Zadie Smith attacks loss of Willesden Green public square as 'cultural vandalism'

The Evening Standard reports today that local author Zadie Smith has stepped ino the debate about the Willesden Town Square application:

A council that closed half its libraries wants to demolish another to make way for new homes, then rebuild it on a cherished public square.

Brent residents are fighting plans to build 100 flats on part of the Willesden Green Library Centre site and erect a “cultural centre” on land in front.

Author Zadie Smith, who grew up in the borough, attacked the scheme as “cultural vandalism” and said the square is one of the few public places where locals can meet for free.

In the New York Review of Books, she wrote about visiting the square when it hosted a French market, saying people were “simply standing around in the sunshine, like some kind of community”.

Protesters claim the plan will result in the loss of a community “breathing space” where local events are held. They have applied for the land to be recognised as a town square. A public inquiry will be held next month.

Martin Redston, leading the campaign, said: “The public square is essential as one of the last pieces of open space in Willesden Green. It is sunny, but sheltered by a lovely old plane tree and looks out on to the 1894 heritage of the old library. It is a place where shoppers and workers can rest, pause and reflect. It is a safe place where parents can let their kids play without straying into main roads.”

Brent, which closed six of its 12 libraries despite residents’ protests, plans to give part of the existing library site to developers in return for them funding the new building, and said it was an “innovative opportunity” to get a new facility without direct investment.

Oliver Sacks: My happy hours in Willesden Green Library

Oliver Sacks, the  British biologist, neurologist, writer, and amateur chemist has written the following letter to the New York Review LINK

To the Editors:

Seeing the photograph of Willesden Library in Zadie Smith’s powerful article [“North West London Blues,” NYR, July 12] gave me a sudden start, and a rush of intense memories and emotions, for it was here that I spent many of the happiest hours of my growing-up years—our house was a five-minute walk from the library—and where I received my real education. I hated school, instruction, classes, and needed to feel free—free to look at the thousands, tens of thousands, of books in the library—to roam and to enjoy the special atmosphere and the quiet companionship of other readers, all, like myself, on quests of their own.

The tender and nostalgic memories evoked by the photo turned to rage and heartbreak as I read Smith’s account of the proposed demolition of the library, and its replacement by luxury flats.

It is true that one can get anything online now, and read everything at home, but there is nothing like a “real” book, and nothing like a library, especially a local library, which is an essential part of a living community. I hope something can be done for Willesden Library, and for public libraries everywhere, but one sees from Zadie Smith’s account of the dawn raid on Kensal Rise Library in London how even passionate communal support—volunteers to run the libraries, and chains of people to protect them—may be impotent to prevent their destruction.

Oliver Sacks
New York City

The Guardian takes up Willesden Bookshop issue

From today's Guardian

 

The Willesden Bookshop is just one of the many independent bookshops that are struggling to survive . Photograph Graham Turner for the Guardian

 

The shelves of the Willesden Bookshop are half-empty. The independent bookseller which launched local author Zadie Smith's debut, White Teeth, and has provided a vast range of books to the diverse north-west London community it has served for 23 years, is in the throes of its closing down sale, and staff and customers are devastated.

Helen Sensi, who has worked at the shop since it opened, called the latest closure "heartbreaking". Sensi is also known as the mysterious "Helen" from Zadie Smith's recent New York Review of Books article] in which the novelist lamented the shop's closure and praised her as the woman who "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."

Part of the Willesden Green Library Centre, the bookshop is being forced to close by Brent council's redevelopment plans for the area. The council believes the current centre, which also houses a museum and a library, is "not fit for purpose, and struck a deal with developer Galliford Try to knock it down and rebuild it in return for allowing Galliford to build 92 flats behind the library. Following huge local protests the plans have now been delayed subject to further consultation, but the bookshop was told its lease would end at the end of August, and it has nowhere else to go.

"It's ironic in that the whole protest has been successful in that the council has had to listen and halt its plans and realise it has to get local people on their side," said owner Steve Adams. "But sadly they haven't come to us and said 'It looks like right now this is happening, can we give you a new lease?' … We would have grabbed at the chance."

The Willesden Green shop is just one of the UK's independent booksellers struggling to survive. Figures from the Booksellers Association showed there were 1,094 independent bookshops left in the UK by the end of 2011, down from 1,159 in 2010 and 1,289 in 2009.

"We've been inundated with people saying 'Why are you closing down?'" said Sensi. "I think people will feel a tremendous sense of loss. Independent shops have had a hard time, but Steve has kept the shop going where others have fallen. He's managed to be a community service, even if the council doesn't recognise it."

Sensi said that the end of the Willesden store was "a disaster for children in terms of literacy. To see children engrossed on the floor, from tiny tots reading cloth books to older children running towards a cover they recognise, is a delight. For me, that's where it begins."

It was in another of Adams's stores, the recently closed Kilburn Bookshop, that Smith herself first started reading. "He allowed the children just to look at the books – they ate them because they were young. He just allows children to enjoy books," said the novelist's mother, Yvonne Bailey-Smith, who said she was "absolutely gutted" about the Willesden shop's closure and who is one of the 5,000 locals to have petitioned the council about the Galliford Try deal.

"It's been my local bookshop for 23 years … It's a huge loss. Willesden hasn't got a landmark, and the bookshop has brought all kinds of people here. [And] it's a community space. I don't know what we're going to have. I don't know what would be a meeting point with that space gone," she said. "It is very upsetting. I have had a tradition to take the children to the bookshop and the library, and now when the [grandchildren] arrive, we always go into the bookshop.

"I've got a beautiful video of my eldest granddaughter sitting in Steve's bookshop by the children's books, reading a novel upside down.

"[And] Zadie's first book was launched there. It was wonderful to have the launch in the bookshop owned by the person who had the shop in which she first started reading. Her voice was quivering when she read."Bailey-Smith praised the shop's range of multicultural titles, particularly for children. When her own children were born, she said, there were very few multicultural books available "that showed characters that looked like themselves. Steve had lots of Errol Lloyd, and anything else he could find, that represented children around the world, and that was lovely."

Adams is now hunting for new premises after declining the council's offer of a short-term rental in the high street, and will meanwhile keep his schools business and website, specialising in multi-cultural children's books, running from an office in a store he co-owns in Highgate.

"We would desperately like to stay in Willesden," he said. "We have listened to residents and broadened the scope of what could be in the retail space, so it could include a bookshop," said a spokesman. "We offered the bookshop a fully fitted unit on the high street as a short-term solution while a permanent unit was found, but this was turned down. We are still in contact with the owners of the Willesden Green Bookshop regarding finding alternative space."

Zadie Smith: The North West London Blues

Demonstrating for Willesden Green at Brent Town Hall

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 19^th 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-20^th 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?