Calling all Suffolk Book League members and non-members, we want your memories of the main County Library, Northgate Street, Ipswich – which reached its hundredth birthday on 3rd September 2024. Whether you have used the library regularly or occasionally, worked or volunteered there, let us know your recollections. I will start the ball rolling below.
Ipswich County Library – a century of service.
The main public library in Ipswich was built as a library on the site, being opened in 1924 on land donated by Alderman William Paul, who also funded the cost; along with the Carnegie Trust (which helped in the making of a number of UK public libraries around that time) (1). The architect was Henry Munro Cautley, who was diocesan architect for the Anglican diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich; therefore steeped in ecclesiastical medievalism, much of which translated into his designs (2). Take a look at the ceiling and stained glass windows in the first floor Northgate Room in the County Library, for confirmation of this. Each little moulding in the cornices in this room tells a story, similar to the carvings in churches from the middle ages. They are less showy than the portrait stained glass, but equally worth examining, which I had regrettably limited chances to do whilst working there.
I can remember attending a tea party to celebrate the ninetieth birthday of the library; and BookTalk marked the occasion with Peter Labdon (formerly head of Suffolk Libraries) pithily commenting that the ‘building endured a singular crisis when elements of the County Council’s library service were shoehorned into it following the shot-gun marriage of services demanded by the 1972 Local Government Act’ (3). Another big event for the library was the refurbishment completed in 1994, when the library’s contents and staff relocated to the old Girls’ School in Bolton Lane (now flats). One thing that sticks in my mind was a large houseplant from the staff room, probably of the Monstera (Swiss cheese plant) variety which was really too big and delicate to be loaded into any sort of van. Staff ingenuity sprang into action and the houseplant was loaded onto one of our flatbed trollies and wheeled across to Bolton Lane, with staff in attendance and successfully negotiating a couple of roads along the way. At the end of the nearly two years it took to complete renovations, it was trollied back - truly a case of ‘heavy plant crossing’!
Having worked in the reference library from 1989 to 2007, I loved it, but can recall how confused I was on arriving by the combination of old and new intermingled there. For example, the ‘dumb waiter’ used to transport items up and down to the basement by means of hauling on a rope felt particularly antiquated, even for 1989. I was told that an engineer called to service it ‘nearly wet himself laughing’ and that in earlier years someone had been known to get into it and be pulled up and down between floors. Sadly, it has long since been removed (during the alterations of the early nineties), for good health and safety reasons, no doubt.
Art UK, Ipswich County Library, Venues, no date, https://artuk.org/visit/venues/ipswich-county-library-3390
Suffolk Churches Glossary: Henry Munro Cautley, no date, http://www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/zcautley.htm
Labdon, P. Two anniversaries, BookTalk, 2014, September, (160): 5.
Janet Bayliss
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