Camden's locals

THE LONDON borough of Camden has more than one hundred libraries.Those libraries contain certain writings of world renown that were put  on paper in that very borough, again Camden.
          How does that make me feel? Odd, like a bystander who finds himself  an extra in an Academy Award movie shot in his own neighbourhood.
          There are other examples of world fame being local to the Camden.
          The poet John Keats wrote poems in his garden near Hampstead Heath.
          Karl Marx struggled with his carbuncles and angry demands near Chalk Farm station and the Roundhouse music venue.

The young Karl Marx, before he became a Camden local lad in middle age

          Opposite the local Belsize Library, Frank Richards prepared his schoolboy character Billy Bunter to stalk the pages of the Magnet story-paper.
          There are many more examples of the Camden famous living here and there and being mere mortals after all.

The Swiss Cottage is not in Switzerland, and neither is the Swiss Cottage Library

THE term Swiss Cottage is intriguing and confusing: it refers to an old Swiss-style inn, from which not just the Library but the area takes its name.
         The Library building has a history of both breaking up and coming together. The breaking up was brutal: the bombing of the previous library nearby during an air raid of the Second World War. The coming together was the birth of Camden borough fifty years ago, about the same time as the new, brutal library was opened.

Second World War air raid damage to Hampstead Library, Finchley Road. Photo Camden Arts Centre

        
Brutal it was in war, but the new library is Brutal in architecture, for Brutalism was a school of design. Like many a term it started off as criticism and ended as an official name.

Swiss Cottage Library's graceful Brutalist architecture winds up to first floor

          The Library is a listed building protected from those who might want to change it. The architectural award it won years ago was hailed with praise or derision, according to taste.
          Now the Library's beautiful and stark spiral staircases, and its glass and steel interiors are established borough treasures.
          In fact the immediate area is a treasure-house of modernity, with neighbouring leisure centre, swimming-pool and theatre.
          However, you can still find the past in the Library's Reserve Stock, with its books going back a hundred years and more, and still available to readers. I always look at the date-stamps on the sheet in the front of a book to see how far back it has been borrowed.
          

You don't have to keep a secret: Library and Museum of Freemasonry

THE freemasons are supposed to be a secretive lot. I think they still are, but not if you take a genuine interest.
          Their grand library and museum has mysterious fixtures and fittings, symbols and signs. It is a memorial to the freemasons who died in the First World War, the third building on the site since 1775.
          Many occultists, spiritualists and others during the centuries claimed the symbols in the building had magic powers. Not the freemasons. Their symbolism is puzzling, but efficient and friendly, and outsiders merely borrowed it to imagine occult mysteries. Much of it came anyway from ancient civilizations.

Inside the Masonic Temple, the stare that is not rude, but mysterious and intriguing: photo courtesy of Grand Temple, London

          
Their library is welcoming and extensive on the subjects that are supposed to be private: secret traditions and even more secret societies.
          The first time I entered their vast stone temple of a building in Great Queen Street, on the edge of London's Covent Garden, I expected a hushed greeting, but got a hearty welcome.

John Keats was here

A LIBRARY in the London borough of Camden is likely to have a classic book on the shelf, with the house where the genius wrote it built next door.
          This is exactly the case with the Keats Community Library. On one side you have the library, and next door lived the world-famous poet John Keats. He is even supposed to have written his Ode to a Nightingale in the front garden.

The house in Hampstead where John  Keats lived. His works are next door in the building on the right, on the Heath Library shelves. Photo courtesy Keats House

          Imagining the cycles of time and place can make you dizzy: from Keats writing the ode in the 19th century, to you next door reading in the 21st century the ode in print, looking out the window at the garden of Keats House, Hampstead.
     

Senate House and Library, London's truth and myth







   Senate House and Library at the University of London.

  The building attracts myths,but has no time for Hitler.

                     See 'No Time for Hitler, a post below

That library, now this one

WHEN I visit the new Camden borough library Pancras Road, I like to switch at leisure between past and present.
          The visitors to the area, tourists and Londoners, say to me, 'Have you seen what they've done?'
           But they praise, not criticize. The new Pancras Road library is near the new King's Cross station. Both are shimmering in newness and underlined by history.
          To reach the new library, I leave the Underground at King's Cross and walk through the gleaming vastness of the new adjoining overground station. There, ahead, is the new library.
          Geographical district and Library hint strongly at what used to be.  King's Cross before the rebuilding was a tough but not rough area used for location filming in many a black-and-white British movie of the 1940s and 1950s. The Library, before it moved around several corners from within the now 'old' Town Hall was a place packed with low and highbrow books. A few chairs containing dozing locals were stationed at the end of aisles down which earnest students browsed. In the same old building as the library people were married at the registry office and they danced in the ballroom built just before  World War Two broke out.
          The new Library in Pancras Road is part of the  also new Camden borough Civic Offices. To its advantage, on entering, you don't feel you are in a monolith of civic offices,and I suspect you are not mean to feel you are.The old Town Hall remains a walk away in its original position nearby, with its curious side-street entrance you might remember.The new Civic Offices face you with its many levels front-on. My personal impression is that of a smart, welcoming department store, a pleasure to explore, so that among its various seemingly floating levels you find what you want, slowly or quickly: a library, council departments, a cafe. 
          Whoever collects stories and impressions from the past might eventually store similar for the future. 
          King's Cross station and Pancras Road Library are ready to work the imaginations of generations to come.

No time for Hitler

THERE is a story that if Hitler had invaded London he would have claimed the  Senate House as his headquarters. Hitler, supposedly, had his eye on that monolith among university buildings.
          The skyscraper was built in the 1930s, when art deco was innocent and beautiful.  In that period, buildings mighty and authoritarian in stonework and  steel were raised in other countries in the name of dictators light-headed with a taste for invasion which led to the Second World War.
          The Senate House design, at least on the outside, inspired George Orwell's Ministry of Truth in his futuristic satire Nineteen Eighty-Four. It looks just the right building for your movie or TV drama about a rising tyrant or a secret police headquarters. I wish the management well in achieving a decent income in film location fees, which perhaps has already happened.
          However, the story of Hitler coveting Senate House as his London headquarters is an urban myth. A spokesman for Senate House Library, who gave me a guided tour, said the fiction arose in the nineteen-sixties, long after Hitler was dead.
          'Hitler probably didn't even know there was a Senate House,' the spokesman said. The building was finished in nineteen thirty-seven, only two years before the beginning of the Second World War. It was bombed during the War, and repaired, and its sturdy structure  reduced the effect of the Nazi bombs.
          

Take a look at my label

LIKE labels on expensive clothes, the notices on old library books impress. They impress because the books are out of fashion, rather than in fashion like the clothes.
          I borrowed a book from Swiss Cottage Library Reserve Stock. Inside the cover was stuck a notice as a label St Pancras Library, an old, now-vanished St Pancras Library when St Pancras was a borough of its own. The boroughs of the area---Hampstead, St Pancras, and so on, did not unite to become Camden until  1965.
          The book I borrowed turned out to have labels as interesting as the book, which was first issued in 1949. Sixty-six years ago you could borrow it for 14 days, says the notice.
     Other instructions on the label would have upset the more wayward modern readers. The wording included the demand that you had to keep books clean, and 'refrain from turning down the leaves or making pencil or other marks on them.' You had to protect books in wet weather carrying them from and to the library.
          In cases of infectious disease---this was the time of the polio epidemic---books were forbidden to be returned to the library, but had to be delivered to the sanitary authorities, or to the disinfecting station in Grays in Road, London WC1.
     The old St Pancras borough, being a borough in itself, must have had more than one library. The label inside my book says it came from ' St Pancras temporary south branch library' at 102 Euston Road, NW1. I wonder what's there now. I ought to have a look.
           Many of these references on labels or notices---'temporary', for example---hint at sadness. World War Two bomb damage caused libraries of the time to move to makeshift premises.
          But now the labels live on cosily inside the front covers of the books, deep in Reserve Stock. They and the books are safe.
          
          

Coming soon

Stories of Camden Libraries during

 World War Two

Karl Marx and John Keats--Camden local boys

Some notices in our old reserve-stock library books are as interesting as the books themselves

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