Stockport : Stockport Library
The exterior of Stockport Central Library, located near to the railway station, which is sadly going to be closed soon.
The first library was opened in 1875, a rather unassuming little collection in a room on the upper floor of the produce market.
The great Andrew Carnegie, from a time when wealthy tycoons did good things for the community, put £15,000 towards the construction of the new library building which opened in 1913. The design for the building was put out to competition, with the firm of Bradshaw, Gass & Hope winning with their Edwardian Baroque style.
The building is beautiful, although the local heritage collection has already been entirely stripped out in preparation for a move to a new location. The book selection isn’t huge, but it felt well curated and I got the impression that a trained librarian had actually had something to do with the whole arrangement.
I can already see the tragedy that the Stockroom, that is planned to replace this beautiful Carnegie building, is going to be. There’s a level of arrogance to some of the documentation that has been released already, which I suspect has not actually been run past a librarian, as it talks about the exciting coffee options with no mention of the local history section. It’s hard not to laugh at the “stunning” (their word) images they’re using to show off their new building, it looks like Stockport will be a laughing stock. These two are the only ones of the adult library and local history sections. The council want this to be a performance venue to up access numbers entering the building, a desire to have an on-trend coffee shop.
What do they need with all that shrubbery?
Well that looks peaceful and calm. They haven’t burdened themselves with images of where people will actually sit and haven’t bothered at all with images of the local history section. Even hotel chains make a vague stab at having spaces for people to work in their imagery.
The council has also decided it won’t linger on the results of their consultation which showed that 55% of people didn’t want the library to move. They claimed that the problem with these results was that they were skewed to people who used the library. Well, who knew….. Incidentally, the council have just announced more cuts to their library service, but who needs books when you can have a lovely new coffee shop and performance venue?
