As a teenager in the 70s, novelist Jonathan Coe spent hours in Birmingham Central Library; his “whole cultural education, in music as well as books” came from those visits. “All for free, because nobody expected these places to pay their way or justify their existence in monetary terms.” Now, Coe is among the writers featured in a newly launched “protest zine” rallying against the wide-ranging cuts to library services proposed by Birmingham city council.
Works by Kit de Waal, Anna Metcalfe and Mark Billingham also appear between the magenta covers of Brum Library Zine. Led by poet Liz Berry and novelist Catherine O’Flynn, the project paired Birmingham’s 35 community libraries with 35 writers who signed up to take part in “micro-residencies” and write original works. The resulting zine features stories, poetry, memoir, flash fiction and a short play by Metcalfe, inspired by Selly Oak library.
The idea for the project had been brewing for a while. In 2019, libraries – those “remarkable free spaces” – were a major source of hope for O’Flynn after “all the bad things that had come at us” in the previous few years (“Brexit, Boris, Trump, Bowie dying”). She planned to visit every community library in Birmingham and write a short story or essay about each one to amalgamate into a gazetteer or a series of pamphlets. But Covid hit, and the project was cut short.
Then, in March this year, Birmingham city council approved what were thought to be the biggest budget cuts in local authority history after effectively declaring bankruptcy last September. Proposed cuts include a targeted £2.3m reduction in the library budget; the final stage of a consultation on proposals to reduce services is under way this week.
The council’s proposals see funding withdrawn entirely from seven libraries, though services may continue to run if community organisations or voluntary groups step in. The number of council-funded community libraries would be reduced from 35 to either 27 or 17, depending on which proposal is pursued. Nine of the remaining libraries would be open full-time – along with the Library of Birmingham, which is not classed as a community library – while others would have reduced hours. Under the plans, several libraries will be “co-located”, meaning that they will move from council-owned buildings to alternative locations.
When the scale of the library cuts were revealed, O’Flynn posted a “long, rambling” thread on X, mentioning the writing project she had wanted to do back in 2019. Berry responded almost immediately: “Do it!” A few days later, they sat at Berry’s kitchen table and started planning. The zine format was Berry’s idea – “she’s a zine enthusiast and has a whole load of amazing radical feminist zines from the 70s and 80s”, says O’Flynn. The pair were inspired by their “DIY, passionate” ethos.
They began sending emails to writers with connections to Birmingham, explaining “that there was no funding at all, that they’d need to give up time, juggle other commitments and stick to strict deadlines”, says O’Flynn. “It wasn’t really the most enticing invitation, but we were overwhelmed by how rapid and positive the responses were.”
Within a week, 35 writers were on board. Some wanted to be paired with a library they felt a special connection to, such as their childhood branch, while others were happy with a random match. “We felt like old-school newspaper magnates sending correspondents off to their postings and receiving their dispatches and selfies,” says O’Flynn.
De Waal wrote her piece about Sparkhill library, which is located up the road from where she grew up in the 60s. “I can honestly say I never read a book there,” she says by email. “But I went because I knew I would be welcome, because it was warm, because it had loads of space (there were seven of us in a small three-bed terraced house) and because there was a quality to the light – though ‘quality of light’ is what I call it now.
“Then I just used to sit with my back against a boiling cast iron radiator and watch the dust motes in the sunlight, daydreaming in the peace and quiet,” she adds. “Sparkhill library, for me, meant a break from home and chaos. And despite being badly dressed and black and poor, no one there ever made me feel out of place.”
Artist and librarian Tom Hicks designed the zine, combining a lo-fi, punk aesthetic with images “painstakingly sourced from vintage Birmingham library books”: borrowing records; “WITHDRAWN” stamps; a library card; a West Midlands Travel bus ticket from 2000, still being used as a bookmark. To cover printing and paper costs, a crowdfunder was launched, raising more than £1,000 in 5 days. Now, more than 2,000 copies of the zine are available for free at libraries across Birmingham.
O’Flynn and Berry hope the zine will encourage people to “join the Birmingham Loves Libraries campaign, write to their MPs and councillors, attend the library consultation meetings and make their voices heard,” says Berry. “We don’t just have to stand by quietly while decisions are made for us.”
“I don’t know what a bunch of writers can do in the face of this tidal wave of market forces,” says Coe. “It feels – in the words of another Birmingham writer, David Lodge – a bit like trying to mop up the world’s oceans with a Kleenex. But we have to take some sort of collective stand.”
Berry – whose mother was a librarian and who runs a reading group for adults in Kings Heath library – said that Birmingham needs its libraries because the city “is one of the most vulnerable areas to literacy challenges in the entire country.” Forty-one per cent of children in Birmingham lived in poverty in 2022/23, up 14 percentage points from 2014/15, according to analysis by the New Economics Foundation.
Under the plans, “kids are going to have to walk or get the bus more than two miles to visit their new ‘local’ library,” says De Waal. “Who’s got the money for that? More likely, those kids won’t go to the library at all and thus a desperate problem is further compounded.”
Libraries were once “seen as an indispensable part of a civilised country,” says Coe. “The fact that we have lost sight of that ethos is disastrous. By any metric outside the crudest monetary or economic one, any country that can’t afford to keep its libraries open, is an impoverished country”.
