ABSTRACT
The Great War brought the Carnegie-funded library building campaign to a halt. Modernism in its various forms was not entirely typical of inter-war library architecture. Manchester, although among the very first cities to open a public library under the Libraries Act of 1850, remained in 1919 much the biggest city in Britain without a purpose-built home for its central reference collection. Not surprisingly, the dream of all concerned with Manchester's public library was a new permanent home for the reference collection. Wilbraham was to be Manchester's last interwar new library building. William Curtis and Howard Burchett were respectively Middlesex county architect and his chief assistant, and the two men produced a number of strikingly original library and school designs as well as sensitive conversions of historic buildings to form libraries which had a convincing patina of age. The Sanderstead Branch Library again uses neo-Georgian proportions and art-deco details, and is dramatically positioned on a steep slope.
