I love Colindale. That’s a strange admission, I know. Exiting Colindale tube station on the Northern Line sometimes feels like arriving in a forgotten pre-war world of boarded up terraced houses, now given over to front room minicab firms or dingy bedsits. Turn left and you will end up at the uninviting Colindale Hospital. But cross the road and turn slightly to your right and, if you are like me, your heart will lift at the prospect of the singular treasures to be unearthed in the dilapidated 1930’s building known as The Colindale Newspaper Library you are about to enter.But hurry because Colindale, one of the oldest and biggest newspaper libraries in the world, is about to close. The building was never fit for the purpose of collecting and preserving every British regional, national and local newspaper, early editions of the Beano and Dandy, every 20th century football programme and historic newspapers over the last 300 years including gems such as the first edition of the Manchester Guardian on May 5 1821. It also has some 250 international titles making it a unique resource of more than 750 million pages used for research by 30,000 people – genealogists, local historians and researchers – every year. They (I should say we) put up with dreadful coffee in polystyrene cups and tasteless vending machine sandwiches – there is nowhere else to eat for miles – because of the exciting revelations upstairs. I can imagine no better way to immerse myself in what it felt like to live in the 1930’s than by reading newspaper accounts telling me what clothes I should buy for how much and what medicines or tablets will cure my likely ailments.
In 2009 the then Labour government pledged £33 million for the British Library to build a new state of the art storage facility in Boston Spa, Yorkshire and to move the collection there, an amount reconfirmed by the Coalition last year in spite of the cuts. The new building will have proper temperature and humidity controls as well as low oxygen levels to reduce the fire risk which is dangerously high for products with such a large wood pulp content as newspapers. Access in future will be at the British Library in St Pancras but almost everything will have to be viewed on microfilm and ordered in advance. Where no surrogate exists, and if the original is considered in a suitable state to travel, it will be sent to St Pancras. Some original periodicals will live at St Pancras but seeing an original newspaper is going to be, literally, a thing of the past.
“We have a room identified for researchers to look at the collection on microfilm but it needs to be adapted and terminals fitted. Eventually everything will be digitised – the best solution as this means one newspaper can be looked at an infinite number of times,” explained British Library spokesman, Ben Sanderson.
The BL is working with a commercial partner for this part of the transformation, which is not covered by Government funding. The aim is eventually to create a multimedia newspaper room with sophisticated software that allows for word searching, which will be a dramatic improvement on the present needle-in-haystack approach. Boston Spa does have a small reading room but researchers will not be encouraged to travel there nor will they have any more chance of seeing original material by making the journey.
For years anyone researching at Colindale was aware this was a building at breaking point. “Surely you know about the Colindale dandruff,” Sanderson asked me, describing the bits of newspaper that flake off as you turn a page, however gently. These papers were intended as ephemera to be thrown away as soon as they were read. They have done remarkably well to last as long as they have but 15% of the collection is already beyond use and 19% is in peril. Merely binding them in large hardback folders does not help because the nature of the storage facilities at Colindale, now squeezed to breaking point, is such that they have to be stored horizontally which creates further damage as the weight causes stress on every page. In Boston Spa they will be stored vertically.
In recent years the explosion of free newspapers and rise in the number of supplements has further complicated the task of keeping one copy of everything. “Sometimes we questioned – do we really need to keep these free sheets or TV guides? But of course we do,” Sanderson told me. It is quite amazing after two or three hundred years what we can learn from them advertising from the 18th century tells us about literacy levels, people’s disposable income and whether they bought products for utility or desire. They are loaded with information.”
So, if you love Colindale as much as I do, you have at least another year perhaps more, to sample its delights. There may be a full embargo on the entire collection for a few weeks in early 2013 while everything is boxed up, labelled and catalogued but some time later that year the greatest newspaper library in the world will be stored in Yorkshire.
Of course I don’t love Colindale enough to move to the North West London suburb as one aficionado of the library did forty years ago so that he could be closer to the source of his inspiration. Colindale attracts its fare share of anoraks and many people have made researching here their life’s work. The collection of sports statistics is especially rich and no other single library has such comprehensive coverage of all county cricket matches over the past century. Collating and interpreting county cricket reports could keep one person busy throughout a working life. And there are hordes of family researchers who spend weeks there hoping to find information that will help them trace their roots. These people presumably will now turn to St Pancras putting even greater pressure on that already bustling building.