A plea to restore Kensal Rise library to us

Land was donated in 1900 with a proviso it be used for a library – the council's 2am raid is a shameful attempt to break the deal
The Kensal Rise pop-up library
The Kensal Rise pop-up library. Photograph: David Levene

A plea to restore Kensal Rise library to us

Land was donated in 1900 with a proviso it be used for a library – the council's 2am raid is a shameful attempt to break the deal

On Monday morning, between 2am and 3am, when most people were asleep, Brent council sent in a team to remove thousands of books in cardboard boxes from London's Kensal Rise library, which local people, ably backed by household-name writers such as Philip Pullman and Zadie Smith, have been fighting to keep open since November 2010. The vicar's wife, Ally, who lives nearest, only had one protester's phone number to hand, and Marika was in Greece, so the alert had to go across half Europe and back, with the result that only five women got there in time to watch the books we have fought to protect carried away by about a dozen men from the council, flanked by two big security officers and a dozen police officers.

Worse, perhaps, the council heavies took library tables and murals painted specifically for the library in the 1930s, though Mohammed Butt, leader of Brent's Labour council, had specifically promised not to do that. They also unscrewed the lovingly polished brass plaque put up in 1900 to record its opening by American author Mark Twain, an act of vandalism that Michael Frayn has likened to the worst days of the Soviet Union, trying to make the library an "un-library". Lights were blazing inside the space that campaigners have been unable to enter since the council locked the doors.

However, the library service has never stopped operating. On the day of the closure, after one round of our expensive legal battle was lost on 13 October 2011, we opened our own Kensal Rise Pop-Up Library within the library's perimeter wall. Books came in from literate local residents, writers, teachers, library lovers. A marmalade cat served as an impromptu heater by sitting on the laps of volunteer librarians when the weather became bitterly cold. Jodi Gramigni designed a transparent structure to protect the books; no-one has ever vandalised it or its contents. We grew and organised: now there are sections for art, history, fiction, biography and philosophy.

But we always intended to re-enter the solid red-brick Victorian building purpose-built for us on land given to this area by All Souls College Oxford in 1900 under a covenant that it must be used as a public library. We kept the pop-up library open partly to avoid triggering the "reverter" under the covenant, under which if the building ceases to be used as a library, the land reverts to the ownership of All Souls.

The end of the 19th century was a time of enlightened philanthropy and we believe the fellows at the time were trying to give something back to the area from which they were making millions of pounds as landowners, recognising a responsibility to share education with the masses who rented properties from them.

Campaigners have not been told clearly by All Souls that it considers the reverter has been triggered, though Brent council insists it has. What will the college do now? It has a property portfolio and an endowment fund worth almost £240m: the likely value on the public market of our library building is about a million. Yet the college's property arm, perhaps acting in ignorance of the fellows' wishes, has told us we would have to pay commercial rates if we rented or bought the building to use as a library.

We know there are enlightened, civilised fellows at All Souls, and they are the lucky possessors of the magnificent private Codrington Library, built from the profits of slavery in the Caribbean in the 18th century. Would they deny us what they have themselves? That would be bitterly ironic, for this is a multi-racial area and the descendants of those slaves are among those who love and use the books, the computers and the quiet spaces for study that Kensal Rise library provided. We call on the fellows to honour the gift of their predecessors to the poor multiracial area that helped to make them rich.

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/may/31/restore-kensal-rise-library-to-us
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