This is about a big subject pretending to be little, about profundity masquerading as triviality and about the British state beginning to break as it stops doing the hard things it should do and does too many easy things that it should not.
What could be less important than the fate of a few second-hand books in a tatty old bookcase surrounded by cheap 1970s tiles and a couple of pot plants?
Who cares that the Oval book swap library, managed for many years by the friendly staff at Oval Tube station, has closed? A fleeting distraction to speeding commuters or ambling cricket lovers has been lost. So what?
So quite a lot in fact. I moved to London’s Oval neighbourhood, just outside central Zone 1, in 2007. The tube station, part of the oldest stretch of deep underground railway in the world, is ugly: a featureless and be-tiled bungalow of a building where it should be the ground floor of a beautiful six storey mansion block. At the time I worked in the city and my daily commute was modestly improved by the innovative and joyful way in which the kindly staff managed the tube station: classical music playing most days, pot plants prettifying the ugliness and, most remarkably, a small book swap library at the top of the escalators. Nothing special but over the years we’ve passed on books of which we had no need and picked up some marvels that others did not want. An old copy of Mark Girouard’s The English Town and a “Calvin and Hobbes” cartoon book for my younger son lodge in the memory.
Book swap libraries are a small way of building mutual trust and links within neighbourhoods. You normally find them in villages or small-town halls, not in busy bits of central London. Over the years, I have occasionally chatted briefly to fellow passengers as we peruse the books or to a neighbour as we admit to both enjoying the library. It says to those passing by: you’re not just a commuter or a customer, you are a part of a community within a neighbourhood.
In March of this year, senseless killjoys at London Fire Brigade told Oval Tube station, and other similar stations such as Highbury and Islington, that the books were a fire risk and needed to go.
When I and others expressed surprise on social media, the criticism was widespread. I was rather taken aback. People obviously cared. The mayor, Sir Sadiq Khan, stepped in and asked the fire brigade to reconsider their position. I have no idea what reconsidering took place, but I do know that, two months on, the book swap library has not returned.
A more depressing example of bureaucratic and regulatory overreach is hard to imagine
The idea that a small bookcase surrounded by inflammable tiles represents a meaningful risk of death by fiery immolation is clearly nonsense. The risk is remote compared to the danger that was presented until very recently by discarded newspapers and magazines blowing fecklessly throughout the Tube’s tunnels or is still presented by the batteries in our phones, scooters and E bikes. A dozen books do not spontaneously go up in flames. No terrorist wishing to kill us would waste his time with them. He could pack more fatality into a lithium battery in an unchecked backpack. One could imagine perfectly the warnings and conversations, about the desire to “take no risk with public safety” that took place behind closed doors but the whole thing is self-evidently nonsense.
A more depressing example of bureaucratic and regulatory overreach is hard to imagine. Meanwhile, the police and London Transport utterly fail to control, or apparently care about, the wave of fare dodging which is visibly overwhelming the system and undermining public trust. Tube trains are suddenly covered in graffiti for the first time in my life. In the same week that the London Fire Brigade shut down our local book swap service, Heathrow went down due to a still unexplained fire in an electricity substation.
Clearly, priorities have gone very badly wrong. Trust matters if towns are to flourish. And cities need to be safe and be seen to be safe if the middle classes are to flock to them not flee from them.
The British state is becoming increasingly good at executing what it should not be doing and bad at executing what it should. Layers and layers of governance and control and inefficiency and joyless lanyardism wasting time and money, commissioning reports, milking the taxpayer and the energetic dry, sitting on and squashing our still lingering culture of association and unofficial voluntarism, of clubs and committees, of swaps and schemes.
One characteristic of high trust societies is a richness of unofficial, neighbourly and communal interactions and institutions. We just made that a little bit harder.
A century ago, London’s complex culture of markets and travelling salespeople, of costermongers as they were known, was wiped out by government regulation, a melancholy and forgotten tale I explored in my history of London’s streets. The loss was so grievous and so profound to the prosperity of our streets and the richness of our urban culture that no one alive today even knows what has been lost.
London Fire Brigade’s casual drive-by shooting of the Tube’s book swap libraries is part of the same depressing journey from a rich and varied civic life to an overly-controlled, joyless and dead public space. It is not a journey we should be on.
