The future of Britain’s libraries: why lattes and Wi-Fi are nothing to fear

Few victims of austerity have been so fiercely mourned as libraries. If they are to be revived, a recent report argues, they must look down the High Street to Starbucks. Can that approach change a writer’s beloved childhood sanctuary for the better?

I started coming to Torridon Road Library in Catford, south-east London with my book-loving father when I was four or five. My parents still live in my childhood home, five minutes’ walk from Torridon, and Dad still visits the library every week. But until today I hadn’t been back since I took my GCSEs nearly – God help me – a quarter of a century ago.

Torridon is the sort of library – small, beloved, attuned to the needs of the neighbourhood – that most people would agree we need more of, but which recent local authority cuts have made rarer than ever. Accordingly, it seems like a good place to settle down quietly and read the Independent Library Report, a recently published set of proposals for how those cuts might be mitigated. From the outside, only two things have changed since I shook the exam-room dust off my shoes: automatic doors have been installed behind the heavy oak originals (which now stand open all day) so that all may enter easily and not have to wait for a strong young man to happen past and help them get in; and the bit on the left that once housed the silent study room has been demolished and replaced with a two-storey children’s centre.

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