I should have known. I should have known the minute Andy Burnham announced the launch of a campaign against those who play their music and conversations out loud on public transport (“Share the carriage, not the noise”) and £100 fines, that something would be coming down the pike to obliterate this tiny gain in the quality of my life.
And it was the tiniest gain, by the way. There was no information on where the resources with which to confront the offenders – I’d like Swat teams on every train, armed patrols on every bus – or impose the penalties were going to come from but at my time of life, and in the godforsaken year of 2026, even a gesture in the right direction gladdens the heart.
What has arrived to smash this small, fragile piece of happiness and hope to smithereens? Why, it’s the British Library and its declaration that three out of its 11 reading rooms are to be remade into – someone please hold me as I type – “flexible workspaces”. They will be permanently closed to the public and rented out for private use as office space, meeting rooms and hot desks instead.
At the moment, the three rooms act as science reading rooms and the rationale for closing them is that science readers and researchers do more of their reading and researching online that those in other disciplines do. User numbers have, we are told, correspondingly dwindled over the last decade. More overarchingly, the British Library’s public funding has declined by about a third in real terms since 2010 and its finances took a brutal hit in 2023 when it was cyber attacked by a ransomware gang. Rebuilding from the technological rubble is thought to have cost £7m so far.
So, it is understandable from a certain point of view that it is time to start sweating those reading room assets. But it’s a very narrow point of view. It’s a very short-termist point of view. It’s a very…managerial point of view. And it’s certainly not one that asks what the point of a national public library is, what it is supposed to provide or what it is supposed to stand for.
Most immediately when you pass through its doors, I would argue, a library should offer a quiet space. These are two things in increasingly short supply (especially, of course, in London, where the British Library lives) and they are correspondingly increasingly precious. The modern world is cacophonous and intrusive and we are becoming acclimatised to the idea that this is normal and that it has no effect on us. And yet, the minute you step into a place that does still ban talking out loud, chomping on crisps, listening to music through leaky headphones and all the rest of it, you realise that this is what you have been missing.
This is what is required for the brain truly to rest and then to reflect, to follow up odd thoughts, link stray ideas, dwell on formerly fleeting insights and begin uninterruptedly joining all the weird synaptic firings and misfirings that we call thinking. That’s not a luxury add-on to what’s happening in reading rooms. That’s an integral part of it, and thus an integral part of a library’s business – even if it is not of an instantly profitable kind as far as the bottom line is concerned.
Libraries, as many people have pointed out before me, occupy a special place in the social ecosystem and in the collective psyche because they are the closest thing we have ever managed to create to an unadulterated public good. A library is a collection of books is a repository of knowledge is an untrammelled offering of power to anyone who steps through its doors. Libraries are amongst the last places we have that can be used by absolutely anyone for free; bastions of egalitarianism, a last stand against rampant capitalism – this isn’t romantic hyperbole, this is the truth. And it is what a national library beyond all others, instead of salami-slicing its facilities and selling pieces off, should stand for.
Libraries have always had to fight for their status as an uncommercialised public service and should, more than any other institution, understand that once such a service is sold off it rarely, if ever, comes back. We become permanently the poorer.
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