West End Lane, NW6 - home to a dozen cafes and a library

Camden Council in north London, where I live, is considering changing the ethos of its libraries – to allow people to bring in food and drink and use their mobile phones.  The intention is to make libraries more appealing to young people.

As both a library user and the parent of a young person, this strikes me as an unfortunate and misguided idea.  Libraries are one of the few public spaces in the inner city to which people can turn for quiet.  Swiss Cottage, in the borough, hosts one of the best public libraries in the capital.  Young people constitute a significant proportion of the users.  They go there to find space where they can give unashamed attention to learning.  It’s a place of thought, study and contemplation.  It is wholly unsuited to be a stage for mobile phone conversations or snacking.  Urban life provides an abundance of venues for these activities.  The library offers an alternative realm.

Camden’s proposal loses sight of local councils’mission in providing public libraries.  Their role is as custodian of a value: of access to knowledge, embodied not just in the provision of books and reference facilities but in the creation of an atmosphere conducive to engaging intelligently with them.  If councils are concerned about falling attendances, they might consider a remedy which is aligned with the public value of libraries rather than capitulation to the coffee shop.  This would entail improving the intrinsic appeal of library collections and promoting respect for them.

Victoria Coren – a columnist at The Observer – is a  fellow Camden resident who is also alarmed by the council’s proposal.  She links it to a more general shift in policy in Whitehall.  Only two years ago, the Culture Minister, David Lammy, was telling us “Books are fundamentally important to what libraries are about.”  Now the Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham, insists that libraries must “look beyond the bookcase”.  Coren believes the contrary:

Burnham says that more library funding would ‘not be realistic in the current climate’. Cobblers. In ‘the current climate’, people need, more than ever, to know about the world. To think laterally and have ideas. To develop an internal life, as an alternative to clubbing and jet-setting. To study history and learn how we’ve got out of trouble before.

The man who thinks that books are a luxury to be cut back in times of recession is a man who doesn’t understand that knowledge is the key to everything and must be at the centre of everything.

Burnham’s approach is in line with a prevailing view that libraries are no longer relevant to the era of Amazon and Google – a view well-expressed by Jemima Lewis in The Telegraph:

People no longer want, or need, to borrow books. Public libraries were invented for the benefit of an aspirational working class – for autodidacts who could not afford the books they craved, at a time when books were really the only source of information.

Many is the clever child who clambered his way out of poverty with the help of a library card. But these days, as the Kaiser Chiefs sing, “it’s cool to know nothing”. Brave indeed is the child at a sink estate school who follows his inner swot. And if the urge to learn proves irresistible, he is probably better off on the internet, where nobody need know that he isn’t surfing porn.

This strikes me as a view which is wholly rooted in a culture – of affluent and ignorant consumerism – which is disintegrating more rapidly than we can comprehend.  As we’re all forced to review our spending, many will be delighted to find that libraries are more than equipped to meet the same need as impulse orders on Amazon address – but at a fraction of the cost.

Victoria Coren is surely right to suggest that libraries could find a new relevance in the impending period of austerity.  Could it be that preserving a space which exemplifies the ethos of concentration might serve young people better than pandering to an assumption that everything must defer to a culture of instant gratification?

Lehman Brothers staff, London, 16 September 2008

When I talk to people in the financial sector, I understand the meaning of the current turmoil being a crisis unprecedented in our lifetimes.  The experience of redundancy is  unlike that any of us are likely to have come across before.  With banking institutions disappearing at a rate of knots, others laying off staff in their thousands and many of the remainder uninterested in hiring, the impression of alternative options rapidly closing down throughout the world can only compound the sense of shock for those who have suddenly lost their jobs.

I’ve seen plenty of advice to bankers along the lines of: polish up your CV and interviewing skills, tap into your network and be prepared to move.  There may be a place for these tried and tested career tactics.  But I wonder whether it is adequate to the moment to rely wholly on this approach.  When people suffer a shocking loss, they typically go through experiences such as denial, anger and depression before they feel able to accept the situation and engage with it constructively.  The slightly frenetic character of well-intentioned advice on job search skills seems to me to risk encouraging people into activities which – for some of them, at least – may be counter-productive.

There are suggestions that this is a crisis that is concentrated on the big financial centres, and that there are still banking opportunities to be found in places beyond London and New York.  But the impression I’m gaining from people who have lost their jobs is that it is the same story wherever they look.  Wise heads I know who have been through City slowdowns in the past are digging in for this one to last possibly five or six years.  If that’s a realistic assessment, it may be a recipe for despondency to go chasing after leads at a time when you are likely to be oscillating through a number of powerful emotions which may be preventing you from thinking straight.

As Lucy Kellaway has observed in the FT, “Unemployed bankers are in a world that has gone beyond pat advice.”  She suggests the best thing to do is to sit tight and take stock:

As an agony aunt, my advice to those who lost their jobs – at least to those with some money in their pockets – is to spend the immediate future on rest and play…  Don’t start chasing leads today. Have a bit of a think and work out if you really want to move to Dubai, or retrain as a priest, before doing anything silly.

I agree with this.  Even for those who don’t have a strong financial cushion, the chances of making a good decision are likely to be improved if they can find time and space to approach the situation more reflectively.  She’s right too to advocate thinking hard before instigating radical change.  But if ever there was a time to think laterally, this is it.

Many people who work in the City never intended to make this their life.  They had other dreams to which they intended to turn once they’d amassed sufficient wealth.  But in the shock of redundancy it can be hard to conceive of an alternative life for oneself.  Looking on this from the outside, I find it slightly bewildering to hear clever and talented people struggle to imagine their capabilities as marketable in contexts other than the ones they have most recently left.  But, on the other hand, I’ve been possessed of this mindset myself.  I ploughed quite specialised niches in broadcasting and – close to the action – could see my career prospects only in terms of the template in which I was cast.

Taking some time to luxuriate in breaking free of the template can open one’s mind to the broader options one faces.  David Freud, an investment banker who lost his job in the downturn of the 1990s, hints at this in discussing research which suggests that even the experience of depression can ultimately be a catalyst for a fulfilling transformation.  This is because it forces a reassessment of goals:

This makes particular sense for City workers. Many have been lured into their careers by the huge money on offer, but they may have little affinity for the work. And when you need to put so much time and emotional intensity into an activity, you do have to enjoy it to persevere.

Personal discontent can be disguised in an upturn but the pressures of a downturn – the firings, the up-ending of networks, the loss of autonomy, survivor guilt – means the misery can come back at full force. In these circumstances depression may be a safety valve, forcing the individual to give up the chase.

It’s not necessary to have felt discontented with the job you have lost to benefit from taking stock to think more broadly about one’s options.  There may be a holding pattern you could pursue until things pick up again.  Or, for someone with unexpected time on their hands, now might be the ideal opportunity to fulfil some long-held ambition.

It’s hard to see the upside when one is coming to terms with an unexpected job loss.  And I’m not suggesting that it’s helpful to don a sense of false optimism.  But disruption to one’s career brings possibilities as well as setback and being open to those possibilities can increase the chances of making a good landing.

Image courtesy conorwithonen.