There must have been a moment when the last of Britain’s Victorian public bathhouses closed down, when a caretaker turned the key in the lock and set off home for a soak in his own tub, saying “that was a good idea at the time but now it’s over”.
When I stood in the Idea Store — the tarted-up library in East London that was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize for architecture this month — I thought exactly the same thing. The public lending library, another great Victorian institution, has had its day. To pretend otherwise is like bursting in on a woman luxuriating in a private bubble-bath and telling her to take her behind out to a public washroom for a good old hose-down. She has no need of that now, thank you.
The same goes now that we can afford our own books. Some might even say that the widespread affluence that caused the end of bath-houses and libraries is a good thing, but I may be pushing my luck here. I had better keep my voice down; I am in enough trouble as it is.
You see, people get in an awful tizzy about libraries. With each passing year they decline: in the past decade, book-borrowing has dropped by 40 per cent while the cost of the service — now at £1.3 billion — has risen by the same proportion. But the response to this failure is always a new bout of hand-wringing, a new set of celebrities pleading for the public to return. This is because to be anti-library is thought to be anti-book, literacy and all nice, decent British virtues that come with being shushed by a lady in a cardigan. Well, I am daring to report that books are booming in Britain, with sales up by 3 per cent a year since 2001. If you want the truth, it is that books have killed libraries.
To show why, let’s go back to the heyday of the 1980s. In a modest South London reading room I whiled away the hours before adulthood, bringing home tracts of vegetarian propaganda — the more lurid photographs of tortured animals, the better — that I knew would annoy my parents. But then the Nineties, and the internet, happened. The visitors to the library of my childhood drifted away. Almost anything you could want there, the computer could do better.
The man who shuffled in with an embarrassing medical condition to research? Far more information online, and in the comfort of your own home. Ditto almost any research project.
What about those people — it sounds impossibly quaint now — on the waiting list for a new bestseller? For a few quid Amazon will deliver to your door. The other day I bought a second-hand book from Amazon for 90p; with postage it was the cost of a bus ticket to the library and I don’t have to hand it back after three weeks.
What about those who, like me, used to enjoy exchanging juvenile comments with others in the margins of library books? Well, the internet can do that kind of thing too. It’s called blogging.
Even with the internet, our appetite for books grew. As prices fell, people became rich enough to afford the convenience of buying their own, and educated enough to want to. Those with a social conscience buy in Oxfam, using it as a kind of library in which they give money to charity to buy books and donate them back. Those with less conscience simply go to Borders, select a pile of books from the shelves to splatter with cappuccino in the café, then go home empty-handed.
So why do people go to libraries now? To judge from the scene I witnessed at the Idea Store — and the statistics back this up — books are decreasingly the draw. This flagship centre (they don’t call it a library for fear of putting people off) has escalators delivering people from the street straight into the brightly coloured halls. I stopped by the toy-filled play area, went up in the groovy lift to peruse the massage and dance classes, and had a cup of tea with a fantastic view of London through jewel-hued glass. The place looks great and it is thriving, except for those poor neglected shelves.
At the Idea Store I had a radical idea. Let us admit that people can buy their own books if they want to. The one exception to this is children — libraries are vital for encouraging reading and literary tastes. Children’s libraries should be lavished with funding but could be located in the kind of places where they go anyway, such as play centres or after-school clubs — all the better for helping with homework. For everyone else, we should completely redefine what we want.
If the Government decides to compete with £1-an-hour internet cafés, fine. If it wants to provide shelter on a rainy day, somewhere for those at a loose end to sit and read the newspapers, good. The book stock could then be centralised and if you wanted one you could order over the counter or online, to be picked up or delivered to your home in 24 hours, just like at the best independent bookshops.
Don’t think of it as the end of libraries, just the start of millions of personal ones. The library is dead, long live the library.
One green bottle
Every night at one o’clock I am awoken by thoughts of the Government’s recycling policy. I am not dreaming about it — it’s just that I can’t sleep through the noise of hundreds of bottles being thrown out by the bustling restaurant above which I live.
This week brought two depressing reports on how Britain is soiling its own nest. According to the WWF, we consume 50 per cent more natural resources than we can produce. And the Institute for Public Policy Research told us that we are at the bottom of the European heap for rubbish recycling.
This prompted a lot of calls for stricter home recycling schemes. But that misses the point. At the end of the evening, I put a wine bottle in my recycling box and go to bed. At 1am I hear the sound of many large bin-bags of bottles from the restaurant below being chucked into a skip, to be thrown into landfill. Every other restaurant in the street does the same. I think of my one bottle in its green plastic box and it starts to seem absurd.
While individuals may recycle out of the goodness of their hearts, businesses need a profit motive. This we have not given them, in the form of fines or rewards, even though they produce most recyclable waste. Please sort it out, then I can sleep soundly.
Strikers anonymous
I was sad to hear on Tuesday that Daily Telegraph journalists have voted to strike; it has been a long time since industrial relations became so fraught in national newspapers. Not so in America. At The Washington Post a few years ago I was invited to take part in a “byline strike” — a way for journalists to protest without leaving their jobs. Their grand sacrifice? Articles were printed without their names on. The trouble was, readers didn’t seem to notice or, perhaps, to care.
