (amidst much true consideration for others), a know-all quality, an occasional tendency to tweak the facts about his travels (though not the essential facts: it did all happen). Oh, and a troublesome capacity to keep publishers waiting. Every fan of A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water knew about this. Where was the sequel? Years went past, and decades: still nothing. Paddy was "working on it", it was "almost ready", and so on.

Artemis Cooper deals rather briefly with the last part of Paddy's life. Even for someone as energetic as Paddy, the pace of life does slow as one reaches one's 70s, 80s, and 90s, so this brevity is forgivable and understandable – yet, was there really no more to say than some 40 pages on the last four decades of his life? However she does address the important question of the "missing" third instalment of the great walk. Briefly, back in the 1960s Paddy had drafted an account of the last part of the journey, but he remained unsatisfied with it, unable to recast it into a form that he felt good enough. His feeling that he could not live up to the quality of the first two books depressed him, and there were deep clouds over his last years. That enviable life was perhaps not so idyllic after all. Artemis Cooper has set this on the historical record, where it belongs. She also holds out hope that an edited version of Book Three of the journey will be out in about a year. She deserves our thanks for that, and for an enjoyable and generous biography.

Bath, Somerset

Bird spotting

A while back I posted some decorative tile panels advertising post cards and road maps, from the front of a branch of W H Smith in Malvern. Here is one still more colourful panel, this time from a former W H Smith shop, spotted by me in Bath today. As with the Malvern panels, the tiles were made by Carter and Company and the letters were designed by Eric Gill. No doubt there were originally more panels on the Bath store, perhaps illustrating different kinds of books. Now only 'Nature books' survives on the shop facade, which now fronts a branch of Patisserie Valerie. As a reminder of the shop's previous role, this toucan, leaning down from its branch, fits the bill.

Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire

Goth-on-Wye

Ross on Wye is a favourite town of mine, boasting as it does two important characteristics of a town as far as I am concerned: a supply of interesting buildings and a good secondhand bookshop. I've been buying books at Ross Old Books for years and there are also occasional bargains to be had in the market. The town is beautifully set on a rise above the Wye and from the 1770s this beauty was famous due to writers such as William Gilpin, who celebrated the scenery of the Wye as a charitable example of the Picturesque. By the 1830s many visited the town as a base for boat trips on the river and the large white ornately bargeboarded Royal Hotel was built to accommodate the tourists.

The round tower in my picture looks like something from the age of chivalry, but was actually built in the 1830s as part of the setting for this hotel. Flanked by walls incorporating a blocked pointed arch, it looks from a distance like part of some medieval fortifications: town walls, perhaps, to protect the inhabitants of Ross from the marauding Welsh. But when you get near the tower, you can see that the battlements on top are tiny – they're meant simply to afford the building the right chivalric-looking silhouette. The windows, though authentically pointed, are too large for a fortified tower. So this is a tower meant to look good from a distance, as visitors drew close to the town from the valley, and as a kind of marker to lead people to the hotel, which is the other side of the greenery on the right-hand side of my photograph. A beacon for the approaching traveller, in the 1830s, and in 2012, whether that traveller is in search of scenery or books.

Brackley, Northamptonshire

Brought to book

Here’s a warts-and-all photograph of one of my favourite buildings in Brackley, a Northamptonshire town that some of you will know as (I think) the market town in Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford. I’m attracted to this house for various reasons. First of all for the charming, if pulled-about, mid-18th century front. It’s all very restrained – the brick pilasters running up each edge of the facade are easy to miss; the pale bands beneath the windows are plain and simple; the off-centre doorway is modest. It’s not grand Georgian architecture, but the kind of satisfying facade that was put up by the dozen in the 18th century. And you notice I say ‘facade’. This is another example of the effect I noticed in Aylesbury a couple of posts ago: a Georgian brick front applied to an earlier house – in this case, a 17th-century building of rubble masonry.

There’s another reason I always stop here when I visit Brackley. This building is now a bookshop, and apparently a thriving one. This weekend it was also hosting a plant sale in the front garden, hence the unusually busy scene behind the railings. Inside it was calmer but there were customers browsing the mix of new and secondhand books, and buying too. As both new and used bookshops fold under the combined pressure of Amazon and ABE, perhaps more High Street stores should adopt the practice, still quite unusual in Britain, of selling both old and new books. Here at the Old Hall Bookshop, with its ample shelves of art, architecture, topography, and literature (and many more subjects: those are just the shelves that interest me), it certainly works for me.

More on libraries

A number of things that have happened recently make me want to say a few more words about libraries. For one thing, there have been persistent and worrying stories in the press about cuts in the public library service in different parts of Britain. For another, opening this morning’s paper, I have just read a story about Manchester University library, where Chris Stringer’s Homo Britannicus, a book about the beginnings of the human species in Britain, has been shelved in the gay and lesbian section. For yet another, I’m worried that every time I go into my local library there seem to be fewer books on the shelves. Libraries, for all their PCs, bright paintwork, and rebranding as “knowledge stores”, seem to be in decline.

I was in a local library the other day. While I was sitting at a table sorting my papers I earwigged a conversation between one of the librarians and a teenager. The young library user told the librarian that she was doing a project on the Romantic poets at school, and needed to read some poems by two of the English Romantics. She knew that she wanted one of the poets to be Blake, but wasn’t sure about the second – Wordsworth, maybe, or Coleridge, or Shelley. The librarian explained that no books by the English Romantics were on open shelves – they were in the basement store. She’d go down and bring up a selection so that the girl could make her choice. After a few minutes the librarian, who I must say was helpful, polite, and knowledgeable, returned with a small pile of poetry books, including one or two Romantics, such as Byron, who had not been mentioned so far, and the young student looked through them and chose.

So all ended well, with the librarian offering valuable assistance, the library’s collection yielding the required volumes, and the student getting what she wanted. But wouldn’t it have been much better if Wordsworth, Coleridge, and co had been on open shelves, so that people could check them out for themselves without asking for them to be brought up from the basement? I wandered over to the library’s poetry section. It consisted almost entirely of books by recent poets, plus a shelf of anthologies, plus one or two ‘classics’ including Milton and Keats (aha! a Romantic on open shelves after all!). It seems to me that the library was diminished by this unwillingness to display the classics of English literature on its open shelves, as it is diminished too by the small number of novels published more than 50 years ago – and by the relatively small number of books generally visible.

Why does all this matter when the girl got what she wanted anyway? And when you can find the whole of English poetry on the internet, and even download for free the complete works of Shakespeare to read on your iPhone?

Well. Because books are actually a rather good medium for sustained reading. Because there are people who don’t know quite what they’re looking for, but who will make important discoveries and have their eyes and minds opened by browsing books on open shelves. Because books properly shelved in the context of other similar books show knowledge in context and continuum – there are all the Metaphysical poets together, all the books on Norman history next to one another. Because librarians ought to be allowed to make sensible, educative, structured choices about what books to display. Because there are clear and specific advantages to reading literary works such as the poems of Byron or Keats in book form instead of, or as well as, online.

For example, not every copy of a literary work has exactly the same text. This is because, for all kinds of reasons, the original words of the poet don’t always make it into print exactly as they should have done. Or, in some cases, it’s by no means clear precisely what those words were in the first place. So different copies have different texts. And some copies have useful notes, provided by the editor, to clarify meaning, sketch in historical background, or discuss precisely those pesky variations of wording.

A reader discovering poetry needs the best text they can get, properly edited, and preferably with explanatory notes and an introduction. This is not the kind of plain text that you usually find on the web. This is the kind of thing that should be in libraries, and was, not so long ago. Now if it is there it’s hidden away in a basement, waiting for readers who know what they want and a helpful member of staff to find it for them.

Books can be life-changing. I came from a family with few books and 40 years ago my eyes and mind were opened by libraries. I could follow the evolution of English literature, satisfy my nascent passion for architecture, and discover all kinds of things about history by just browsing. I didn’t have to ask anyone’s help; I could follow the shelves. So much was right there because librarians as competent and knowledgeable as today’s had put lots of good, revelatory, inspiring books on shelves, in order, under my nose. People today have the right to expect a service that’s just as good.

Lichfield, Staffordshire

Palace of the book

Before the mid-19th century there were no public libraries in the sense that we have them today. Apart from those belonging to private individuals or universities, most libraries charged the public a fee to borrow books. Such commercial libraries flourished with the rise of the novel in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the middle classes flocked to the circulating libraries to get the latest Henry Fielding or Fanny Burney. Those amongst the poorer classes who could read were excluded.

This state of affairs exercised those who campaigned for social reform, especially the Chartists, who, as well as agitating for electoral reform and building land colonies, set up reading rooms that were run on a cooperative basis. It wasn’t just the Chartists who did this. The early-19th century saw numerous societies and institutes for working people who, in return for a small annual payment, could attend lectures and borrow books. In Lichfield a Reading and Mutual Instruction Society was set up for just this purpose in 1850, and it soon had over 100 members.

This kind of thing worried the establishment – if the lower orders got hold of too much education, they might rebel, and then where would we all be? But by 1850 parliament passed the Public Libraries Act, allowing local councils to levy a halfpenny rate to fund local libraries and museums. Not many councils rushed to do this, but one of the first was Lichfield, whose Free Library and Museum opened in this Italianate building in 1859.

There was a catch with the halfpenny rate, though. The council could use it t build a library but not to buy books. The money for those had to come from somewhere else, a problem that stymied a few library projects before they got off the ground. In Lichfield, the Reading and Mutual Instruction Society wound itself up and donated its books to the new library. And so, in the city of Dr Johnson and David Garrick, everyone had access to books, and this grand building seems to express pride that literature is available to all.