Julie in letter plea to save libraries
ONE of Accrington’s best loved celebrities has boosted the campaign to save Hyndburn’s libraries, with a letter recalling her fond memories spent in them.
In the letter, actress Julie Hesmondhalgh remembers a youth spent in Clayton Library, as well as Accrington Library and the former Church Library, and argues that the range of benefits these public buildings bring is ‘better than gold’.
She wrote: ‘The majesty of Accrington Library has been well documented. The multi award winning Accrington-raised writer Jeanette Winterson talks about it as having saved her life as she struggled to escape her oppressively religious upbringing. It opened up worlds to her that she couldn’t have imagined, and those books paved the way for her to go to Oxford.
‘I still occasionally dream about the reference library upstairs, past the stained glass window on the sweeping stairwell (“For a jolly goode booke/ Whereon to looke/is better to me than golde”), I can almost smell that room.
‘Saturday mornings my dad would take me to have a browse while he looked up the races in the newspaper area and before we went to the baths next door.
‘But equally important to me was our far less grand but well-stocked Church Library which my mum and I would visit weekly.
‘It’s from here that I borrowed Little Women (and all the subsequent Alcott books), Daddy Long Legs, A Pilgrim’s Progress and later, the Judy Blume teen masterpieces.
‘Church Library went a long time ago, but Clayton-le-Moors Library survived and provided as progress marched on, not just books to borrow, but computers to use.
‘Young people whose home lives aren’t perhaps as conducive to quiet concentration as we’d hope for ourselves.
‘That community hub is what’s being taken away when we close these smaller, less majestic, locally based libraries.
‘Our councils are being put in a terrible position of choosing which services to lose and which to keep in these swathing austerity cuts to local authorities.
‘It’s an impossible task. But I do believe that if you take away the local libraries, it is another step towards cutting off the less well off in our society... from information and access, support and technology, and a quiet space for learning.
‘And that surely is better than gold.’