The power of books
It’s exam season and today I am in Nottingham having dropped my youngest at an exam centre. After 4 years of home-ed he is sitting exams. It’s a fraught time and will hopefully result in a move back into mainstream education.
The upside is I find myself with time to enjoy my nearest city. And today I have three delightful hours in Nottingham’s new library. It is light and airy with desirable furniture! It’s a hub of laptops and headphones, and a background rumble of purpose. There are also rows and rows of beautiful books all of them available to me and a source of unending inspiration.
I grew up with Saturday visits to the library to get books that I inhaled! I read fast and voraciously. It was a wood-panelled, dark building that felt like a sanctuary. Before I left home it was closed and re-routed to the new shopping mall, becoming bright and noisy in the transition. Away at university the library was a constant, taking black and white photocopies of anything I needed to record. In London I had access to some great libraries and then when I moved to Nottingham and started a family, the library was a destination, a place to punctuate long days and retain some sanity.
I fell out of that as my kids got older, as the internet took over, as teenagers pushed away from books as a source of escape and found computer games instead.
Last year I treated myself to a membership of Nottingham’s private library, Bromley House, a Harry Potter-esque magical space. It was a delight to have a purpose to come into the city to read, write and treat myself to the best chocolate babka in the world at Tough Mary’s Bakehouse.
And now Nottingham Library has opened in a new building and I can delight in all the art, design and creativity books all there for me to be inspired by who knows what and go down a rabbit-hole of discovery.
Books I delighted in today:
Extraordinary Sketchbooks - Jane Stobart
Ben Nicholson - Drawings and Painted Reliefs - Peter Khoroche
Eric Ravilious - Imagined Realities - Alan Powers
The Bigger Picture - Women who changed the Art World - Sophia Bennett and Manjit Thapp
My favourite libraries:
Liverpool Central Library, Liverpool
Kettles Yard House Library, Cambridge
Bromley House Library, Nottingham
My favourite babka:
Thanks for the recommendation for Extraordinary Sketchbooks - have reserved it from our library (1960s small library, but still a place of wonderment) as it looks fab.
Libraries I love them too. And Victoria Wood , an advocate. May they always be available, for free x