ABSTRACT
Listed at Grade II in 1997, identifying it as a historic building of national significance, the iconic Hampstead (later Swiss Cottage) Central Library was opened by the Queen on 10 November 1964 (Figure 6.1).1 Historic England (the government’s statutory advisor on the nation’s ‘heritage assets’) justifies the building’s listing by saying that it is ‘amongst the most ambitious architectural designs for a library found anywhere’.2 Of all the modernist libraries of the 1960s, Hampstead represented the boldest attempt to redefine the public library builtform, although aspects of its design, including its half-rotunda ends, certainly drew on historical precedent. Plans for a new library for Hampstead – the Victorian Hampstead Public Library in Arkwright Road had been badly bomb-damaged in the war and, though repaired in 1952, was an inadequate, overcrowded facility – formed part of a scheme for a large, new civic centre proposed in the late 1950s.3 A site was chosen at Swiss Cottage, commonly described at the time as the ‘gateway to London’ from the north. The architect chosen to design the sevenacre complex was Basil Spence, possibly Britain’s leading architect of the day. The original brief given to Spence4 was to design a civic centre which included a town hall, council chamber, two multipurpose public assembly halls (one to accommodate 1,250 people, the other 300), council offices, a restaurant, mayoral suite, swimming pool, gymnasium, library and parking for 200 cars below the principal square.5 In presenting his new civic centre for Hampstead, Spence criticised town halls and offices of the past as having ‘starched fronts’ and offering bad conditions for those who worked in them.6 Spence wanted to take the stiffness out of the civic centre. At Hampstead he wanted to open it up and ‘make it a pleasant place for the public, small, interesting and democratic, to provide interesting vistas and silhouettes, and to provide sunny offices’.7 A mark of its modernity, the main administrative block, 150 feet high, was to be positioned over the Swiss Cottage underground station, with lifts bringing civic employees directly from the station into their offices.8 All the buildings on the site were to display ‘quality and permanence,’ and the complex was to be a gathering place where people wanted, rather than had, to go.9
