Mucky Old Manchester: Central Library About to Disappear for Good

 

Manchester Central Library will soon be closed, and will remain that way for the next 3 years. During this time it will be completely gutted, its 22 miles of shelving packed carefully into moving boxes and its rare and unique archive materials handled cautiously into sealed containers.

When it returns to us in 2013, it will be "beautifully and sensitively restored" and will have grown "an adjoining, ultra-modern city centre community library"; a cyborg combination of faux-classical early 20th Century architecture and glass, plastic and computer.

Undoubtedly, Central Library is in dire need of a complete renovation. Walk in today and you'll note the blocky 1980s font above the ENQUIRIES desk, the scrawled graffiti, the musty smell and the horribly uncomfortable wooden chairs, designed for the early 20th Century flat, stiff back.

Currently, what Central Library is, is a snapshot of Manchester pre-IRA, pre-Beetham Tower, pre-Media City UK, in all its dilapidated post-industrial grandeur. And, despite Manchester's seemingly backwards-looking trend of late (see Urbis becoming football museum and the opening of Fac251), it is a piece of old Manchester that will soon cease to exist.

I urge you to go in, have a wander; before it disappears forever.

Words: James Roome