The Joy of Six 1553

Michael Savage reports that journalists are self-censoring their reporting on right-wing protests, Donald Trump's administration and trans issues because of growing concerns about their personal safety.

"The magazine’s extensive output about Islam emerges from a coherent ideological viewpoint. Muslims are invaders. They don’t belong in this country. They don’t share our values and they threaten our public spaces. Any civic engagement by Muslims in Britain is suspect and should be resisted." Peter Oborne itemises the Spectator's rabid Islamophobia.

 Alistair Jones on the reorganisation of local government in Leicestershire: "Rutland is deemed too small to be a cost-effective council (although, personally, I remain unconvinced). Similarly, although more contentiously, the population argument was likely to see some expansion of the Leicester City Council boundaries. The question was going to be: how far? And now we know. There will be a significantly enlarged city council, and the remainder of the county and Rutland will form a single unitary authority."

In the latest move to censor US school libraries, one district is considering getting rid of them altogether. Erin Reed reports from Clay County in Florida.

"Both detectives were created or at least popularized by women; both possessed a typically female kind of intelligence that was easy to miss or dismiss. But the women who made them lived entirely different relationships to ownership and credit, and those relationships come through in the characters themselves." As the early Miss Marple and Nancy Drew novels are entering the public domain, Ellen O’Connell Whittet asks what comes next for the characters.

Rob Bagchi recalls the Joe Mercer's short, sunny spell as England's caretaker manager in 1974: "He gave them a blueprint for renovation that was disastrously ignored when the caution and anxiety he had temporarily banished returned with a vengeance."

The Joy of Six 1548

Sam Bright explains what is missing from the Covid Inquiry PPE report: "Long before the pandemic struck, the governing party had established a fundraising system that handed influence to those with the fattest chequebooks. The Conservatives, and Westminster as a whole, created the conditions for the PPE scandal long before even the first whiff of Covid in Wuhan."

Andrew Page shares his thoughts on the reaction to the death of Ann Widdecombe: "It has been deeply depressing to see some people going much further than this and celebrating her death online. Quite apart from the cruelty shown towards her family and friends, there is something profoundly corrosive about a society in which the death of another human being becomes an occasion for applause because we happened to dislike their opinions."

"Whilst working in public libraries, I experienced several attempts to censor library stock including a parent wishing me to withdraw art books from the library’s shelves, because they featured paintings or sculptures of nudes. Books featuring Black people of note were the subject of complaints as well as those about political figures of the time. I had parents complaining about Judy Blume’s books, which were aimed at a teenage audience, because they featured girls going through puberty and parents who were divorced." Meg Gain on Reform-led Warwickshire County Council's proposal to censor what children read.

"Residential family assessment centres have become a major part of England's child protection and family justice system, yet surprisingly little is known about whether they improve outcomes for children and families." King's College London reports research by Mary Baginsky and Rick Hood.

Tim Adams says Jude Bellingham is channelling the spirit of Duncan Edwards, his 1950s Black Country counterpart.

"In 1951 he helmed an adaptation of Josephine Tey’s bestselling The Franchise Affair. In it, a teenage girl accuses two respectable women living in a remote country house of having kidnapped, beaten and starved her in an attempt to force her to become their servant. The movie starts on a remote highway with a wild thunderstorm, and the young girl (Ann Stephens) pops up in the middle of the road in a startling close-up." Self-Styled Siren praises the neglected British director Lawrence Huntington.

The Joy of Six 1537

David Howarth reminds us that both Tony Blair and Keir Starmer said pluralist things in opposition, only to go back on them in power: "Given that history, why should Liberals believe that Andy Burnham would be any different? He has already backtracked on his previous anti-Brexit pronouncements and his only promise on electoral reform is that he might include a 'pledge' on it in Labour’s next manifesto. We know what such 'pledges' from Labour are worth."

A deliberate strategy to push the British right – from the Conservative Party to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK – into a radicalising auction over the mass deportations of ethnic minority British citizens is being underwritten by the owner of 55 Tufton Street, the Westminster townhouse that houses a cluster of opaquely funded right-wing lobby groups, reports Nafeez Ahmed.

"The party holds one seat in a chamber that has grown from 60 to 96 members, meaning their proportional presence is smaller now than at any point since devolution began." Elsie Jones asks why the Welsh Liberal Democrats underperformed in last month's Senedd elections.

Andy Bull looks back on Brendon McCullum's career in New Zealand: "All of which may, or may not, be a timely reminder that McCullum's dressing rooms have not always been the sort of free-and-easy open-to-all environments they seem to be when the team are winning. That, expert as he is handling his players, he is also a pretty ruthless dressing-room politician, a man who knows how to instruct a media team and even deploy his lawyers during a crisis."

Wayne Gooderham explores the influence of Hubert Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn on popular music and on the gender sensibilities of The Smiths, Van Morrison and The Velvet Underground in particular. 

"I had never been so far below sea level, it was difficult to comprehend, the layers of rock, millions of years old above us." Neala shows that being an archives volunteer at Manchester Central Library is more exciting that you might expect.

The Joy of Six 1447

Keir Starmer's digital ID project is a techno-authoritarian’s wet dream, argues Carole Cadwalladr: "This is a policy that wasn’t in the Labour Party’s manifesto, that no party faithful campaigned for and that no voters were told about on the doorstep. Instead, after some brief ground softening by pet journalists in friendly newspapers, it appeared out of almost nowhere in late September."

David Nowell Smith shows that accusations of "left-wing bias" against the BBC have a long history and arose from newspapers' fear of competition: "The first coordinated newspaper campaign against the ‘Reds’ at the BBC was initiated by the Daily Mail in January 1937, less than two weeks after a new BBC Charter had given the Corporation further editorial independence."

Carolyn Jackson and Mieke Van Houtte say the high-stakes tests common in English schools could be having a serious effect on children’s wellbeing.

"Academics warned that recovery from the October 2023 cyberattack, apparently by an international ransomware gang, has been 'agonisingly slow'. Even the imminent restoration of functions such as the library’s online catalogue will be of only limited help to researchers still unable to access key resources: Frances Jones finds a lack of concern at the plight of the British Library.

"We handed a loaded weapon to four-year-olds." Alex Kantrowitz on the regrets of the man who built the retweet.

Dick Weindling and Marianne Colloms tell the remarkable story of the two men who robbed eight London banks in a morning: "Robert wrote a lengthy confession and said he did it for: 'the devilment of the matter – the excitement, the ingenuity, the almost impossible success to crown it all, urged me to attempt the fraud'."

The Joy of Six 1439

"The sections of Restoring Order and Control that mention children are chilling, suggesting that many asylum seekers bring their children not because they love and care for them but as a 'fact' to 'exploit ... in order to thwart removal'." Christopher Betram reads the government's new paper on its asylum and returns policy.

Morgan Wild believes municipal bond markets can save Britain: "This is one way to give public servants skin in the game. The team delivering the project should also raise the finance. Their decisions matter to them – cost overruns mean higher local taxes – in a way that they don't when they're trying to talk money out of the Treasury."

Why has government found it impossible to repair or replace Hammersmith Bridge? Do we need to replace it all? A fascinating investigation by Nick Maini.

Hetan Shah asks why no one cares that the British Library is in crisis.

"Carved from Forest of Dean sandstone, the structure was designed to appear as if gently rippling in the breeze. Blending Christian and Islamic symbols, the tomb reflects Burton’s lifelong fascination with Middle Eastern culture." Ian Visits reports that Conservation work has started on one of the most unusual mausoleums in the Roman Catholic world – the Bedouin tent shaped tomb of Sir Richard Burton and his wife, Lady Isabel, which stands in the churchyard of St Mary Magdalen in Mortlake.

Susan Major offers a new insight into York's history: "York’s back alleys hide a striking feature of the city's past: scoria bricks, made from the molten waste of Cleveland’s 19th-century blast furnaces. Distinctive for their silvery blue sheen and unusual shapes, these bricks tell a story of recycling, ingenuity and urban change."

The Joy of Six 1421

"There was little to no interaction between the three groupings at conference. The main hall hosted debates that were stitched up months ago, when the delegate line-up was elected, and the fringe events largely confirmed prejudices, instead of challenging them. 'This is why we were right all along,' was the lesson learned by all three groups." Seth Thévoz argues that Labour is split into irreconcilable factions.

Leo Litra and Gabrielė Valodskaitė say the success of Maia Sandu’s pro-EU party in Moldova’s parliamentary election holds three valuable lessons for protecting votes from Russian meddling in the future – whether in Moldova or in other vulnerable democracies.

"The Librarians, directed by Kim A. Snyder and recently released in the UK, is a documentary about the crackdown on American school libraries that began in 2021 in Texas and soon spread to other states. Ordered to remove 850 books from their shelves ... several librarians resisted. Some were fired; some received death threats." Anna Aslanyan on the battle against censorship.

Kenan Malik reviews a new book that challenges accepted views of the appeal of the arts: "Today, much of that working-class culture has not just slipped away but also been lost to memory. It is partly the result of the changing relationship between the state and the arts. Thatcherite free market ideology of the 1980s combined with New Labour’s stress on 'social impact' both to commodify the arts and to instrumentalise it – the worth of any work of art lay not in the work itself but in its capacity to promote economic growth, .urban regeneration and, most importantly, 'social inclusion”."

Natasha A. Fraser looks back on the cinematic legacy of her stepfather, Harold Pinter. She remembers his understanding of actors, the yellow legal pads he wrote his scripts on, his Hollywood flirtations and disdain for the clutter of Academy correspondence.

"It would have been fascinating to see where Tey's pen and her ingenious mind would have taken her. As it stands, a headline from the Scots newspaper, The Herald, from 2022 rather seems to sum it up: 'Josephine Tey,' it declared, 'the best crime writer you’ve never heard of'. Quite possibly. And it’s high time that changed." Alec Marsh champions the forgotten queen of crime fiction.

The Joy of Six 1419

"Make no mistake: Raise the Colours and Unite the Kingdom, which drew more than 100,000 protesters to London last month, want the same thing: nativist dominance; a fortress Britain built on exclusion. It poses as spontaneous grassroots patriotism, but scratch its surface and you’ll find that veteran far-right and neo-fascist organisers are behind its coordination and financing." The global far-right is brainwashing a town near you, warns Joseph S. Furey.

Richard Ovendon says libraries are palaces for the people that must be defended: "More than a decade of austerity has ... ravaged the public library sector in many parts of our nation. There are fewer palaces for the people, many are open for fewer hours than before 2010, and some of them are in dire need of physical repair."

"The challenge for anyone trying to bring propagandists to trial has always been connecting vile words to horrific acts." Peter Pomerantsev on holding Putin's propagandists to account.

Liz Green says that support for councillors is vital to democracy: "Within months of being elected, many are already wrestling with exhaustion, frustration or a sense of being out of their depth. For those stepping into cabinet or committee chair roles, the pressure intensifies."

Zoe Williams mourns Jilly Cooper: "People got groped and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s surprising how OK it is in many far more literary books of the era."

"Another picture here, 28 London Streets, is a gallery of evocative street names from their neighbourhood – Princelet Street, Henriques Street, Chudleigh Street. Instead of gurning or cavorting as in their other self portraits, the artists here are two misty, spectral entities: the ghosts of Gilbert & George, haunting their old streets for ever." Jonathan Jones enjoys the G&G exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.

Malcolm Saville visits Shrewsbury in 1963

Malcolm Saville was a Sussex man, but his most popular books were those set in the Shropshire hills.

This advertisement from the Wellington Journal (12 January 1963) shows him making an appearance at a Shrewsbury bookshop to sign books before giving a talk at the town library.

Saville had long worked in publishing - I believe he was even Enid Blyton's publicist at one time - and did not give up that day job when his career as a children's writer took off.

The Joy of Six 1195

Chris Skidmore tells a Press Association reporter that he has "no regrets" over leaving parliament and warns his former party that it faces its "toughest by-election fight so far" in Kingswood.

"You expect some silence in a library. But not this much. The reading rooms of the British Library near King’s Cross are usually home to busy writers and academics working on their next tomes, but on a visit this week, most of the desks were empty." Robbie Griffiths on the ransomware attack that crippled the British Library.

Tom Scott warns that conspiracy theorists are increasingly moving out of their internet echo chamber of medical disinformation and climate science denialism into real-world activism in communities around the UK: "There is no single, central point from which the movement is directed – indeed, one of its strengths is that it has grown organically. It is not overtly party-political, though Richard Tice’s Reform UK party, with which it shares many positions, appears to see it as a fertile recruiting ground. Some of its leading figures are also linked to groups even further to the right, including the neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative."

In the wake of the impact of Mr Bates vs the Post Office, Mark Lawson chooses 13 television programmes that shook Britain.

Darcy Moore introduces us to George Orwell's militant suffragette Aunt Nellie.

"The wisdom of taking very young boys out of local and school football and placing them in a youth-academy setting is questionable for a number of reasons, not least because the overwhelming majority of them will never secure a future career as professional footballers." Post-Liberal Pete mourns the decline of street football and the rise of club academies.

The Joy of Six 1188

Peter Geogehan reminds us that Michelle Mone is a symptom of a much deeper disease corrupting British politics.

"In the hours after the arrest, pretty much every British political media organization prominently reported the man’s arrest, together with his age, his position as an MP, and his alleged crimes. But while every reporter in Westminster knew exactly who he was, it took more than a year before anybody dared publish his name." Esther Webber explains how British libel law lets bad people get away with bad things."

"I am the only reader present in what’s typically a bustling space. The library’s reading rooms are now zombies. As public service announcements have brightly reported, the rooms are still open for 'personal study'. That said, visitors cannot request, retrieve, or use materials (for the most part), from the library’s vast collections." Carolyn Dever on the strangely unreported cyberattack that has crippled the British Library,

Alexandra Wilson says the idea that the best young academics end up working at the best universities is a myth.

Jonathan Liew reports on the dwindling of the London darts scene: "But this is a drowned world now, a lost world. Walk a mile in any direction from Alexandra Palace, where the Professional Darts Corporation hosts its world championships, and the rich darting heritage that birthed a worldwide phenomenon exists only in ghosts and whispers."

"Before the movie played, however, viewers were invited into a mocked-up American motel room, with a garish pink and blue neon sign blaring outside the window. A young chap with an electric shock haircut and a leather jacket sidled in to talk a little about Robin Hardy’s picture and the season of outsider films for which it marked the beginning." Richard Luck celebrates Alex Cox and Moviedrome.

The Joy of Six 1167

"When you look at the facts in the cold light of day; Labour’s plan will raise much needed money at a time when state schools are quite literally crumbling. It will not lead to a mass exodus or overwhelm the state sector, and when even Michael Gove thought taxing private schools was a good idea, it’s hard to argue against it." Emma Monk backs moves to curb the tax breaks received by private schools.

Alistair Carmichael talks to Holyrood Magazine about, among other things, Dolly Parton and the Dalai Lama.

Angelina Osborne on why Black British history matters.

"In just one year, bans have increased by a third, with a total of 3,362 bans in the 2022-23 school year. The sharp rise in book bans is largely targeted at books with LGBTQ+ content, characters or authors; books about race or racism; and books about physical abuse or with themes of grief or death." Katie Dancey-Downs explains the need for Banned Books Week in the US.

Terence Towles Canote writes about one of his favourite British films: "David Puttnam had good reason for wanting Bill Forsyth to see Whisky Galore! The producer had been researching the Scottish oil industry, in particular the oil boom in Shetland in the early Seventies. What struck David Puttnam is that the Shetlanders actually welcomed the oil companies, in hopes that the large amount of money generated by oil would in turn help them. David Puttnam then talked Bill Forsyth into developing the idea for what would become Local Hero."

A short introductory lecture on T.H. White, one of my favourite authors, from Gabriel Schenk.

The Joy of Six 1094

"Its lasting value is in its revelation that the institutions of the Conservative Party and the British government are so decrepit that they can be hacked by someone like Liz Truss, as if they were merely Oxford student societies writ large." Lewis Baston reads Harry Cole and James Heale's biography of Liz Truss.

"A memory of Churchill only as an icon of anti-appeasement is a caricature, even if it was a caricature the man himself was complicit in creating. It reduces a man of many parts, and of many bargains, into a lovable bulldog." We need to save Churchill from his present-day admirers, argues Patrick Porter.

Nigel Warburton on why we need libraries: "Community libraries ... are, among other things, a democratic resource providing free access to information for all, including guided access to the internet for those who might otherwise be excluded."

Geoff Barton says we should listen to young people's views on education.

Richard Lester’s 1974 film Juggernaut trembled on the edge of being a political allegory for Britain in that decade, finds Simon Matthews: "There was something deeply ironic about Richard Lester – one of the key ringmasters of Swinging London – portraying the state of the nation in the 1970s. Doubly so, given the cast includes David Hemmings, he of Blow-Up and much else, expended here halfway through the film. How times change."

John Thomas takes us through this year's work on the remarkable Roman villa found beneath the fields of Rutland.

Listen to the stories of Kenal Rise with John Rogers

Something a bit different from John Rogers. As he explains on YouTube

This is a video of my project for Brent 2020 London Borough of Culture in collaboration with the wonderful Kensal Rise Library which ran from January 2020 to January 2021. Kensal Rise Has A Story tells the story of the streets around Kensal Rise Library through the voices of local people and is part of the inaugural Brent Biennal

I explained the project in an interview with Art Review

It’s a geographic sound map or trail of Kensal Rise. The form the project takes has partly been informed by the COVID-19 restrictions. I had planned this beautiful archive inside the library and some of the sound works were going to be burnt onto vinyl which could be listened to within a listening booth. We’ve not got those, but its ok, those were outcomes, they weren’t really the work itself which is a portrait of the community in their own words. 

By ‘community’ I mean the community of the library. Where it becomes geographic is that the emphasis is on the subjective responses to the environment and the changes within that environment rather than looking for some objective, dry, historical overview of the area, or even contemporary commentary on the area.

The ethos of the Kensal Rise Library is at the heart of the project. About 60 percent of the contributors are connected to the library, as users or in some other way. You can’t listen to any of the clips without feeling the presence of the library.

The unusual pub name near the end - Paradise by way of Kensal Green - is a reference to a poem by G.K. Chesterton.

John has a Patreon account to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.

The Joy of Six 1043

"Failures of investigation and enforcement by the National Crime Agency and other UK state bodies have led to flawed judgments by UK courts, especially regarding post-Soviet elites. Capable and expensive lawyers (hired by members of transnational elites or their advisers) defeat or deter the regulators’ often weak and under-resourced attempts to prosecute politically exposed persons." A Chatham House briefing paper by John Heathershaw et al. details how the UK is ill-equipped to assess the risk of corruption from transnational kleptocracy, which has undermined the integrity of important domestic institutions and weakened the rule of law. 

Tarjei Svensen finds that some of Ukraine's chess grandmasters have take up arms to defend their country.

Patricia Clarke says the "epidemic" of spiking with needles in clubs and at parties in autumn 2021 revealed something important about women’s lives in Britain, but it wasn’t what we thought.

"For borough librarian George F Vale and his deputy, Stanley Snaith, the underground village that had developed at Bethnal Green station was the perfect opportunity to set up a makeshift library and provide the local community with access to free books once more." Kate Thompson explains how working-class East Enders had access to books, entertainment and culture in an underground library during the Second World War.

The Corn Poppy on learning sea shanties at school.

"If you ever visit Easthope, you may be struck by how quiet the place is- But if the ghosts are anything to go by- It’s an area alive with the hum of the past." AmyNearlyKnowledgeable investigates a village on the slopes of Wenlock Edge.

Six of the Best 999

Stephen Williams makes the case for abolishing Bristol's elected mayor.

Samantha Rose Hill examines Hannah Arendt's writings on the links between loneliness and totalitarianism: "Arendt’s argument about loneliness and totalitarianism is not an easy one to swallow, because it implies a kind of ordinariness about totalitarian tendencies that appeal to loneliness: if you are not satisfied with reality, if you forsake the good and always demand something better, if you are unwilling to come face-to-face with the world as it is, then you will be susceptible to ideological thought."

With evidence for efficacy so thin, and the stakes so high, why is electroshock therapy still a mainstay of psychiatry? John Read explains.

"Nottinghamshire has a long history of libraries, from the old penny libraries prior to the establishment of a public library service. If none of these had existed and I could design a new world the first thing I would want in my utopia is a place where knowledgeable staff help you choose books you can read *for free* then take them back for someone else to have the same pleasure." Ross Bradshaw on the wonder of public libraries.

Aris Roussinos.argues that Paul Kingsnorth has emerged as Britain’s foremost critic of industrial modernity and the  literary heir to a strain of thought that has survived in the English imagination, on both Left and Right, since the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Didn't you used to be Josh McEachran? The former Chelsea starlet reflects on his career and why things did not work out for him at Stamford Bridge,

For World Book Day: Wings Over Witchend by Malcolm Saville

A quick tribute to my favourite writer as a child on World Book Day.

I once wrote of the appeal of Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine series, which began with Mystery at Witchend, for the Guardian:

Mystery at Witchend tells how the young members of the Lone Pine Club bring to justice a gang of saboteurs hoping, perhaps optimistically, to cripple the Allied war effort by blowing up a dam in the Shropshire hills. 

Though he wrote other series and set books in other places, it is the Lone Pine stories and their Shropshire landscapes for which Saville is best remembered. Quite why so many criminals used this backwater as their base for operations was never wholly clear, but one of the best things about his books was that they were set in "real places you can explore for yourself", as he always said in his forewords. 

Many readers did just that, discovering Bishop's Castle, the Long Mynd and the Stiperstones for themselves.

Wings Over Witchend, a tale of Christmas tree theft from the 'State Forest' on the Long Mynd, was my favourite of the series when I was young. That was probably because it gave a prominent role to the youngest characters.

I also thought I had lost the copy I had borrowed from Hemel Hempstead Library. As I daren't imagine the punishments inflicted upon children who lost library books, I kept quiet about it.

Luckily, I found it one day down the side of a piece of furniture and was even able to read it again before it was due to be returned.

The lovely wraparound jacket illustration is by Charles Wood and borrowed from the Malcolm Saville Centenary Website.

And there is a Malcolm Saville Society you can join.

Higham Ferrers to lose its library

I started showing my holiday snaps of Higham Ferrers with Chichele College and had planned to visit the town's church next.

But this story from the Northamptonshire Telegraph intervened:

Higham Ferrers Library is up for sale and will most likely close at the end of the year. 

The library is being sold by the county council for £400,000 although the authority says it would still welcome offers for the building that would allow it to continue as a community managed library. ... 

Community organisation Higham Ferrers Library Group had been planning to take over Higham Ferrers library but decided it could not afford to do so earlier this year as they could not find the annual £19,000 in rent asked for by NCC and were unwilling to put their own finances in jeopardy.

Will any local services survive much more Conservative national and local government?

Higham Ferrers library was built in 1904 as the town's parish rooms. Pevsner says it was designed by Talbot Brown in 'an attractive Northants vernacular Jacobean manner'.

St Barnabas - Leicester's other pork pie library

Because it stands by a busy road junction, Leicester's 'Pork Pie Library' - Southfields Library - is well known.

But the city has a second library in the same style hidden away in North Evington - St Barnabas Library.

The two libraries were both designed by the architects Symington, Prince & Pike and both are grade II listed. St Barnabas dates from 1937 and Southfields from two years later.

Their style is reminiscent of Charles Holden's Arnos Grove station on the Piccadilly line, which opened in 1932

Spending cuts are making life impossible for the poor in rural areas

An extraordinary start to an article by Louise Tickle in today's Guardian:

Twenty-four miles there and back is one hell of a hike to your local jobcentre. But when Ray Taylor, 56, had his benefits cut for 13 weeks after illness meant he missed an appointment to sign on, he had no option but to get out his walking shoes. 

He doesn’t have friends with cars to give him a lift, and with no money coming in, he couldn’t pay the £7 bus fare from the small Cambridgeshire town of Ramsey to Huntingdon, where he is registered for benefits. And if he missed signing on again, he would be sanctioned again.

Soon Ramsey will have no buses even if you can afford the fares.

You might advocate relaxing the sanctions regime and allowing people sign on over the internet. Except that many poor people won't have access and the libraries where they could log on are being closed across rural England.

My headline is not hyperbole. Spending cuts are making life impossible for the poor in rural areas.

Pax et Lux: Long Eaton's Carnegie library

You come across this striking library on the long walk from Long Eaton station to the town centre.

The Carnegie Legacy in England will tell you about its history:

Designed by 1906, by architects Gorman and Ross of Long Eaton and built by Messrs J & J Warner of Mickleover.  Above the entrance is a "mosaiced tympanum with the figure of Learning set against a golden sunburst." 

The library also has a large stained glass window by Stoddart of Nottingham. ... 

Awarded Grade II listing in 1986. To east of the main entrance is a pair of free-standing iron gates, all that now remains of the original Art Nouveau railings that encircled the library. These are also included in the listing.