Modernisation and modernism: the post-war public library and the revolution in its built-form

It is not the intention in this chapter to provide a comprehensive account of Britain’s post-war modernisation project. Rather, the discussion is focused on the twin historic aspects of the public library’s mission: the material and the intellectual. This invites brief discussions of economic and technological development, the revolution in social attitudes and behaviour, the formulation of cultural policy and the rise of a new architecture. Into this framework is fitted, in the second half of the chapter, examples from the discourse of librarianship that not only resonate with the aforementioned meta contexts but also help explain the precise reasons why librarians endorsed Sixties library design so enthusiastically.