St James Street Library Campaign needs your help tonight

Anyone who supports the reopening of St James Street Library as a resource for the whole community, not a drug centre, please come to the scrutiny committee meeting tonight (Weds 1 July), from 7pm at Waltham Forest town hall, Forest Rd.

St James Street Library Campaign found out late last night that the scrutiny committee is meant to discuss the council’s plan to replace our beloved library with a Drug Action Team (DAT) centre tonight. Apparently council officers have invited DAT supporters and police to support the plan. It’s important that we should make our opposition known because, if scrutiny does consider this agenda item tonight, its recommendation will go to the cabinet meeting next week. There’s a very strong lobby inside the council in favour of the DAT centre, so we fear the recommendation may get pushed through, even if councillors haven’t yet received the report they’re supposed to have read.

We oppose turning the library into a DAT centre for many reasons. We’ve been fighting since the library was closed in 2007, to have it reopened as a resource for the whole community, including a library. There is no community centre in the large and deprived area around Coppermill Lane that used to be served by the library, and local people have many great ideas for its use.

As well as its essential function in providing books, the library served as a drop-in centre for old people, a space for students living in overcrowded dwellings to do their homework, and a welcome stop for parents and children on their way home from the four local primary schools. The area has been noted in reports by independent bodies, such as the Prince’s Foundation, as being a deprived area with few facilities even before its only community space, St James Street Library, was closed. The Audit Commission censured the council for closing it without consultation, and without doing the legally required impact assessments eg for disability: St James Street Library was well-used by people with disabilities and had the only disabled toilet at that end of the market.

St James Street Library was closed without warning or consultation, and for the weakest of financial excuses. The saving of £70,000 a year (a bargain for a popular resource) was just a fraction of the £230,000 increase the councillors voted in their own allowances at the same meeting. Meanwhile, the council squandered £3.5 million on a trashy makeover for Walthamstow central library that caused extensive damage to the (listed) building; the council has also dumped nearly a quarter of a million books during the past few years, sending many of them to Edmonton incinerator.

Please come to support us this evening! Don’t give them a chance to say they didn’t know anyone cared about this.