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LIKE many Cardiffians, I was very annoyed when the city’s Local Services Department was moved out of Dominion Way off Newport Road.

So the news that a new centre for the city’s great collection of local literature, historical maps, newspapers and so forth is being relocated at the Grade II listed building known as Cathays Library is most welcome indeed.

Cathays Library, which in my younger days played a major part in my education, was opened 110 years ago on March 7, 1907.

It stands on the corner of Whitchurch Road and Fairoak Road, and Alderman David Jones – who was Deputy Lord Mayor of Cardiff at that time – had the pleasure and honour of opening it.

It had replaced a local library based in a converted chapel in nearby May Street.

Some years ago now, plans were put forward to close the library which had been built at a cost of £5,356 and which was one of two branch libraries presented to Cardiff by the Scottish American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.

Thankfully, some 300 Cardiff school children backed a campaign for the £250,000 required to bring it up to a suitable standard and more than 1,000 Cardiffians also signed the petition.

During the blitz in the last war the library survived an incendiary bomb which was dropped on it. It survived another fire in 1995 when a team of firefighters fought what was a suspicious blaze in the ground-floor store room.

In the introduction to my book Cathays, Maindy, Gabalfa And Mynachdy: The Second Selection (published by The History Press), I told how the magnificent Children’s Reading Hall there played a big part in my early life: “Many is the hour I spent in the fine children’s reading room and it was in this wonderful hall of enlightenment that I discovered the