"Built in fulfilment of a promise made in 1904" a celebration of the libraries of south Manchester

It’s another of our exhibitions and tells the story of the libraries of south Manchester.    http://www.gladtobe.in/south/

From the promise made to the people of south Manchester in return for voting to join the city in 1904, to the our three Carnegie Libraries, and along the way some wonderful little stories.  All of this with Peter’s paintings of each library as they look today. Or read the book at

The libraries of south Manchester come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and date from the decades after 1904

This was the year when Burnage, Chorlton, Withington and Didsbury voted to join the city.  In return for voting to become part of Manchester there was the promise of cheaper gas, electricity and water rates, and the provision of public libraries.

But the libraries  were a little slow in coming.  In the case of Chorlton the first library was opened in 1908 in a rented house on Oswald Road and it would be another six years before a purpose built library was opened on Manchester Road.

It was “furnished with a thousand carefully selected volumes for use in the library and home reading,.............. a good selection of magazines is placed in a separate reading room [and] a special feature of the new library is the provision of a room for meetings of Home Reading Union circles and similar organisations.”

The Manchester Guardian reported “the style is Classical with Ionic columns in Portland stone and had 7,420 books, [which] if necessary can be increased to 10,500 volumes. There is a general reading room for adults and one for juveniles.”

In an age which has seen libraries add computers to the resources available to the user it is perhaps surprising that the Lord Mayor in opening the library nearly 100 years ago “hoped that someday there would be a kinematograph connected to our libraries for the special benefit of boys and girls, enabling them the better to understand the histories they were reading.”

The exhibition will be in Chorlton Library till the end of the month and then we plan to roll it out across the south of the city with a final showing in Central Library on Deansgate.

Picture; art work and picture from the current exhibition in Chorlton Library from the collection of Peter Topping