Carl O’Prey, film script-writer and author of The Lawn of Sleeping Soldiers, due out in October 2026
On the edge of town, an old library remains derelict but not gone. It sits in that familiar civic condition where use has been withdrawn on an ordinary public building awaiting a final decision.
For over a century Everton Library in Liverpool has formed part of the basic infrastructure of local literacy: books, newspapers and the sacred quiet discipline of shared silence. It began as the Technical Institute for Dock Workers. My mother learned to read and write here during the 1941 Blitz, when the continuity of life itself was so fragile. The library remained intact up the hill from her soon to be bombed childhood home and survived for over sixty years afterwards.
Researching my recent novel, my mother and I attempted to trace her old home on Amelia Street using archival maps drawn up before the Blitz took her community away. That work of the reconstruction of memory – moving through maps, records and sound, belongs to the same civic identity the library once enabled – that lives and even the “lost tribes” cleared into replacement high-rises, can be recovered or at least made legible through shared access to knowledge. In my own experience, that backward movement became a necessity as I concluded my book.
As a ten year old, I spent truanted days in one of our warm, free library buildings. It’s here I found Wordsworth and Norman Mailer seated on the same shelves without any hierarchy or explanation. I read them concurrently and independently without being structured into any form of curriculum. A creative inquisitiveness I now recognize as my path in life. What was made clear to me back then is that libraries have never only been solely about books.
The Central Library in Liverpool city centre makes the point clearly. Year 10s work in groups or sit in shared silences, revising and researching with their attention split between page and screen. Deathly silence still lingers in the circular reading room – designed to replicate that of the British Library in Bloomsbury – which in turn is now preserved inside a glass atrium within the British Museum as yet another artifact, a monument to earlier forms of concentrated study by Marx, Woolf, Joyce and Eliot – rolled out as a symbolic interior inside a post-modern shell.
In Liverpool that inheritance is reworked in another way rather than merely preserved. The truly modern Central Library interior remains encased within its original, neo-classical façade and functions as a hybrid egg of collectivist space. Students revising alongside residents tracing sound archives, land records and family histories, as I have done. Septuagenarians, academics and the homeless sit attached to computer screens, entwined with students, all moving through different directions of social and intellectual need.
Up on the hill, Everton Library stands in a more exposed space. Symbolically, its true neighbours are St George’s, a glorious cast-iron church opposite, and the Mere Bank, a Grade II listed pub. As libraries eventually became the second tenet of human existence, the demarcation became apparent between a place to listen and a place to read. It’s here on St Domingo Road that I sense the technological upheaval that led from Caxton’s printing press to the publication of the King James Bible and the resulting proliferation of faith via text. At the same time allowing the literate poor to question the laws of interpretation and probability between the oracy of a church and the words of a library. By extension, today’s question of trust within digital technology encircling the vulnerable and the young has now become a debate about contemporary democracy. All of which can only lead us back to the camp-fire – those collective meeting houses where we can both witness and debate in real time. Back to our civic and independent libraries. In addition, if and when screen restrictions are applied to our younger demographic, collectively we should privilege a return to the libraries to exchange solitary homework for peer-to-peer learning and actual socialization.
The restoration of Everton Library also exemplifies the New North’s idea of Localism within a single building. High up in the oldest part of Liverpool, together with the multi-use re-development of the functioning St George’s church, it could once again read as a civic summit – as the informal capital of a once great maritime city – defined not by authority but by the accumulation of democratic literacy just as global trade once flowed from the nearby docks.
I finished my book in the New York Public Library – the city with the largest Everton emigration of the 20th century, all arriving in a strange city having nothing but the basics and a new, free library stretching out for an entire city block. The place of a continuing education. A tale of two literacies.
As Everton library lies abandoned on the edge of my town, it sits within a different system. Its proposed restoration, framed by merging definitions of civic need and New Localism, depends first on funding – estimates, grants, sponsorship, negotiations of its symbolic value around the red tape of authorities prolonging its decay. Before it can return as a physical space, it must first be assembled as a financial object – as public provision must be continuously justified and its heritage status recognized. Issues that make me feel even more that libraries should also be ‘re-nationalized’. That shift is central because libraries are no longer simply maintained; they are required to prove their necessity in advance.
The Everton Library building matters beyond sentiment or architectural value, not just an exceptional Grade II listed, Arts and Crafts structure in need of restoration. It is a civic form that has, up to its relatively recent closure, absorbed the changes of war, educational, social and welfare reform, redevelopment, demolitions and digital displacement – whilst continuing to function as a shared space of working-class literacy and debate.
To reclaim and re-label local libraries as the intellectual ownership of the people, is to insist on that continuity directly. Not as nostalgia but as structures belonging in practice to those who use and depend on them most, including our new cross-cultural diasporas. Under that claim, the question may be no longer whether a building can be saved or not. It is whether the conditions that once made shared access to literacy normal can still be treated as a collective responsibility, rather than an optional, local heritage or red-taped-up outcome.
