Public libraries are under threat. What impact will this have on creativity?

It’s true that libraries make writers and readers; that they house, protect, and defend language. The library is that place where language sits, ready to be picked, poked, and prodded. Most writers affirm the central importance of the library in their childhood and wax lyrical about the private, transformational experiences with books that constituted their desire to write. The library, in our shared public imagination, is a special place. It is understood as the steward of an assortment of wonders, a place to explore curiosities, a place to get lost, to forget about the violence of social life. A beacon of stillness. We know the story of the famous writer’s relationship to the library but not the central role that libraries play in areas hardest hit by state neglect, organised abandonment, and decades of austerity.

All the Libraries in London: Reader is the product of an artistic collaboration; it lists every library currently publicly accessible in London, but it is more than just an index. This is a political and artistic listing, one that invites the reader to rediscover their own memories of their local library as a site of discovery. The book's authors invite us to reflect on our personal relationship to libraries as well as the necessity of collectively securing their future existence.

My local library always felt slightly empty. Ironically – it didn’t have as many books as you’d expect and as a child I always wondered why. Before understanding the political nature of the conditions I lived in; how my postcode, my position in a class structure, my body and the effects of austerity shaped by access to resource, I still thought of my local library as my own desire pathway (poet Robert Mcfarlane describes the concept of a desire pathway as “paths and tracks made over time by the wishes and feet of walkers, especially those paths that run contrary to design or planning” ). I was determined to occupy my local library and utilise it in a way that ran contrary to the state’s design (the forcible closure of libraries due to purposeful underfunding). Libraries are one of the well-worn paths and tracks that are shaped by the wishes of the people. Even as they crumble and remain on the brink of closure, we can maintain our own desire pathways by defending them, by ensuring that our children, our siblings, everyone that comes under our care and protection, benefits from this public good. The library is important not because it offers a route out of poverty for the most “deprived” but because it houses the kind of books that help them critically assess their position in a violent world. Libraries make the kinds of writers and readers whose work will never be permitted into the mainstream by virtue of their class, race and gender, whose work poses a real threat to the governing order. This alone makes them worth defending by any means necessary.

More information about the All The Libraries in London project can be found here, and the book can be purchased here.