Library Sketches – Sutton Coldfield
I used to use this library a lot, back in the late 80s when I lived in neighbouring Erdington, mainly as far as I remember to borrow CDs. I haven’t been back in at least 15 years. If I’m honest I’ve avoided Sutton Coldfield altogether for the last three years since having my fingers crushed in lift doors in the shopping centre over the road and being too traumatized to return. Still, I put all that behind me for this visit.
The library is housed in the Red Rose Centre, a fairly ungainly 1970s red brick development dominated by a multi-storey car park. Underneath, the centre proper, is the kind of place that might once have been described with some excitement as a ‘shopping precinct’ and used to be home to the town’s flagship Sainsbury’s store. But Sainsbury’s moved out some years ago leaving behind a mixed bag of retailers, the car park, the library and Rumours nightclub to get on with it without them.
Above the library entrance is a large mural about which I can discover very little, other than that it depicts ‘themes of local historical significance’. On the day of my visit I studied it for quite some time. It’s a bit like a North Birmingham ‘Guernica’ – not that easy to work out what’s going on. I managed to make out a bishop, and maybe a knight. My notebook from the day simply describes the scene as ‘some ecclesiastical nonsense’. I like it though. It has a kind of brutalist woodcut vibe about it and reminds me of children’s books of the 70s.
The library opened in 1974 which was also the year that Sutton Coldfield became part of Birmingham, a union still lamented by some of its population. Living in nearby Erdington we used to receive the free Sutton Coldfield newspapers through our door. There were often letters about the issue of vermin in the town centre and it seemed for many correspondents this infestation was linked quite directly to unification with Birmingham. I’m not sure what rodent border control existed before 1974 but something about the creation of the metropolitan county of West Midlands had clearly led to its collapse.
The library is four years my junior and maybe that’s why despite being almost 50 years old it still feels like a new library to me. It’s open plan and large (the biggest in the city after the main Library of Birmingham), though not as large as it once was since the council sold off the second floor earlier this year.
Like most public libraries, Sutton has been fighting for its survival over the last decade. It closed for ‘a few months’ for asbestos removal back in 2010 and didn’t open again until 2013. Maintenance closures for local libraries are like falls for the elderly – something theoretically quite minor and straightforward often turns out to be fatal. Once a library closes its doors for repairs, local authorities can prove very reluctant to open them again. Sutton Coldfield managed to pull through and reopen after a long hibernation, only for the Council to then announce plans to close the library for good saying it was the ‘most expensive to run in the city’.
A local community group called FOLIO (Friends Of Libraries In Our…) Sutton Coldfield was formed to fight the closure. They succeeded finally with a proposal that put a café and a soft play area in the library to generate extra revenue. There was a bit of a spat with rival acronym gang FOLOB (Friends of Library of Birmingham) who accused FOLIO of trying to turn the library into a ‘glorified Wacky Warehouse’ – strong words – but as far as I can see FOLOB failed to come up with any other ideas, so FOLIO won the fight and kept the library open.
FoLoB’s worst fears don’t seem to have come to pass. The soft play and café are around the opposite side of the library from the entrance and on my visit I found the reference section to be properly library silent. It was actually quite baffling how the sound didn’t travel at all in an open plan space. I wondered if it was maybe something unusual about the air in Sutton Coldfield. Maybe that’s why it took so long for anyone to hear me screaming as the lift doors had crushed my fingers. You see the trauma hasn’t really gone away at all.
There were about 30 other people in the library on a Monday lunchtime (not including those in the café and soft play). Many of these were in the reference section which is an amazing resource. I could lose myself for days in the local newspaper archive alone which is unbelievably exhaustive with shelves of bound volumes for each sub-area of Sutton Coldfield. Some dedicated archivist has catalogued all of these, providing painstakingly hand-written indexes like a Benedictine scribe, allowing someone like me to find for example every reference to dog-fouling in Boldmere in a particular year.
After the reference section I looked around the lending library, building up a pile of books to browse through before deciding what to take. There were some adolescent boys behaving extremely furtively in the large print section which seemed charmingly innocent somehow. I picked up Ali Smith’s Public Library, two enormous antique interiors books, and three Manga illustration guides and went and sat down at a desk. Next to me a woman was speaking on her mobile about some paperwork she was going through. Apparently someone had given the single word response: ‘Bus’ in answer to the question ‘What is your route to work?’ The woman next to me found this really funny. She repeated it several times and became slightly more hysterical each time. I thought maybe she needed to get away from her desk and get some air.