The branch that used to be Chalk Farm Library
The library on Sharpleshall Street was for many years a Camden branch called Chalk Farm Library. It served the streets between Primrose Hill and Chalk Farm in the ordinary way of a small municipal branch: lending stock, reference material, a children's section, later computers and internet access. Its present name and its present ownership both date from a single crisis, and the story is unusually well documented because the people who saved it wrote it down as they went.
The 2011 closure decision
In 2011, following a sharp reduction in central government funding, Camden Council announced that three of its libraries would close at the end of March 2012. Chalk Farm was one of them. Rather than simply defending the status quo, local councillors put forward an alternative: community organisations could bid to take on the running of the threatened branches. Public meetings were held in September 2011, and in November the council issued an expressions of interest document inviting groups to apply.
The Primrose Hill Community Association, a registered charity already active in the neighbourhood, put together the winning bid. That decision, taken quickly and under a hard deadline, is the reason the building is still a library rather than something else.
Pledges, volunteers and a twenty-year lease
The campaign that followed was conducted street by street. Dame Joan Bakewell, a local resident, agreed to be patron of the appeal. A pledge form and leaflet went to every house and business in Primrose Hill, and volunteers followed up by knocking on doors. By January 2012 pledges of around £400,000 had been received. The library's own account of the campaign puts the eventual total at 494 financial pledges worth £593,000, with more than 200 residents offering their time.
In March 2012 the council approved the application. Camden granted a twenty-year lease with rent relief over the first six years, provided a set-up grant, and donated the existing book stock to the new organisation. That combination, a long lease plus a genuine endowment of cash raised locally, is what distinguished this rescue from the many volunteer library campaigns of the same period that did not survive their first few years.
Reopening as a community library
Chalk Farm Library closed as a council branch on Saturday 31 March 2012. Accounts of what happened next differ slightly in emphasis: a limited Saturday service is recorded as resuming under the new name on 28 April 2012, while the library's own history gives an official opening on 22 October 2012, attended by Joan Bakewell and by Alan Bennett. Both are consistent with the way such handovers usually work, with a modest reopening first and a formal launch once the operation was running.
Opening hours were then extended in stages. The library now opens on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, with the remaining days largely given over to room hire, which helps pay for the rest.
A reading room and a meeting place
What the building does now goes well beyond lending. Alongside books, audiovisual stock, internet access and study space, the programme includes children's events, book groups, talks, music, exercise classes and social sessions. The library reports that over a hundred volunteers have been trained and that membership has passed 2,500, figures that describe a building used far more intensively than a branch library of its size would normally be.
It is also, in a practical sense, the neighbourhood's indoor public room. Primrose Hill has a park, a high street and a good many private houses, but relatively few places where anyone can sit down without spending money. The library is one of them, and it exists because several hundred households decided in the winter of 2011 that it should. Camden continues to list it among the borough's community-run libraries, distinct from the branches the council operates directly.