We must protect and reinvent our local libraries

Growing up in Accrington, Jeanette Winterson found refuge and inspiration in her local library. In an age of austerity, the need to protect and reinvent libraries for the future is more urgent than ever
Children in a public library, 1946
'For kids in particular, ebooks aren't the answer' … a public library in north London, January 1946. Photograph: Fred Morley/Fox Photos/Getty Images

We must protect and reinvent our local libraries

Growing up in Accrington, Jeanette Winterson found refuge and inspiration in her local library. In an age of austerity, the need to protect and reinvent libraries for the future is more urgent than ever

I was born in Manchester. Brought up in Accrington, 20 miles north-east. I was adopted by Pentecostal parents who wanted me to be a missionary. I've been doing my best ever since.

The Accrington Public Library was a stone-built, fully stocked library, built on the values of an age of self-help and betterment. It was built in 1907 with money from the Carnegie Foundation. Outside were the carved heads of Shakespeare and Milton, Chaucer and Dante. Inside were art nouveau tiles and a gigantic stained glass window that said useful things such as "INDUSTRY AND PRUDENCE CONQUER".

The library held all the Eng lit classics, and quite a few surprises such as Gertrude Stein. I had no idea of what to read or in what order, so, staring at the shelves that said "English Literature in Prose, A-Z", I just started alphabetically. Thank God her last name was Austen …

The Accrington Public Library ran on the Dewey Decimal System, which meant that books were meticulously catalogued, except for pulp fiction which everybody despised. So romance was just given a pink strip and all romance was simply chucked unalphabetically on to the romance shelves. Sea stories were treated the same way, but with a green strip. Horror had a black strip. Mystery stories shlock-style had a white strip, but the librarian would never file Chandler or Highsmith under mystery – they were literature, just as Moby-Dick was not a sea story and Jane Eyre was not romance.

Humour had a section too … with a wavy orange giggle strip. On the humour shelves, I will never know why or how, was Gertrude Stein, presumably because she wrote what looked like nonsense …

I used to help out at the library. I was a rough, tough kid, not much good at school, except for words. We had six books in our house but I had the library. I loved that building – built for the working classes – built for me. I loved the sense of energetic quiet. When I left home at 16 and was living in a Mini, I went to the library all evening until it closed.

My own Carnegie library in Accrington is still open. I visited recently. There are far fewer books. The lovely separate children's library has been closed. There are no longer classical music concerts or lectures – Pitman Painters' style. There are computers of course and plenty of people coming in and out. The library is doing its best according to its remit of being a community centre with books. What the library isn't any more is the place of unassailable knowledge I encountered as a kid.

Andrew Carnegie was a crofter's lad who emigrated from Scotland to America and became a billionaire. But he believed in books and the chances they offered, and he wanted libraries to be the universities anyone could attend and no one would ever have to leave. He paid for 660 libraries in the UK and Ireland – and 1,500 or so in America.

"Man does not live by bread alone. I have known millionaires starving for lack of the nutriment which alone can sustain all that is human in man, and I know workmen, and many so-called poor men, who revel in luxuries beyond the power of those millionaires to reach. It is the mind that makes the body rich. There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else."

He was wrong about that – the underclass that possesses no money and nothing else either is the most destitute on earth. That underclass is growing – here in Britain. In fact, Accrington is second on the list of the poverty map, according to Experian Public Research, analysing data for the Guardian in June this year. So it would seem straightforward then, to plough what money there is into alleviating poverty and providing essential services.

Here's Tony Durcan "director of culture, libraries and lifelong learning, Newcastle City Council", in the news just now, over £7m-worth of lethal cuts to Newcastle Library Services: "Faced with agonising decisions about child protection, care for the elderly and emptying bins, where do libraries, leisure centres and culture rank? I think we all know the answer."

Do we? Poor Durcan – it's not his fault – but I think we should look more closely at this answer, and therefore at the question itself. Let's go to Manchester in 1852 – where the first public lending library in England opened. The 1850 Library Act allowed local authorities to spend a penny in the pound on libraries. Dickens took the train up there for the opening. Twenty-two thousand working people helped raised the money to buy books for the library.

A hundred years after Engels was standing in the sewage of the Manchester slums, imagining a world where men and women would be more than useful objects, the second world war was nearing its end in Britain. John Maynard Keynes was overseeing the beginnings of the Arts Council in 1944 – which sounds like a crazy priority at the end of a world war, when the county was literally in ruins and Britain had no money at all – and there was food rationing. But the Labour party had a vision for postwar Britain, and education, art and culture for everyone were at the heart of that vision. A national theatre, free entry to museums, the expansion of the BBC. The Arts Council's first slogan in 1946 was "The Best for the Most". So we should ask ourselves questions about austerity budgets and what Britain can or can't afford.

As our Government tells us that this wrecked economy can't afford to pay a living wage to the poorest people in society, what can we offer them? They can take their kids to the park, perhaps. They might be able to go swimming or play sport at their leisure centre, find a football pitch. Yes, these things are important. But it is just as important that there should be a library as the centre of a web of cultural services, for kids with nowhere to go, kids who don't have books or a room of their own, for stressed-out parents, for students needing a place to study and find more than Google can offer, for older people who want a safe place outside of the house, for community groups and reading groups, for lectures, for discussions, and of course for computers and IT.

Libraries across the UK are trying to offer as much as they can to the communities they serve, and particularly to people on low pay and with few resources, but there is confusion around the role of libraries: what are they? How should they change and develop? What place do they have in a modern internet-based world where the book itself might be disappearing?

When we look back at the latest cuts in Newcastle, we can see where this confusion starts – "Libraries, leisure and culture". But culture is not leisure – though you need leisure to pursue culture – and libraries are not leisure in the way that a sports centre is leisure. Libraries began with the highest purpose in mind – to educate through the agency of a book. The first public libraries were aspirational and proud. Libraries were not community centres with books in the way.

If we want libraries to flourish and take their place – I think their proper place in a modern society – we can't make them compete with sports centres for resources, or survive by becoming culturally obsolete and socially relevant, replacing all their books with computer terminals.

Libraries have never been more inventive than they are right now. The Reading Agency partners with libraries across the UK to set up book groups – supported by publishers – to bring in kids, many of whom have never read any books outside school. Libraries are doing more educational work than ever. Libraries and literacy cannot be separated. I don't see how this can be classed as "leisure", nor do I see why we have to choose between getting our bins emptied and putting cash into libraries.

There is no excuse. Either we stop arguing and agree that libraries are doing their best to reinvent themselves and that with a bit of help – financial and ideological – they belong with the future, or we let them run down until they disappear because they become irrelevant to people's lives.

As books themselves change, so the argument goes, does it not follow that libraries will change too? If books are not necessarily objects then perhaps libraries need not be either? Virtual libraries and online libraries can house ebooks and downloads and none of this takes up physical space and none of it is as costly as a building that houses books. The disappearing book and the disappearing library are about technology, aren't they? Printing put books on the shelves, took them out of the private collections – usually church libraries – and into the hands of the world.

The wealthy will have books and access to books. The best universities will keep their magnificent libraries to be visited by those who can afford the fees. Is it downloads for everyone else? I want books to be visible. Hold a book in your hands and it is more than its content. Books as objects matter.

Ebooks are not an improvement; they are an addition. They can't be used as an excuse to take books away from the everyday world and into the virtual world. We all know that browsing an index is nothing like being in a bookshop or a library. Libraries and publishers will come to an arrangement about ebook lending and that could work very well as a satellite service for library users – providing we keep Planet Library. For kids in particular, ebooks aren't the answer. Put six picture books of front of a child and she'll soon find her own way. Give her a library shelf of books and she can pull them out all over the floor. Early reading is physicality – the taste, smell, weight of books.

Who is going to pay for this new expanding network of libraries? These people's palaces of books where everyone can go from early in the morning until late at night? Libraries cost about a billion a year to run right now. Make it two billion and charge Google, Amazon and Starbucks all that back tax on their profits here. Or if they want to go on paying fancy lawyers to avoid their moral duties, then perhaps those companies could do an Andrew Carnegie and build us new kinds of libraries for a new kind of future in a fairer and better world?

This is an edited extract from the inaugural Reading Agency lecture, delivered by Jeanette Winterson. www.readingagency.org.uk
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/nov/23/protect-our-libraries-jeanette-winterson
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