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Haringey Cuts
Thought I might list in one what is already known:
Cutting in training social workers for adults and children
Reduction of the planning department to “one of the smallest in London”
Council’s neighborhood management service scrapped
Walk-in customer services centre at Hornsey’s (CE) closed
No libraries are proposed for closure, but the books and staffing budget will be slashed by £200,000
Old folks’ homes and day centres reviewed with closures
Redundancies among parks and leisure staff will trigger a 50 per cent drop in maintenance regimes, leading to a “significant deterioration in the quality of open space”
conservation teams and enforcement officers that maintain the borough’s many woods and parks radically reduced
Outsourcing management of its leisure and sports centres
Households in controlled parking zones will be expected to pay up to £150 per year to park a single car outside their homes
Crouch End, Green Lanes and Muswell Hill, will have its pay and display parking tickets more than doubled from £1.40 to £3 per hour.
More than 1,000 council jobs - or 20 per cent of the council’s workforce – are at risk
Have also heard that SG School before/after school club is at risk. It is run by the council and they are probably not going to fund it. It possibly may be taken over by the YMCA.
From various sources. Think 7th Feb or there abouts is the big day everything is announced
Comments
Re stock. As a musician, I rely on their excellent music library, upstairs, which doubles (trebles) as a reference library, and quiet study area - one of the few completely silent areas in the whole of north London, I suggest.
It is a pity that there isn't a Dewey Decimal 'map' of the library. You have to be guided to a section by a member of staff. But the staff are first class, particularly the older ones - friendly, knowledgeable, and immensely helpful. And they have access to a vast second library of 'Reserve Stock' in the basement. Many more scores - scores of scores - and all sorts of other arcana.
At the other end of the scale, they have the unbelievable facility of buying what the customer wants, if it's not otherwise available. History of Philosophy, limited edition, written by my tutor? Bought; taken out; renewed countless times. Brand new stuff, recommended by the superb Start The Week programme, on Radio 4? In your hands within a week or two. Modern novel, The Lacuna, say, which everyone is talking about? Free; I wouldn't be able to read it, otherwise.
Do you ever venture upstairs, to spend an hour or two with their mind-boggling supply of newspapers and magazines? Or if your computer is down, there is a great bank of them up there, at your service - free. There's also the not-bad-at-all piano keyboard up there. Just ask for the headphones at the desk, and the ivories await you, Rachmaninov or Art Tatum, here we come (actually I can't play either, but even half an hour on my scales and arps keeps arthritis at bay).
If the those cutting bastards dare to touch Hornsey Library, I shall join any protest going.
I was actually thinking more of the Wood Green branch, where I'd been on Tuesday and which seems to have less and less in every time I visit. Hornsey and the one which shares premises with a swimming pool are pretty good (except for the inevitable chlorine smell in the latter). Stroud Green is convenient and has a lot of PG Wodehouse, but is otherwise not much cop. Muswell Hill and Alexandra Park are, I imagine, similarly popular with their locals, but otherwise pretty poor. But I do agree that the staff are generally very good in all of them.
Do you happen to know if any Islington branch has a music library as good as Hornsey's? I'd like to have a look, if so - but I don't think they have.
The Blackstock Road one is called N4 and yeah, some of the staff are less than great. It's not a brilliant branch, particularly since upstairs got hijacked from being SF and crime and instead got repurposed into some sort of youth area. Still, I almost always find something I want to borrow.
Not musical, ADGS? Nonsense! Everyone is musical - potentially. The problem is the number of fascist music teachers around - or who WERE around, when I was young. I can't tell you how many times I hear of would-be singers being silenced, because they are out of tune. I seem to remember that even the great Gareth? Gavin? Malone did it, in his first telly project, in a boys' secondary school. There was a shot of a Bengali family comforting their teenage son, for failing to get into the choir, I think. Ouch. But..I'm digressing.. and it's time to get up!
There are a lot of events / talks / activities planned at Stroud Green library so it is well worth joining the group.
The message given out by the council leader at a recent area assembly was that the council is planning to increase use of libraries, eg increasing the number of services available through them, as a way of keeping them open.
I would echo checksi's original comments about the use and value of our libraries and would point out that by going through the door of any small library does give you access to the wider stock across the borough in any case.
Article and link to fabulous speech by Philip Pullman in defence of public libraries can be enjoyed here http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/27/philip-pullman-defend-libraries-web
The LD's rigged the 'consultation' , botched the sell off and opened the inferior N4 library miles away - totally unsuitable for young kids in SG to get to. My own brood used to do their homework in the Arthur Simpson to avoid the rowing and flumping at home.
If you go past the site (which operated as a libarary since 1961) you will now find one of the ugliest cheapest modern blocks of flats in the area - the builders were so embarrased about it they did not even give it a number and there is a faded typed sign in one of the window.
Crouch End library is a gem, but I fear it will go the same way.
PS Does anyone remember Eileen Colwell?
However, I got fed up of the reference sections. I remember this one guy who used to be always at the Arthur Simpson library and he'd have a pile of magazines and newspapers by his side, even though most of the time he seemed to be on the verge of sleep. I once asked him if I could read the NME as he wasn't reading it and he got quite aggressive with me. I didn't bother going there much after that.
Arthur Simpson Library was incredibly convenient for me, and the sell-off was dodgy in the extreme, but the one meeting I went to about saving it appalled me. People were talking about Blackstock Road as if it were some great distance away (as against, what, half a mile at the absolute outside?) and there weren't frequent buses down the road. A lot of it seemed to be barely-coded references to Blackstock Road being 'a different community'. I was disgusted enough with this, at best, parochialism to think - even if it does inconvenience me too, these bastards don't deserve a library. It's clearly not done much to educate them so far.
At least one of the Arthur Simpson librarians, the commendably thorough Asian guy, now works in Central rather than N4.