I seem to have seen the insides of an awful lot of public libraries lately and don’t recall any without PC’s and internet access, but thank goodness none of them has had background music. Apparently Gloucestershire are giving it a try. Maybe in a few years’ time we’ll all have got hardened to it, but at the moment the prospect makes me shudder.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/5185201/Libraries-criticised-for-playing-music.html

A spanking brand new public library opened late last year in Crawley, where I live. Externally it matches perfectly the concrete brutalist style of architecture typical of the town centre when Crawley New Town was built in the 1950s. Inside it’s bright and spacious with automated touch-screen check-ins and -outs, banks of computers, wi-fi, DVDs, CDs, coffee shop etc. Oh, and some books, although not enough of them to frighten the populace. But at least it’s still called a library.

Call me antediluvian but I love libraries that are stacked to the gunwales with books, books and nowt but books. My very favourite one as a teenager was the Central Library in Manchester, an elegant rotunda reminiscent of the Pantheon in Rome, and entirely dedicated to all things bookish (though that was nearly 40 years ago, and I guess some of the bookshelves will have given way to PCs etc by now).