Library Tickets
Nechells in the 1970s was a good time and place to be a child. The area’s industrial heyday was over and its future as a rebranded and forlorn regeneration zone was yet to come. This was the liminal phase of abandoned factories, derelict houses and weed-strewn expanses of wasteland. Nechells was essentially a sprawling, insanely hazardous, post-apocalyptic playground for local children to enjoy.
And I did enjoy it, but sometimes on biting February days or sodden April afternoons it was nice to find somewhere warmer, less treacherous to explore and that place for me was the local library.
The library was housed in an imposing red brick, Gothic structure built in 1892.It was constructed on a tight triangular plot and the first time I saw a picture of the famous Flatiron building in New York it reminded me my local wedge-shaped library. Technically Nechells library did not exist, it was called instead Bloomsbury Library. I’ve since discovered that this was simply because Bloomsbury in London was fashionable and known for its handsome Georgian terraces. The belief was that the name alone would add a patina of prestige and sophistication to any development, even one in an inner-city industrial slum. But I grew up knowing only one Bloomsbury, and in later life when I heard talk of the Bloomsbury Set, I was puzzled. I assumed that Nechells must just have been a lot more literary in the past. Maybe all those demolished houses had contained poets.
Bloomsbury Library interior is my all time favourite smell. I’ve tried lots of other Victorian libraries but none have the blend quite right. It’s a very particular distillation of old books, damp anoraks, parquet flooring, wax polish and sunlight.
I always liked the children’s section. I enjoyed the small, brightly coloured wooden blocks that served as chairs and the lovely hollow noise they made as you pulled them across the parquet floor. I liked the books too – even though in my memory most of them featured terrifying woodcut illustrations of whey-faced children and malevolent little old men. What I liked best though as a young child, in fact very much the main reason to go to the library in the first place, was all the business with the tickets.
I think on balance life is significantly better for my children than it was for me in many ways, but a barcoded plastic card will never afford them the joy and deep satisfaction that my eight little chunky cardboard library tickets gave me. There are few greater thrills for a child than understanding how something works – and the direct exchange of one ticket for one book and vice versa was wonderfully free of mystery and complication. Added to that was the absolute buzz of seeing and hearing a date stamp do just what it was brought into this world to do. It makes me wonder: why didn’t toy companies make library playsets for children? Why instead were we bombarded year after year with deadly Post Office Sets with their impenetrable mini-DVLC forms and assorted other state bureaucracy? Chad Valley missed an enormous trick.
I was probably nine or ten before I began to appreciate the library more fully and realise that the books themselves could be almost as enthralling as the ticketing system. I spent hours in the teen-fiction section (as it was then known). I remember burning my way through all of Joan Lingard’s Kevin and Sadie novels set against a backdrop of the Troubles in Northern Ireland; all of John Christopher’s post-apocalyptic novels about The Tripods; and later discovering Mervyn Peake and Gormenghast for the first time. The books I got from Bloomsbury library shaped me as a reader, a writer and a person.
The allure of the books must have been great because visiting the library involved braving a hazardous border crossing and engaging in dangerous territorial incursion.
I went to St Josephs Roman Catholic primary school which was in a state of permanent war with the provocatively named Cromwell Street school just over the road. The library lay in Cromwell’s godless territory and I suffered many attacks and ambushes on my way to and from its doors: my bike was taken, I was the frequent target of stone throwing snipers and on one occasion, rather elaborately my anorak hood was used as an ashtray by bigger boys. It’s not purely rose-tinted cliché to say that the library was a sunlit sanctuary from the world outside its doors.
I left Nechells when I was 15 and John Madin’s bold, Brutalist library in the city centre became my local after that. That library is in the process of being demolished as I write, but that’s a whole other eulogy. Nechells changed beyond recognition over the years, but the library remained. I’d go back there sometimes as a grown-up yearning for some connection with my past, I’d pick up a book, sit at a desk and try not to sniff the air like some terrible library pervert.
In 2013 some thieves (and I’ll always suspect they were ex-Cromwell Street pupils) stripped all the lead off the library’s roof causing flooding and significant damage to the building and its stock. For Birmingham City Council looking to cut costs it was enough to close the library for good. In the local paper, an anonymous library employee, doubtless someone I’d once envied for their freedom with a date stamp was quoted as saying:
“We are all very disappointed as many of us have worked there a good many years and love the building. It is so old and has so much character.”
A year later I found the library listed for sale on a property website – just £100,000 guide price for what was described as:
‘An imposing late nineteenth century grade II listed library in need of some repair and improvement.
Features include access to a clock tower.’
In 2008 I went to New York to visit the offices of the publishing company Henry Holt. They’d just published my first novel in the US and I was over there doing publicity. I hope that makes me sound like a big shot and nicely skates over the fact that the trip was largely a baffling ordeal and my subsequent two books died a death there. This memoir is seeping inexorably toward its inevitable, sentimental conclusion – how the child in the library became the published author. ‘I looked up at the towering skyscrapers and thought of all the places my eight library tickets had taken me’. But I’m pretty sure I didn’t do that. I gave the taxi driver the address and probably thought instead of what if anything the publishers might have laid on as a buffet. It wasn’t until we pulled up and I saw the famous silhouette that I realised the publishers were based in the Flatiron Building. I thought of Bloomsbury library then, the smell and the sunlight and the pages, a vivid sense-memory, gone as soon as it came. I got out of the cab and entered the famous building. There was no buffet.
Born in 1965 in Stechford, Birmingham, I spent many Saturdays in the mid 70s taking the 53 bus up the road to the library at the Poolway shopping centre with my older sister. My mom, Irish and rather paranoid since she did the unimaginable thing of throwing my dad out in 1973, did not allow us to play out, but a trip to the library, sure what was the harm in that.
My memories of these Saturdays are not really specific, but I can picture the library which was modern and small, sandwiched in amongst the other shops in the 1960s shopping centre, and picturesquely called Kents Moat Library. (Was it a thing in the 60s to name new concrete and glass buildings after old wooden and stone ones? There are several tower blocks in Chelmsley Wood named after Oxbridge colleges, which just seems to be taking the piss.) Children’s fiction was on the left wall at the back, adult fiction on the right, with crime fiction in the middle; in my last visits to the library, aged 12, this is where I headed as I had graduated, with great sophistication I thought, to reading Agatha Christie. I also seem to remember that I started with four dark blue cardboard tickets for children’s books but moved with age to six beige tickets for adult books; I was very pleased with those tickets.
Your memory of kids books with “terrifying woodcut illustrations of whey-faced children and malevolent little old men” struck a chord; I spent a lot of time browsing and often the reason for choosing one book over another would be the scared attraction caused by some weird illustration.
After swapping the tickets for books, me and my sister would go to Woolworths and buy a 1/4lb of pick and mix, which would take at least 20 minutes to choose. Then a bus ride home to read and try to eke out the sweets until Saturday evening tv started, maybe Starsky and Hutch or Seaside Special through to Match of the Day. My sister always made her sweets last longer than me.
I found my way to your article after reading and loving What Was Lost. It got me thinking about childhood places. Although I still live in Birmingham I haven’t been near the Poolway in years and I thought I should make a nostalgic visit. Then I googled the Poolway and found a few grainy photos on some Brum nostalgia forums along with this apocalyptic youtube video marking the life and death of the centre, 1961-2017 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9p8AtWmCcg The camera pans past the library at 3:06. I didn’t watch to the end. Forward Birmingham!