Be a Borrower!

I live just five minutes’ walk from Hanwell Library, located in a lovely old Carnegie Library building saved from extinction in 2020 by a cash strapped Ealing Borough Council and now run as a Community project. I am so lucky to not only have this one on my doorstep but another two Council libraries just 10 and 15 minutes’ bus ride away. Yet it’s known that 800 public libraries have shut since the Tories came to power, despite all their rhetoric and promises of ‘levelling up’ when we all know that access to free books and especially in a quiet environment, is super important and beneficial to everyone, especially young people, who often don’t have such resources at home. Children who read for pleasure tend to be better at English and Maths than children who don’t. Every child should have the opportunity to discover the joys of reading. Even more so when they are free to choose their own books and not have to follow the adult-directed, pre-ordained scripts of a ‘school book’. When I was maybe seven or eight years old, I discovered a local Derby library near the council estate where I lived and soon progressed from a single ticket user to a three-ticket borrower. I would steam through books with unabated pleasure, sometimes trying to return books on the same day as I had borrowed them, only to be told that the system didn’t allow for such speedy consumption.  If my little local library can keep battling on, delivering its magic to children and families in Hanwell, then I know that others will be sharing the joy that I knew as a child in Derby.