THE foyer of Swiss Cottage Library provoked me to imagine times before I was born.
This year the emergency evacuation of nearby high-rise residential blocks meant a centre for helping and informing the residents had to be set up. The location was the Library and the attached Leisure Centre. In the Library foyer and around the Leisure-Centre cafe and swimming-pool, there were desks, staff and volunteers in conspicuous jackets. They walked, sat and wrote, and assured the many visitors.
The high-rise blocks had been inspected and tested for safety against fire, and still are being subjected at the time of writing.
The alert to the London borough of Camden had come from the fatal fire in a high-rise block in west London.
All this set me thinking. You might know from my previous posts my determination to remember a library in the War. That was the forebear of this library, the ill-fated Hampstead Central Library, bombed twice in air raids in the Second World War, once with the hideously destructive VII rocket. It's a few bus stops up the road and still standing, now used as an arts centre.
In the present, the west London tower fire is unbearable to contemplate. It cast me back to the people who lived through the air raids of the First World War and the Second World War. Such disasters as the present one in west London they might have had to endure every week or more.
The present occupation of Swiss Cottage Library and Leisure Centre channeled me to history, buoying me along to see the Blitz spirit suddenly roused in the present. The old rallying points are invisible but still there.
