Cllr Peter Craske is the Cabinet Member for Places on Bexley Council.
There can’t be many Councils in the country that have just opened a new library, and there must be even fewer that are opening two new libraries in only a few months.
Here in Bexley, that is exactly what we are doing.
Both of them are the results of working in partnership with others to secure a site and provide other services from the same building.
In Sidcup, we have just opened the Storyteller – a new home for the town’s library, complete with a cafe – and in the New Year, it will be the home of a new three-screen cinema run by the Really Local Group.
There has been a huge amount of buzz in Sidcup about this and everyone has watched their new library and cinema being built right in front of them.
The site itself used to be a Blockbusters shop, and after that closed down well over a decade ago, the site just lay empty, unused, blighting the town centre.
At the same time, the home of the existing library was reaching the end of its life and would have required very substantial and very expensive works just to maintain it at its current level, let alone make it fit for the next 20 years.
So we came up with an idea. The idea was to see if we could buy the Blockbusters site ourselves and turn it into something really creative, that would bring something new and different to the town centre, and, at the same time create a new, modern home for the library.
All of this led to us striking up a partnership with the Really Local Group to bring not just a new home for the town’s popular library but a new cinema for Sidcup.
And we’ve done it!
Our new library opened on December 16th, complete with a new cafe, a well-designed children’s library, a vastly improved computer and IT area and internet connections, and with thousands of books for users to choose from.
And in the new year, the new cinema will open. What makes this different is it isn’t a major chain cinema, it’s more local and niche, showing major films yes but also more thematic films; not the usual films as the ones at the various multiplexes near by.
And Really Local Group have a well established track record of creating independent cinemas as the key to creating places for the whole community to use.
Then, in 2023 we will open a new library in Thamesmead, in partnership with Peabody. This new library, with amazing views across Southmere Lake to the Thames, will be part of a wider community building, The Nest.
Of course, we could have just left the existing buildings alone, spending more and more money exponentially each year just to keep them going as they reached the end of their lives, and then have to spend even more to eventually rebuild them, but that would not represent any kind of value for money for our residents and taxpayers.
By working this way, thinking about things in a new and different way, we are delivering new libraries, fit for the next 30+ years, in partnerships that will provide so much more for the communities they serve.
As I said, being able to open two new libraries in the space of a few months is something we are very proud of and we can’t wait to open up the new Thamesmead library in the new year.