A decade ago Sheffield City Council announced heavy cuts to the city’s library service, planning to close dozens of libraries. The public outcry that followed, including petitions of over 10,000 signatures, revealed the importance libraries held to the community in Sheffield. What followed was 16 libraries being run by local volunteers, determined to ensure libraries remain a community hub. A decade on, are things any better?
This is not a story of a community’s resilience in the face of public service cuts, but rather serves as evidence of the importance of libraries to communities, and of how the people of Sheffield – as well as the rest of the UK – are desperate to maintain these precious public spaces. Yet still, city councils and national governments over the past fifteen years do not seem to understand the importance libraries hold for communities, which the people who use them have demonstrated as they fought to save their local libraries.
Rather, the budget cuts in Sheffield years ago have been reflected nationwide, as councils plough on with cuts to library services. There has been a drastic amount of library closures over the last fifteen years or so, and the impact of this cannot be underestimated as spending on libraries in 2009 was at £1 billion, but by 2019 this had declined by a quarter. The increasing number of councils having to declare themselves bankrupt means that they have had to limit spending on important public services – our libraries therefore are seen as expendable. Birmingham City Council declared bankruptcy in 2023 and has seen an alarming amount of library closures, particularly in the most deprived areas of the city.
Not only is this a reflection of the damage inflicted by the last 14 years of government policy centred around austerity, but conveys how underappreciated libraries are. The role of a library is not just as a source of academic enrichment, but they are embedded within our social infrastructure, particularly important for the youth and those from underprivileged backgrounds. The cultural capital they provide, allow libraries to serve as a vehicle of social mobility. The very issues that austerity and budget cuts wish to solve, are solved by libraries. It is therefore counterproductive to ruthlessly close them down and demonstrates how underappreciated they are.
Iona Mandal, Birmingham’s Youth Poet Laureate, is a member of the Brum Library Zine, a project by local artists and writers who are championing Birmingham’s disappearing libraries. Mandal criticised the erasure of libraries noting that they have been “a space which has fostered a love of literature in me”. She further credited libraries with enabling her to communicate and make friends when her family first moved to this country, “libraries were a place where I first picked up board books to grasp English, and later found bilingual storybooks to gain confidence in my mother tongue, Bengali.”
It is important to note that library closures have disproportionately affected those in deprived areas which are around “four times more likely to lose a local venue”. This is disastrous for social equality as those who feel isolated/underrepresented within the education system often don’t have the same access to literature or family members with higher education, exacerbating class inequality. Therefore, a free public service such as the local library is pivotal to the academic development of those who otherwise may go without. This reinforces how library closures and loss of public services has disproportionately impacted those from more disadvantaged backgrounds, widening the inequality gap.
Currently, to prevent the loss of their local library, communities must defer to the short term solution of taking it over themselves. This means they are volunteer run and reliant on community spirit or generosity. The UK no longer has its established nationwide network of public libraries, instead it has become a patchwork of partially public and community run institutions. This highlights how people have unequal access to what should be a reliable public service. This alternative has prevented many libraries from disappearing completely, as evidenced in sixteen of Sheffield’s libraries that are community run.
As more libraries are scheduled to be closed in the coming year, many communities will have the option to take it over themselves instead. However, whilst this is working in the short term, volunteer-run libraries are not the desired solution. Volunteer-run libraries can further the education and inequality gap, as libraries in deprived areas are less likely to have community members who can financially afford to give up their time for unpaid work. Their closure is therefore indicative of a more deep seated issue of government spending being characterised by a dismissive attitude towards the perpetuation of class inequality, particularly in relation to education. The cost of living crisis means that more and more people are unable to volunteer, showing the lack of sustainability in the long term for volunteer-run libraries. Ultimately this means there is not a consistent national network of public libraries and some areas, typically those with more socio-economically well off residents, have greater access to libraries than others.
It appears that currently there are two options for communities, either take over the library themselves as volunteers – meaning they must give up their time, especially difficult during the recent cost of living crisis – or watch a significant and treasured part of society disappear. I present a radical third option and the only real long term solution: to invest in libraries. To appreciate libraries for the social hubs of education, social mobility and togetherness that they are. To understand that spending in the way of libraries is an investment into communities, into young people, into education, into social mobility, into a workforce. In order to have an educated, skilled workforce, in order to foster thriving social communities, in order to offer opportunity to all, we must invest in these essential community spaces.
