Library Review

1984 Library Review

doi: 10.1108/eb012764

It is not difficult to fill a chapter, and it would perhaps not be impossible to fill a book, with quotations over three centuries deploring the state of library provision in London. They begin at the latest in the midseventeenth century and die out if they die out at all no earlier than the late 1940s. Yet how valid were these complaints, and who were the complainants

MAIDMENT, W.R.

1984 Library Review

doi: 10.1108/eb012765

In 1888 the London County Council was established as the primary local authority for the area now known as Inner London. Twelve years later the parishes within the county were organised into 28 Metropolitan Boroughs which, together with the unchanged City of London, formed the second tier of local government. Twenty of the new boroughs inherited library powers because one or more of their constituent parishes had adopted the Public Libraries Acts before 1900. The eight boroughs which started without public libraries were Bethnal Green, Deptford, Greenwich, Hackney, Islington, Paddington, St. Marylebone and St. Pancras. Five of these adopted the Acts within a few years. Bethnal Green, Paddington and St. Marylebone on the other hand held out against the trend. Even the generosity of library benefactors could be rejected by diehards Paddington refused a Carnegie grant of 15,000 to establish a service.

DEWE, MICHAEL

1984 Library Review

doi: 10.1108/eb012766

In 1886, Thomas Greenwood had been rightly critical of the lack of public libraries in London. Eight years later, he was able to describe a changed situation. Following further adoptions of the Acts purposebuilt public libraries were to be found at Battersea, Bermondsey, Camberwell, Chelsea, Lambeth and St. MartinintheFields, for example. Greenwood wrote appreciatively of further developments

JONES, GRAHAM

1984 Library Review

doi: 10.1108/eb012767

There is no hope for a more efficient library system for London, wrote Frank Pacy, City Librarian of Westminster in the mid1920s, under the present divided management by twentyeight separate entities. Rootandbranch language of this order, implying that the speaker's professional career has been spent largely contending with the impossible, is not often used by a senior public servant within sight of retirement. Yet Pacy was no radical. Such judgments had in any case been current some twenty years earlier, after experience over half a decade of the then new Metropolitan Boroughs. The delivery of a paper by John McKillop to the Library Association annual meeting of 1906 at Bradford and its subsequent publication in the Library Association record remarkably, without the author's name, as if representing a corporate viewpoint provide substantiating documentation.

HARRISON, K.C.

1984 Library Review

doi: 10.1108/eb012768

LEBENSRAUM The London of Roman times, Elizabethan London, Pepys' London, the London of 1900, the capital of today one after another successive maps in most atlases record the relentless growth of the metropolis over the years. But always the most rapid and sensational growth is seen between 1900 and the start of the Second World War.