Kingstanding Library

On Saturday afternoons in the mid-1950s, Gwen Hutt walked to the library. It was not a library building at all. Kingstanding’s books then lived in the Methodist church on the corner of Kings Road and Carshalton Road, in a large room with big windows and “big window sills on which you could sit and read for hours and hours, and I did.” Ken Jones remembered the old library at the Methodist church for its smell, “the most wonderful smell”, and for the books on birds and animals he carried home, the start of a passion that lasted sixty years.

For its first thirty years the estate made do. The same Methodist rooms doubled as extra classrooms for the school round the corner in Hornsey Road. Children who wanted a proper branch library took the bus or walked to Perry Common.

A library of its own

That changed in June 1964, when Kingstanding Library opened on Kingstanding Road, a short walk from the Circle. The sources disagree on the day, the 6th or the 11th. Ron Jameson photographed the new building and its neighbouring shops in the 1960s, and his pictures are in our archive.

Children remembered the outside as much as the books. “We so loved to climb that honeycombe wall as children,” Shirley Ann Kelly wrote, “it was the place to be with all the activities in the summer hols!” Claire remembered a four-sectioned bookcase at child height, pop-up books like Haunted House, and Saturday story time, when a long-haired man with a deep voice read a tale called Tailypo. “Scary stuff!!” There were cartoons in a side room once, on a special children’s morning.

Some faces stayed for decades. In 2011 a former classmate asked whether Hazel Freeman still worked there. “Yes she dos,” came the reply, “i go there every thursday.”

A landmark on the Circle

By the 1980s the library had become one of the fixed points of the neighbourhood. When a photographer for the Warwickshire Photographic Survey recorded the old waterworks building near the Circle in 1984, the caption described it simply as “opposite Kingstanding Library”.

The site may have had an earlier public use. Alan Hitchman remembered a wartime auxiliary fire station on Kingstanding Road, “so it could have been about where the library is near Dunedin Road”. Voices of Kingstanding itself places that station on the corner of Kings Road and Dunedin Road, so the question is open.

Where the memories began

In January 2011 the library played its part in this story too. On 18 January Chris Hillcox held the first open meeting of Voices of Kingstanding there, inviting people to bring their memories and photographs of the estate. Many of the stories now told on these pages were first spoken aloud in that room.

Sixty years on, Kingstanding Library is still on Kingstanding Road. It is where the estate finally got its own shelves of books, and where, half a century later, it sat down together to remember itself.

Then and now

1960s2018