Sanctuary, an essay by Lynsey Hanley

The ideas that underpin our creative programme are Sanctuary, Archive and Commons. We have invited three writers to reflect on these pillars and what those themes in relation to the library space mean to them. The first is by Lynsey Hanley, who explores sanctuary in an more intimate and personal way, writing about the ways in which library spaces offer a non-judgemental third space, a home away from home.

‘Communication,’ wrote Raymond Williams in The Long Revolution, ‘is the process of making unique experience into common experience, and it is, above all, the claim to live.’  Writing in 1961, Williams – the great Welsh critic and democratiser – was in a position not only to imagine a better society but to see one slowly taking shape. In that decade he would see entire new towns being built, new schools, new universities, new forms of public broadcasting, each of them promising a space to widen our field of experience, from unique to common, from feeling unknown to feeling truly, mutually, known.  

In each of those newly built towns and estates, those new schools and universities, was a library. Three years after The Long Revolution was published, public libraries were enshrined in law as a statutory service – considered, like public transport and a free education, something that people need if they are to have, in Williams’ words, ‘the claim to live’ and not merely to exist. Libraries became not a matter of philanthropy or working-class mutual improvement, but a fundamental right.  

The public library in Chelmsley Wood, where I grew up just outside Birmingham, stood alone behind the shopping centre, next to a roundabout and alongside a Portakabin that housed the Citizens’ Advice Bureau. It is no longer there. It was, in my humble opinion, the estate’s most beautiful building, an elegant glass and concrete cuboid offset by hardwood handrails, its automatic doors reachable by ramp. Opened in 1970, it survived until 2009 when it was demolished and the library moved to the first floor of a giant new ASDA.  To this day it’s the only building I grieve as if for a person, remembering the amphitheatre steps of the basement children’s library – covered in staticky green carpet where we sat at reading time – and exactly how it felt to mould my small hands around that wooden handrail at the library entrance. It was a generous building, more generous than any other in the neighbourhood, whose staff were kind and unflappable, whose treasures were always readily available: a home from which you could really start. 

Libraries give our potential a home to grow in, and I don’t know what I’d be doing now if I hadn’t had a library within walking distance to escape to as a child. On a claustrophobic estate, from a claustrophobic home, the library was the one place it felt free to breathe. It felt as though those automatic library doors were never locked, and that you would be welcome, at any time of the day or night, to get lost in the safest place you could possibly think of. Imagine being a child and finding a place on your doorstep that’s safer and warmer than home, school, the bus or the outdoors.  

People who spend their time in public libraries, whether as employees or visitors, know that what makes them so special is their unconditional openness. Their opening hours matter, because they need to be there whenever they are needed. Everything contained in public libraries is put there to welcome, acknowledge and nurture people, and that’s why I and so many others love them with all their hearts.  

To reduce libraries to the books they contain is, in some way, to close off some of those routes to magic and solace. They are secular churches, where no one is ever turned away for want of money or status; and, just as no one demands that you pray in a church, you don’t have to read in a library. There has never been a greater need to value such places, which are flexible enough to attune themselves to what their users need, yet constant enough to offer what they rely on. An expression of community contained in a building. 

With that in mind, I walked through the automatic doors of Bootle Library on a wet day in January anticipating magic, and the first thing I saw was a baby boy wearing a savoy cabbage leaf for a hat. Toddlers crawled on bright foam mats, inspecting a tray of Cheerios before treading them in and collecting the crumbs in their dextrous little fists. Their carers breathed out and laughed with each other, passing their babies between each other so they could drink their tea. A toddler passes half a biscuit to her mum – but where’s the other half? Shall we look for it? There it is! And, again, there it is: the claim to live, shared, witnessed and built upon.  

The savoy-cabbage hat reminded me of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which in turn reminded me of the very earliest times I saw books laid out at my local library, somewhere outside Birmingham in the late 1970s. The Barbapapa and Mojo Swoptops were my first favourites. Then, The Very Hungry Caterpillar waved a magic wand at my two- or three-year-old imagination, the purple of the plums and the monstrous bogey-green of the pickle in Eric Carle’s illustrations, making me wonder: how does a caterpillar turn into a butterfly? Through the alchemy of curiosity, experimentation and steady exploration, all made possible at the library. 

Magic was here, in the form of unbegrudging hospitality and the offer of safety and warmth for children, their carers, and anyone else who came through the door. It was expressed in many ways: through tea and biscuits, laughter, the mashing of satsumas releasing their scent. Things were happening at their own pace and not to someone else’s clock, just like the best kind of living room. It was somewhere you could live, and ‘claim to live’, outside of home.  

For parents of small children, for those living alone, for those who are cold and can’t get warm, for those who need ‘another place’ when their own four walls become prison-like – the library is that place. It’s a home for all the written-down thoughts of those who’ve seen fit to share what they’ve learned in life. It’s a meeting space, a safe space, a warm place, and now, it is becoming clearer, a space where like-minded people can get on with the work of doing things differently, working together to subvert and circumvent those other ungenerous boxes – of capital, of philistinism, of fear – that try to limit our collective capacity.

In a hidden corner, away from the play session, a tired middle-aged man found a place to have a nap, reminding me of all the libraries in which I’ve ever found sanctuary. As well as places to nap, they have been places to revise, to borrow LPs, to breastfeed, to sneak crisps, to change nappies, to eavesdrop, and simply to sit quietly, with or without a book to read. At many times in my life, they have given me a greater feeling of home than the one I slept in. When you feel at home, you feel free to let go, and from letting go, you grow. That’s what libraries do.  

Lynsey Hanley was born in Birmingham and lives in Liverpool. She is the author of Estates : An Intimate History, and Respectable: The Experience of Class. She is a regular contributor to the Guardian and The New Statesman.