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.