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| Demonstrating for Willesden Green at Brent Town Hall |
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Last time I was in Willesden Green I took my daughter to
visit my mother. The sun was out. We wandered down Brondesbury Park towards the
high road. The ‘French Market’ was on,
which is a slightly improbable market of French things sold in the concrete
space between the pretty turreted remnants of Willesden Library (1894) and the
brutal red brick beached cruise ship known as Willesden Green Library Centre
(1989). We walked in the sun down the
urban street to the concrete space – to market. This wasn’t like walking a
shady country lane in a quaint market town ending up in a perfectly preserved
eighteenth century square. No-one was
wearing a barbour jacket, the WI were not selling jam and you could not hear
cows lowing in the next field. It was not even like going to one of these
Farmer’s Markets that have sprung up all over London at the crossroads where
personal wealth meets a strong interest in artisanal cheeses.
But it was still
very nice. Willesden French Market sells cheap bags. It sells CDs of old time
jazz and rock ‘n’ roll. It sells umbrellas and artificial flowers. It sells
ornaments and knick-knacks and doo dahs, which are not always obviously French
in theme or nature. It sells water pistols. It sells French breads and pastries
for not much more than you’d pay for the baked goods in Gregg’s down Kilburn High Road. It sells cheese, but of the
decently priced and easily recognizable kind - brie, goat’s, blue - as if the
market has travelled unchanged across the channel from some run-down urban
suburb of Paris. Which it may have done for all I know.
The key thing about Willesden’s French Market is that it
accentuates and celebrates this concrete space in front of WGLC, which is at
all times a meeting place, though never quite so much as it is on market day.
Everybody’s just standing around, talking, buying or not buying cheese, as the
mood takes them. It’s really pleasant. You could almost forget Willesden High
Road was ten yards away. This matters. When you’re standing in the market
you’re not going to work, you’re not going to school, you’re not waiting for a
bus. You’re not heading for the tube or shopping for necessities. You’re not on
the high road where all these activities take place. You’re just a little bit
off it, hanging out, in an open air urban area, which is what these urban high
streets have specifically evolved to stop people doing.
Everybody knows that if
people hang around for any length of time in an urban area without purpose they
are likely to become ‘anti-social.’ And indeed there were four homeless drunks
sitting on one of the library’s strange architectural protrusions, drinking
Special Brew. Perhaps in a village they would be sat under a tree, or have
already been driven from the area by a farmer with a pitchfork. I do not claim
to know what happens in villages. But here in Willesden they were sat on their
ledge and the rest of us were congregating for no useful purpose in the
unlovely concrete space, simply standing around in the sunshine, like some kind
of community. From this vantage point we could look ahead to the turrets, or
left to the Victorian police station (1865), or right to the half-ghostly
façade of the Spotted Dog (1893).
We could have a minimal sense of continuity with what came before.
Not so much as the people of Hampstead must have, to be sure, or the folk who
live in pretty market towns all over the country, but here and there in
Willesden the past lingers on. We’re glad that it does. Which is not to say
that we are overly nostalgic about architecture (look at the library!) but we
find it pleasant to remember that we have as much right to a local history as
anyone, even if many of us arrived here only recently and from every corner of
the globe.
On market day we permit ourselves the feeling that our neighbourhood,
for all its catholic mix of people and architecture, remains a place of some
beauty that deserves minimal preservation and care. It’s a nice day out, is my
point. Still, there’s only so long a toddler will stand around watching her
grandmother greet all the many people in Willesden her grandmother knows. My
daughter and I took a turn. You can’t really take a turn in the high road so we
went backwards, into the library centre. Necessarily backwards in time, though
I didn’t - couldn’t - bore my daughter with my memories: she is still young and
below nostalgia’s reach. Instead I will bore you. Studied in there, at that
desk. Met a boy over there, where the phone boxes used to be. Went, with school
friends, in there, to see The Piano and
Schindler’s List (cinema now defunct)
and afterwards we went in there, for coffee (café now defunct) and had an
actual argument about art, an early inkling that there might be a difference
between a film with good intentions and a good film.
Meanwhile my daughter is running madly through the
centre’s esplanade, with another toddler who has the same idea. And then she
reverses direction and heads straight for Willesden Green Book Shop, an
independent shop that rents space from the council and provides - no matter
what Brent Council may claim - an essential local service. It is run by Helen.
Helen is an essential local person. I would characterize her essentialness in
the following way: ‘Giving the people what they didn’t know they wanted.’
Important category. Different from the concept popularized by Mr Murdoch:
giving the people what they want. Everyone is by now familiar with the Dirty
Digger’s version of the social good – we’ve had thirty years of it. Helen’s
version is different and necessarily perpetrated on a far smaller scale.
Helen
gives the people of Willesden what they didn’t know they wanted. Smart books,
strange books, books about the country they came from, or the one that they’re
in. Children’s books with children in them that look at least a bit like the
children who are reading them. Radical books. Classical books. Weird books.
Popular books. She reads a lot, she has recommendations. Hopefully, you have a
Helen in a bookshop near you and so understand what I’m talking about. In 1999
I didn’t know I wanted to read David Mitchell until Helen pointed me to Ghostwritten. And I have a strong memory
of buying a book by Sartre here, because it was on the shelf and I saw it. I
don’t know how I could have known I wanted Sartre without seeing it on that
shelf – that is, without Helen putting it there. Years later, I had my book
launch in this bookshop and when it got too full, mainly with local friends of
my mother, we all walked up the road to her flat and carried on over there.
And
it was while getting very nostalgic about all this sort of thing with Helen,
and wondering about the possibility of having another launch in the same spot,
that I first heard of the council’s intention to demolish the library centre
along with the bookshop and the 19th century turrets and the
concrete space and the ledge on which the four drunks sat. To be replaced with
private luxury flats, a greatly reduced library, ‘retail space’ and no
bookshop. (Steve, the owner, could not afford the commercial rise in rent. The
same thing happened to his Kilburn Bookshop, which closed recently after thirty
years.) My mum
wandered in, with some cheese. The three of us lamented this change and the
cultural vandalism we felt it represented. Or, if you take the opposite view,
we stood around pointlessly, like the Luddite, fiscally ignorant liberals we
are, complaining about the inevitable.
A few days later I got back on a plane to New York, where
I teach for a part of each year. Logically it should be easier, when a person
is far away from home, to take bad news from home on the chin, but anyone who
has spent time in a community of ex-pats knows the exact opposite is true:
no-one could be more infuriated by events in Rome than the Italian kid serving
your cappuccino on Broadway. Without the balancing context of everyday life all
you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad. Quickly you
become hysterical. Consequently I can’t tell whether the news coming out of my
home is really as bad as it appears to be, or whether objects perceived from
three thousand miles away are subject to exaggerations of size and colour. Did
a Labour-run council really send heavies into Kensal Rise Library, in a dawn
raid, to strip the place of books and Mark Twain’s wall plaque? Are the people
of Willesden Green seriously to lose their bookshop, be offered a smaller
library (for use by more patrons from other libraries Brent has closed), an
ugly block of luxury flats – and told that this is “culture?” Yes. That’s all
really happening. With minimal consultation, with bully-boy tactics, secrecy
and a little outright deceit. No doubt Cllr Mo Butt (Brent Council) finds
himself in a difficult position: the percentage cuts in Brent are amongst the
highest in the country, mandated by central government. But the chronic
mismanagement of finances is easily traced back to the previous Labour
government, and round and round goes the baton of blame. The Willesden Green
plan as it stands so clearly gives the developers an extremely profitable land
deal – while exempting them from the need to build social housing – that you
feel a bit like a child pointing out. In this economy who but a child would
expect anything else?
Reading these intensely local stories alongside the
national story creates another effect that may be only another kind of optical
illusion: mirroring. For here in The Leveson Inquiry you find all the same
traits displayed, only writ large.
Minimal consultation, bully-boy tactics, secrecy, outright deceit. Are
some of the largest decisions of British political life really being made at
the private dinner tables of a tiny elite? Why is Hunt texting Murdoch? What
did Rebekah promise Dave and Dave promise Rebekah in that pretty little market
town of Chipping Norton? During another period of ex-pat existence, in Italy, I
sat at a Roman café table in a Renaissance square rolling my eyes at the soap
opera of Italian political life: wire-tapped politicians and footballers and TV
stars, backroom media deals, glaring conflicts of interest, tabloid culture run
riot, politicians in the pockets of newspapers. I used to chuckle over la repubblica and tease my Italian
friends about the kind of problems we didn’t have in our basically sound
British parliamentary democracy.
And so I recognize myself to be an intensely naïve person.
Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political
insight. And I retain a particular naivety concerning the British state, which
must seem comical to many people, particularly younger people. I can only
really account for it by reaching back again, briefly, into the past. It’s a
short story about debt – because I owe the state, quite a lot. Some people owe
everything they have to the bank accounts of their parents. I owe the state.
Put simply, the state educated me, fixed my leg when it was broken, and gave me
a grant that enabled me to go to university.
It fixed my teeth (a bit) and found housing for my veteran father in his
dotage. When my youngest brother was run over by a truck it saved his life and
in particular his crushed right hand, a procedure that took half a year, and
which would, on the open market - so a doctor told me at the time - have cost a
million pounds. Those were the big things, but there were also plenty of little
ones: my subsidized sports centre and my doctor’s surgery, my school music
lessons paid for with pennies, my university fees. My NHS specs aged 9. My NHS
baby aged 33. And my local library. To steal another writer’s title: England
made me. It has never been hard for me to pay my taxes because I understand it
to be the repaying of a large, in fact, an almost incalculable, debt.
Things change. I don’t need the state now as I once did;
and the state is not what it once was. It is complicit in this new, shared
global reality in which states deregulate to privatize gain and re-regulate to
nationalize loss. A process begun with verve by a Labour government is
presently being perfected by the coalition. The charming tale of benign state intervention
described above is now relegated to the land of fairytales: not just naïve but
actually fantastic. Having one’s own history so suddenly and abruptly made
unreal is an experience of a whole generation of British people, who must now
wander around like so many ancient mariners boring foreigners about how they
went to university for free and could once find a National Health dentist on
their high street. I bore myself telling these stories. And the thing that is
most boring about defending libraries is the imputation that an argument in
defense of libraries is necessarily a social-liberal argument. It’s only
recently that I had any idea that how a person felt about libraries - not
schools or hospitals, libraries -
could even represent an ideological split. I thought a library was one of the
few sites where the urge to conserve and the desire to improve - twin poles of
our political mind - were easily and naturally united. Besides, what kind of
liberal has no party left to vote for, and feels not so much gratitude to the
state as antipathy and, at times, fear?
The closest I can find myself to an
allegiance or a political imperative these days is the one expressed by that
old Leftist Tony Judt: “We need to learn to think
the state again.” First and foremost I need to become less naïve. The money
is gone, and the conditions Judt’s generation inherited and my generation
inherited from Judt’s are unlikely to be replicated in my lifetime, if ever
again. That’s the bad news from home. Politically all a social liberal has left
is the ability to remind herself that fatalism is only another kind of trap,
and there is more than one way to be naïve. Judt again: “We have freed
ourselves of the mid-20th century assumption – never universal but
certainly widespread – that the state is likely to be the best solution to any given problem. We now need to liberate
ourselves from the opposite notion: that the state is – by definition and
always – the worst possible option.”
What kind of a problem is a library? It’s clear that for
many people it is not a problem at all, only a kind of obsolescence. At the
extreme pole of this view is the technocrat’s total faith: with every book in
the world online, what need could there be for the physical reality? This kind of argument thinks of the library
as a function rather than a plurality of individual spaces. But each library is
a different kind of problem and ‘the internet’ is no more a solution for all of
them than it is their universal death knell. Each morning I struggle to find a
seat in the packed university library in which I write this, despite the fact
every single student in here could be at home in front of their mac book
browsing Google Books. And Kilburn Library - also run by Brent Council but
situated, despite its name, in affluent Queen’s Park – is not only thriving but
closed for refurbishment. Kensal Rise is being closed not because it is
unpopular but because it is unprofitable, this despite the fact that the
friends of Kensal Rise library are willing to run their library themselves (if
All Souls College, Oxford, which owns the library, will let them.) Meanwhile it
is hard not to conclude that Willesden Green is being mutilated not least
because the council see the opportunity for a sweet real estate deal.
All libraries
have a different character and setting. Some are primarily for children or
primarily for students, or the general public, primarily full of books or
microfilms or digitized material or with a café in the basement or a market out
front. Libraries are not failing ‘because they are libraries.’ Neglected
libraries get neglected, and this cycle, in time, provides the excuse to close
them. Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library
offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do
not have to buy anything in order to stay. In the modern state there are very
few sites where this is possible. The only others that come readily to my mind
require belief in an omnipotent creator as a condition for membership. It would
seem the most obvious thing in the world to say that the reason why the market
is not an efficient solution to libraries is because the market has no use for
a library. But it seems we need, right now, to keep re-stating the obvious.
There aren’t many institutions left that fit so precisely Keynes’ definition of
things that no one else but the state is willing to take on. Nor can the
experience of library life be recreated online. It’s not just
a matter of free books. A library is a different kind of social reality (of the
three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values
beyond the fiscal.
I don’t think the argument in favour of libraries is
especially ideological or ethical. I would even agree with those who say it’s
not especially logical. I think for most people it’s emotional. Not logos or
ethos but pathos. This is not a denigration: emotion also has a place in public
policy. We’re humans, not robots. The people barricading Kensal Rise Library
love that library. They were open to any solution on the left or on the right
if it meant keeping their library open. They were ready to Big Society the hell
out of that place. A library is one of
those social goods that matter to people of many different political attitudes.
All that the friends of Kensal Rise and Willesden Library and similar services
throughout the country are saying is: these places are important to us. We get that money is tight, we
understand that there is a hierarchy of needs, and that the French Market or a
Mark Twain plaque are not hospital beds and classroom size. But they are still
a significant part of our social reality, the only thing left on the high
street that doesn’t want either your soul or your wallet.
If the losses of
private companies are to be socialized within already struggling communities
the very least we can do is listen to people when they try to tell us where in
the hierarchy of their needs things like public space, access to culture and
preservation of environment lie. “But I never use the damn things!” says Mr
Notmytaxes, under the line. Sir, I believe you. However. British libraries
received over 300 million visits last year, and this despite the common neglect
of the various councils that oversee them. In North West London people are even
willing to form human chains in front of them. People have taken to writing
long pieces in newspapers to ‘defend’ them. Just saying the same thing over and
over again. Defend our libraries. We like libraries. Can we keep our libraries?
We need to talk about libraries. Pleading, like children. Is that really where
we are?
