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MANCHESTER FREE LIBRARY BUILDING, HOME TO THE SPANISH INSTITUTO CERVANTES

The Manchester Free Library was opened in 1852. The Spanish Government's Instituto Cervantes opened in Manchester in 1997. To clarify the history of how one became the other is the aim of this entry.

History: confused

Brief information about the past history of the building housing the Instituto Cervantes, situated on the corner of Deansgate and Liverpool Road, is contained in just a few architectural or tourist guides and online photo sites. The most notable are Clare Hartwell, Hyde and Pevsner, Lancashire: Manchester and the South-East (2004); and Barry Worthington, Discovering Manchester: A Walking Guide to Manchester and Salford (2002), which clearly states that this "fine structure" was the “Free Library Building”, and after restoration is now occupied by the Instituto Cervantes."

But there is no mention of this on the Spanish Institute's official website. Nor is it mentioned on any part of the Manchester City Council's library website, especially where one would expect to find it, on the two pages about the history of what came "Before Central Library: Campfield" and "Before Central Library: King Street and Piccadilly". Nor ais the subsequent history treated in the existing Wikipedia article on the "Manchester Free Library”. The nearest to an official recognition of the historic link between past and present is the website of Historic England, even though it emerges confusingly from two different entries. The first has the title "Castlefield Information Centre", to which is added (in small print under Details) “(formerly Deansgate Free Library)". At the bottom is a recent voluntary contribution providing photographic proof that the Instituto Cervantes now occupies the same Deansgate address as the listed building. The second entry is headed "Castlefield / Deansgate Library (images)", and provides a photo, taken in 2001, "for the Images of England project". Despite the confusion, both entries include the best and most complete architectural description of a structure that had become, in 1974, a Grade 2 listed building: Formerly known as: Nos.322 TO 330 Deansgate Free Library DEANSGATE. Includes: No.2 LIVERPOOL ROAD. Library over shops, now visitor' centre and urban studies centre.1882, by George Meek; altered. Red brick with sandstone dressings, slate roof. Rectangular plan with curved corners to the front. Romanesque style. Two storeys (the upper much higher), 7 bays including the corners; square stone piers to ground floor, plus cast-iron columns at the corners, frieze and cornice over ground floor, sill-band and panelled pilasters to 1st floor, plain brick frieze, moulded cornice withblocking course interrupted in the 3 centre bays by a stone frieze, bracketed cornice and enriched parapet with central carved pediment. The 4th bay at ground floor is an open entrance to a lateral through-passage, furnished with iron gates and with a segmental pediment above containing carved figures; immediately to the right is a round-headed doorway moulded in 2 orders, with shafts, and the other bays have glazed screens. At 1st floor each bay has large stepped triple window treated as an arcade of round-headed arches, with stone shafts which have carved capitals, geometrical glazing bars, and hoodmoulds, that (sic) over the main entrance with a panelled arch-band above. Quadrantal corners with 5-bay arcades carried round, and 2-bay returned ends in matching style. Rear linked to former Higher Campfield Market Hall, Liverpool Road (q.v.). At least one inaccuracy concerns the number of window bays, which should be nine (or is it eleven?) including the large corner ones. What is not clear is who the anonymous author of the survey is, and when it was composed. Was it in 1974 when originally listed, and then updated after it became a visitor centre? Or was it written once it became the Castlefield Visitor or Information Centre?

To confound matters further, the building is in the Council's A-Z of Listed Buildings in Manchester, but it has reverted to, or retained, its anonymity in the register, under Deansgate (west side), as "Nos.322 to 330 (even), including no.2 Liverpool Road. Grade II. 17.5.74". Somewhere in the Council there must be a record not only of the present but also of the past history of the building, as is shown in a 2010 Council document about the Water Street regeneration scheme, within the Castlefield Conservation Area, that has a photo mapping the listed buildings in the area, including item 12: "no 322-330 Deansgate Free Library (Grade 2)". At the beginning of the document is a splendid aerial photograph of the area which highlights the building's prominent position at the forefront of a block of listed buildings, and opposite the new skyscraper called the Beetham Tower, containing the Hilton Hotel.

Clarification about the building's role as Castlefield Visitor Centre is to be found in a chapter posted online of a book by three Manchester academics, Terry Wyke, Robson and Dodge, Manchester: Mapping the City (2018). It reproduces a North West tourist board's picture postcard, showing a colourful diagram of "Castlefield: Britain's First Urban Heritage Park". On it one of the several square balloons has the instantly recognisable photogenic corner of the building with the words: "Castlefield Visitors' Centre. The Centre provides an introduction to the whole of Castlefield […].” Another balloon entitled "Urban Studies Centre" also points to the same building, with a close-up photo of the rounded arch above the doorway and the sign "Manchester's Urban Studies Centre". The caption under the photo says it "is situated above the Visitors' Centre” and "is operated by the Manchester Education Committee." The short text of the chapter has the title "1986. Castlefield: urban heritage" and tries to justify the opening claim that Castlefield is "Manchester's most historic site", though this was not recognised in the 1950s and 1960s when St Matthew's Church had been demolished and the area was "largely derelict" (227). In the 1970s, archeological digs (uncovering the original remains of the Roman castle) and the rescue from demolition of Liverpool Road Station (the first passenger railway station in the world) led to the area being declared a conservation area in 1979, and then in 1982 being designated an urban heritage park. The text makes no specific mention of the Visitors' or Urban Studies Centres, nor is there anything to explain why the building they came to occupy had been registered in 1974 as a listed Grade II building. The only clue as to the importance of its advantageous location is revealed in a town-planning map unearthed by the authors at the end of the chapter, the provenance of which is Manchester City Council, "Castlefield" (c.1980). It shows the boundary of the conservation area, the site of the Roman fort, and three "proposed" conversions: the "NW. Museum of Science and Industry", the "Air and Space Museum", and the "Proposed Heritage Centre", which is the building that concerns us in a prominent position at the corner of Liverpool Road and the unmarked Deansgate.

Another book by academic experts, Alistair Black, Pepper and Bagshaw, Books, Buildings and Social Engineering: Early Public Libraries in Britain from Past to Present (2009), which ought to give some coverage to this Deansgate building, in fact relegates it to one inaccurate reference in the appendix, a gazetteer of libraries: "Deansgate (now offices) 'Central Lib'., Archs. George Meek and John Allison 1882 ext. 1922” (404). Inaccurate because its current use in 2009 was of course the Cervantes Institute; it was never called 'Central Library'; it was not extended in 1922, rather its internal storage space was altered; and its Grade 2 listing is omitted. The long section on the process towards the opening of Manchester's new Central Reference Library in 1934 begins by making the point that until then Manchester had not had a permanent purpose-built home for its central reference collection, for "its early years had been spent in a remodelled Owenite Hall of Science at Campfield, which opened in 1852", and in doing so Manchester was "among the very first cities to open a public library under the Libraries Act of 1850." Then in 1877 "the central reference collection had been moved to the converted Old Manchester Town Hall (on King Street), but this building had been sold in 1908" and the books "moved in 1912 to temporary huts in the grounds of the Old Infirmary in Piccadilly, where it remained throughout the war" (166-67). No mention is made of the Deansgate building or the role it played in all this.

Some important information was provided in a short illustrated booklet by one of the authors of Mapping the City, Terry Wyke, together with Derek Brumhead, in their A Walk Round Castlefield (1989). The Castlefield Information Centre (as it must have been called then) is described as follows: "The handsome building fronting Deansgate was designed by George Meek principally as a library and finally opened in 1882" (26). This was because the original Campfield library (in the Owenite Hall) on Tonman Street had become "structurally dangerous", so its contents were transferred to the old Town Hall in King Street; and it "was decided that a new building on the Deansgate-Liverpool Road corner should be a joint scheme of the Markets Committee and Libraries Committee, serving as a branch library and as an improved entrance to the Higher Campfield Market" (which was being erected on the site of the open-air Campfield fair). Also noteworthy is the information that in "1981 the building facade was cleaned and a restoration programme started", revealing above the main entrance, beneath the "years of soot and grime", the carved City Arms and "figures in high relief representing Commerce, Peace, Industry and Trade." Mention is made of the Urban Studies Centre on the upper floor. But curiously there is no mention of the Grade 2 listing. Although no source is given, the photograph ("c. 1895") of the handsome building with horse-drawn carts and a tram passing by, is most likely from the principal source being used, though not stated, which must be Credland.

Credland's history: Campfield opening

Indeed, the fullest and clearest account of the building's early history is in W R Credland, The Manchester Public Free Libraries: a History and Description, and a Guide to their Contents and Use (1899). Between pages 128 and 129 is the said photograph, in much clearer definition, captioned "Deansgate Branch"; and there is another one of the inside, the large "Reading Room", with distinctive iron columns supporting the skylighted high ceiling. William Robert Credland was Deputy Chief Librarian of the Manchester Libraries. His account of the opening of the first library in 1852 in the Owenite Hall of Science, "which fronted Byrom Street" (35), draws extensively from that of the first Chief Librarian, Edward Edwards, in his history of Free Town Libraries, their Formation, Management and History: in Britain, France, Germany and America(1869). Edwards had been actively involved in the committee stages of William Ewart's Libraries Act of 1850, and in its immediate implementation by Manchester. Credland follows Edwards in underlining the fact that Prince Albert sent a donation of books and, in a letter dated 25 August 1852, praised Manchester "for taking the lead" in applying the rate-supported legislature, and hoping that "the example thus nobly set by Manchester" would be "followed throughout the country." (5). Prince Albert could not attend the opening ceremony on 2 September, but other dignitaries did, thus marking the national importance of the event. A stage-struck William Thackeray briefly seconded the resolution moved by Charles Dickens, in which the institution was said to be making "special provision for the working classes, by means of a free lending library". In his speech Dickens joked that his uncertainty about the meaning of the term "Manchester School" (of economics) was resolved by seeing before him the 20,000 volumes of the Manchester free school of books, which would teach the working man that "capital and labour are not opposed, but are mutually dependent and mutually supporting" (11-12). The speech of the third literary dignitary, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, pointed towards the educational benefits by making use of what now seems a very apposite, even prescient, metaphor, calling the library of books a "mighty arsenal", for "books are weapons" which students should use in accordance with "the principles of chivalry", in order "like the knight of old to defend the weak, to resist the oppressor […]” (14).

The second half of the inauguration was held in the evening so that working men could attend and present their own report. There the MP John Bright (political partner of Richard Cobden in the Manchester free-trade school of thought) echoed the Dickensian interpretation of the term “free library” by emphasing that its educational purpose showed "the great harmony among the various classes of this community", who have all "clubbed together their givings [voluntary subscriptions] into one common fund to raise this institution" (22-24). It was also in the evening that Thackeray overcame his stage-fright and delivered a weighty speech to make up for his earlier unfinished one, concluding with the message that as a "liberal writer" he was making "common" "cause" with the predominantly working-class audience (25, 27). Credland finishes his account of the opening by quoting part of a monumental 48 pages epic poem on “The Inauguration of the Manchester Free Library" by George Hatton, dedicated to Sir John Potter "the originator and munificent supporter" of the library. The poem's patronising "rapture" extols the library as a free school where the "unlettered handicraftsman in new phase" can emerge from "the depths of ignorance" with his "longing soul" crying out "'Advance---advance.'" (28). The poet's claim that it was the "first really popular Free Library in England" (28) seems vindicated by Credland's account of its "striking success", enumerating the number of volumes consulted (61,000) in the reference room during the first year and the number (77,000) issued by the lending department. Nevertheless, Credland admitted that there was a great need for the number of users to be increased, because, as he notes from the 1851 population census, half (31,000) the total number of children between 3 and 14 "were neither at school nor in employment", and were therefore not "receiving the instruction necessary to fit it for the battle of life." Credland adds that the "use of the Free Libraries has in later years increased out of all comparison with the mere growth of the population”, largely accounted for by the "passing of the Elementary Education Act of 1870." (30).

He then moves on to describe the Campfield building that housed the first free library, noting that after a few years "its inadequacy to meet the public's requirements became apparent”, initially due to its very popularity and the growth of both population and book publishing. The building was originally built in 1840 and was called "The Hall of Science" "as a place of meeting for the followers of Robert Owen, whose name will live in history as that of the originator of a form of socialism” (35). Ten years later, Credland notes that the "Owenites having become greatly reduced in number were glad enough to dispose of their property, and it was purchased by Alderman John Potter on behalf of the subscribers to the Public Library Fund, for the sum of £1,200.” Credland remarks how appropriate it was that "a structure which had at first been used for the purpose of propagating a form of communism for which the people were by no means ripe, came to be devoted to a more practical and promising method of social reform." (36-37). Credland was obviously voicing his approval for the assertively liberal ideology behind the Victorian free library movement, faced with the threat of industrial unrest at home and social revolution abroad.

Such was the success of the free library that, as Credland narrates, it was necessary to open two branch lending libraries in 1857 in Hulme and Ancoats, and between 1860 and 1872 three more branches at Rochdale Road, Chorlton-Ardwick and Cheetham. The last one was so popular it was transferred to a "magnificent" (114) new building opened with great ceremony in 1878. Meanwhile, the Campfield library building had become even more unsatisfactory. It was "too far from the centre of town", the ceiling was too low, the ventilation poor and there was not enough shelving. Matters came to a head in 1877 when the structure "began to give way beneath the weight of books placed against its walls", becoming so dangerous it was "abruptly closed." (116). The books were transferred into the offices of the recently vacated old Town Hall in King Street. This was then refurbished as a temporary, or possibly more permanent, central reference library, and was officially opened (on the same day as the Cheetham branch) in 1878. Credland echoes the hopes that the move might be permanent, for he expresses his approval of its central situation and the accessibility of "a building placed in the very heart of the city and occupying one of its most desirable sites" (126). He reports that the reading room seated about one hundred persons, and frequently it was "crowded to excess". In May 1882, however, "the accommodation for readers was enlarged to about the extent of one third, by the addition of a portion of the room used for the storage of books." (126).

Credland: Deansgate opening

Credland doesn't spell out what happened to those books, but their destination is clear from the next section of the history, entitled the “ Deansgate Branch" (127), opened in 1882. The very first sentence draws attention to the fact that when the Campfield library closed in 1877, "the books of the lending department were also removed with those of the Reference Library, and stored in the old Town Hall", where "they remained for four years." (127). They must then have gone to the new building to create extra space for readers. The presence of those books underpinned the main point made by the Mayor, Thomas Baker, at the start of his opening-ceremony speech: "The branch free library we have now met to inaugurate is the successor of one which has an historical celebrity. The lending library at Campfield was the first lending-out library in Manchester." (129) As the immediate successor to the first library, and the adjunct to its other successor the new reference library, the importance of the Deansgate branch library, half a mile away in the centre of the city, was reflected in its cost, its size and the quality of its architecture. Accompanied by the two full-page photos of the exterior and the interior already noted, Credland's description deserves to be quoted at length: When in 1877 the original home of the Public Libraries in Campfield, was so unceremoniously closed, the books of the lending department were also removed with those of the Reference Library, and stored in the old Town Hall. There they remained for four years. In the meantime the old building and site were sold to the Markets Committee of the Town Council, and an arrangement was made in conjunction with that Committee, to erect on a site fronting Deansgate, a suitable building which should serve for the library, and also as an improvement of the Market entrance. Designs prepared by Mr Geo. Meek, under the direction of Mr John Allison, the City Surveyor, were adopted. The elevations are classic in style, carried out in stock bricks, with stone cornices, columns, panels and other dressings. The ground floor consists of shops, and in the centre of the Deansgate façade is a wide entrance to the New Market, above which is a curved pediment filled in with figures in high relief representing Commerce, supported by Peace and Industry, flanked by figures representing Trade. To the right of this is the entrance to the library, consisting of a handsome doorway having [a] semi-circular head carried on stone columns with carved caps. This gives admission to an entrance hall, tastefully inlaid with coloured tiles, from which a broad staircase leads to the apartments forming the library and reading rooms. [… ] The chief room is very lofty, and measures 72 feet in length by 54 feet wide. It is lighted principally from the roof, which is supported by light iron columns, but there are also windows on the side facing Deansgate. These windows have been made double in order to prevent annoyance from the street traffic. This fine apartment, which presents on entrance a most striking appearance, affords ample accommodation for the newsroom and library. The library is in the newsroom [...]. Opposite to the newsroom is the boys' reading room, similar in style, but considerably smaller, being 50 feet by 36 feet. It will accommodate 100 boys, and is provided with a collection of books for their use. The total cost of the library, including fittings, was £12,000. The library was opened by a public meeting being held within its walls on April 5th, 1882 [...]” (127-29).

In his speech, the Mayor Thomas Baker, who presided, as well as seeing the new library as a continuation of the original, also emphasised that it was a huge improvement as regards both situation and structure. The Free Libraries Committee "believe that in this structure they have avoided all the evils of the old one. As far as they can judge, they have ample room, most excellent ventilation, and a situation second to none in this great city. The books now upon the shelves are substantially those of the old Campfield Lending Library, except that the old worn-out ones have been removed [...]. Manchester was the first town in England to make the experiment of a Free Lending Library under the Libraries Act, and it has carried out that experiment to a most successful issue. This good work has been communicated over the length and breadth of the land." And because free access to education through books and newspapers was ennobling and lessened idleness and crime, the Mayor was disposed to think that "the Free Libraries, comprising the Reference Library with its 70,000 volumes, and the six branch libraries, are the most noble public institutions which Manchester possesses [...]” (130). The Mayor also emphasised that the library committee, in the first instance, "did not contemplate a building either so large as that in which we are now assembled or in so public a situation, but the Markets Committee of the Corporation, having possessed themselves of this plot of land, because it was contiguous to their market and fronting to one of the main streets in the city, and, as they needed only the ground floor, negotiations were opened with them which terminated in the Free Libraries Committee becoming the owners of the whole of the second floor of this building and all above it." (129-30). Here lies the key to understanding the connection between the two library buildings, a key already outlined by Credland and also reiterated by another of the inaugural speakers, Counsellor James Croston, who praised the Corporation because it had "acted wisely in not carrying out the first intention of rebuilding on the site of the old structure, but had availed themselves of the opportunity afforded by the Markets Committee to give them that commodious and handsome room” (134).

Because the original library had been divided and given birth to a double institution, one the reference the other the lending library, the Deansgate building was therefore the latest one of six branch libraries. Yet, nevertheless, its central position and direct ascendancy from the original gave it, along with the Reference Library, a special, even flagship status, which may have been assumed but was not fully explained in these observations, and as a result has been ignored in subsequent accounts of the Deansgate building. Through the joined forces of the two committees, the rebuilt library was a brand-new improved version of the original model. It was the latest, up-to-date, innovative, market version, or to put it even more emphatically, the new up-market model library was both literally and figuratively on top of the market.

Deansgate building: architectural features

Moreover, the new version of the original had its own distinctive logo and trademark in the form of the ornate high-relief sculptures. Credland has already pointed out, above the "wide entrance to the New Market", the sculpture "representing Commerce, supported by Peace and Industry, flanked by figures representing Trade" (128). Yet, it is by no means obvious that the allegorical figures of three ladies, flanked by children, convey, even by convention, the meaning attached to them by Credland. We can only speculate that the architect, or someone else, could have explained the allegory which had been designed either by him or by those committee members who had commissioned the sculpture. In any case, the "sculptor has not been identified". Credland also omits to mention what his photo clearly shows and that is the other imposing sculpture, high above the market entrance, at the top of the library, which depicts the Corporation's coat of arms with the motto "Concilio et Labore". Whether that first term should have been spelt 'consilio' alluding to the wise counsel in Ecclesiastes, or was assumed to mean council, is a matter for scholarly debate. At a meeting of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1857, a certain Mr Caw suggested the correct spelling should be "Consilio". Was the ambiguity a mistake, or was it intended to mean something like good counsel by a wise council? There seems to be no doubt, however, about the intended effect of both sculptures on the facade. Together they put on visible public display a combination of, and an alliance between, the library and the market; and more abstractly, between rational thought on the one hand and trade and industry on the other, symbolising the value of hard-work directed by intelligence.

Also not mentioned in Credland's or any other description, but very possibly visible over the library doorway, would have been the words "Free Library" (where today it says "Instituto Cervantes"), with no mention of "branch". The only evidence for this is not a photo, but a fine hand-drawing just of the entrances to the building by the illustrator in a book by William Arthur Shaw, Manchester Old and New [1894]. As well as the "Free Library" sign, the drawing also shows over the market entrance, in very large letters, the sign "Market", which in Credland's photo is replaced or obscured by the word "Sale", in the middle of something illegible. Whatever is over the library doorway in the photo is also out of focus and indiscernible. The book, incidentally, has a fine drawing of St Matthew's church behind the Campfield Market (137). Significantly, Shaw, a close friend it seems of Charles Sutton whom he calls a "gem of a librarian"(137), in his account of the free library organisation gives pride of place, that is last, to the central institution, the Reference Library, and next to it, after it, last but not least of all, is the Deansgate Branch Library (134). That subtle ordering reinforces the aura surrounding the presumed designation above the doorway, carved in stone, of "Free Library". Without, it should be emphasised, any reference to "branch", the two words would suggest, by their lack of an article and the grammatical abstraction, a representativeness beyond the limitations of a mere branch library, giving extra prominence to the adjective and concept of "Free".

This phrasing would have reflected quite clearly the context of the period, implying that the free libraries and the free library movement were closely associated with the powerful impetus towards free trade. It should be remembered that, just round the corner from the Deansgate building, the famous Free Trade Hall had been rebuilt, for the second time, on the same site, in 1856. Interestingly, Credland refers to the "classic" style of the Deansgate library, whereas the Historic England listing describes it as being in the "Romanesque style". Its rounded arcaded windows and triangular pediment indicate the presence of both. What no one seems to have noticed is the possibility of an allusion, not only to the classical tip of the Portico library, but also to the architecture of the Italian, palazzo-style, Free Trade Hall, specifically in the latter's facade forming a colonnaded arcade of nine rounded bay windows. The Deansgate library has at least nine bays, not the seven in the Historic England description. Depending on what counts as a bay, the Deansgate building might be said to have nine, like the Free Trade Hall, plus the two very large rounded ones at the corners. Both buildings have allegorical female figures representing trade, commerce and possibly the arts, though the Hall has many more. The main difference between the two structures, apart from size, is that, instead of the Hall’s sharply rectangular corners, the library is distinguished by its equally solid but softly rounded corners, which, by their prominent street-corner location, would appear to connect smoothly the trade from the nearby Liverpool Road Station (and the markets behind) with the commercial centre of the newly widened Deansgate. One might add that the library was fortunate not to suffer the Hall’s indignities of bombing by the Luftwaffe and being turned into a modern hotel. The symbolism of the library's appearance is of course necessarily subjective and speculative, because neither the architect Meek or the surveyor in charge Allison, or anyone else, seem to have left any clear indication of the meanings embodied in the building's design.

Local context

There is another aspect of the immediate local context that may help to bring out further meaning. The advantages of the frontage on Deansgate were obviously of prime importance. But the move away from the disadvantages of the original site or plot was not only desirable, it had a socio-historical, even political, significance that was implicit though not directly expressed. Credland says that the Owenite Hall of Science "fronted Byrom Street" (35). A report on the foundation-stone ceremony performed by Robert Owen in 1839 was more specific: "The site of the building is a plot of land situate on the north side of the large square, known as Camp Field, bounded by Tonman-street and Byrom-street […]. On the eastern side of the square stands St. Matthew's Church, a beautiful piece of gothic architecture, having one of the most beautiful spires in the area; whilst on the southerly side, leading to the station of the Liverpool railway, stands the sunday school of St. Matthew's". St Matthew's Church with its enormous spire was built in 1825, designed by Sir Charles Barry, "the most eminent British architect of the time". It occupied the ground between what would become the Lower and Upper Campfield Markets. Sadly, depopulation led to its demolition in 1951. The important point here is that it was directly adjoining, and on the opposite corner of the street to, the newly erected Hall of Science. This exact position is confirmed by Ordnance Survey maps of 1844 and 1850. A quick online search reveals that Friedrich Engels visited the Hall frequently; and he remarked on the large attendance of 3,000 articulate working-class people on a Sunday. Less easily accessible is the fact that the threat posed by socialist atheism, just next door, provoked the vicar of St Matthews to condemn the movement in a famous, or for some infamous, sermon, and to report the illegality of such political activity on a Sunday, taking to court members of the Hall. These included Robert Buchanan, who wrote a pamphlet whose full title demonstrates and documents the acuteness of the conflict: Socialism Vindicated: in reply to a sermon entitled "Socialism denounced as an outrage upon the laws of God and man," preached by the Rev. W. J. Kidd, in St. Matthew's Church, Camp Field, Manchester, on Sunday morning, July 12th, 1840. This was the background of social conflict that prompted the approval of those who would, a decade later, welcome the taking over of the secular socialist Hall of Science by the rate-payer financed free library.

The replacement building in Deansgate three decades later signified a move that was less of a look backwards, more a clear look forwards, indicating the right way to progress, not only through the alliance of an intelligent council and cooperative labour force, but also through the integration of the Church in the advance of a more progressive society. The configuration of buildings on the renovated site could have been likened to a huge ship of state, with the powerhouse of the two covered markets fore and aft of the highest structure, St Matthew's Church and spire, and in the forefront, or prow, the library as the brain and head steering the way onwards and upwards, though in a more practical and earth-bound direction. One oddity of the library's mixture of architectural styles is the single, tall, strikingly large, moulded chimney-stack, the description of which, rather than mock-Tudor or neo-Gothic, might well be conveyed as a smaller harmonious replication, better still, reapplication, of the enormous spire, a kind of funnel emitting not religious fervour but the energy of intellectual activity generated by the book-reading below. In short, the move of the free library building, albeit on the same Campfield site, from a back-street plot to the very prominent plot on the corner of Deansgate, enabled the designers to make a bold statement on the public policy of uniting capitalist free-market trade with a more self-educated and socially directed workforce.

Watts: an education

Less impressionistic, more based on human evidence, but equally underplayed or ignored by the collective historical mind, is another feature of the local context. It is occasionally glimpsed in Credland's History, especially the first page where Manchester appears as the mid-century origin of "a strong and enthusiastic agitation for educational reform", which eventually culminated in the "Elementary Education Bill of 1870." This generated at a national level a desire for educational institutions such as the "Public Libraries and Museums" enabled by Ewart's Bill of 1850. "Almost immediately", the establishment of a public library in Manchester was discussed and then carried out by the Mayor, John Potter, as we already know, but almost unnoticed in the sentence is the phrase "at the suggestion of John Watts, Ph.D." (2). Following the purchase of the Hall of Science, a meeting in it of the city's great and good appointed a committee to carry on the new venture, one of its two secretaries being the aforesaid Dr Watts. This gentleman was one of the speakers in the evening session of the first library's inauguration (21). He is also listed among the dignitaries present at the opening ceremony of the Cheetham Branch Library in 1878 (110), and was also present later the same day at the opening of the new temporary Reference Library, where he is reported as making a speech in which he remembers the previous speaker, Mr James Crossley (President of the Chetham Society) accompanying Mr Edward Edwards (the first Chief Librarian) to London to buy the books for the Campfield library, many of which were now before them (124). He modestly says his "connection with the origin of this library was not important", although he believes he was the first person consulted by "Sir John Potter", and confirms that he was "the Honorary Secretary up to the birth of the library in Campfield". He also declares that "the promoter of that measure" (the Free Libraries Act) "was one of the greatest benefactors in this country." (124) For libraries, he states, beget a habit and instinct for learning which ensures that "man is a progressive animal." And he concludes with a striking metaphor: "Here we have as it were the brains of a large number of good men, who, though dead, yet speak to those who will consult them." (125) We are told nothing more about Dr Watts, not even whether he attended the next opening ceremony at the new Deansgate Branch. He may have been ill, or he may have been busy elsewhere in one of his numerous activities. Whatever the case, he was surely there in spirit.

There is an entry for him in Wikipedia as "John Watts (reformer)": he "was an English educational and social reformer. Originally an Owenite, whose economic writings affected the views of Friedrich Engels, he moved to a position more in favour of capital. In later life he had a multiplicity of interests and undertook many social projects." It tells us he moved to Manchester in 1841 and ran a boys school for three years in the Owenite Hall of Science. In 1844 he had lost faith in the practicality of Robert Owen's utopian communities, and in the same year (somehow) obtained a PhD at the University of Giessen in Germany (but in what subject is unclear). Then in 1853 he went into insurance and, after his company went bust, he wrote the original draft of what became the first Life Assurance Act of 1870. As a "committee man" he was involved in the provision of public parks, public education and support for the press. His active involvement in setting up the Manchester free library is clearly stated: "In 1850 Watts persuaded Sir John Potter, then Mayor of Manchester, to form a committee for the establishment of a free library under the provisions of the Public Libraries Act 1850, which was then passing through parliament, insisting that it should be a free lending library. Watts acted as one of the secretaries of the committee that saw the Manchester Free Library opened by public subscription." Also emphasised is his further involvement in education as the drafter of Bruce's Education Bill of 1868 (though it should be added that this is what led to Forster's Elementary Education Act of 1870).

The importance of Watts's principal role in advocating free schools for young children, it should be said, can better be appreciated in Samuel Maltby's Manchester and the Movement for National Elementary Education: 1800 to 1870 (1918). This sees him first of all as the "moving spirit" of the Lancashire Public School Association, which in December 1849 held a conference in the Free Trade Hall "with a view to a National Movement" (75). Maltby concludes that Watts was as influential as Cobden, particularly in his decisive effect on the successful passing of the Education Act, as was recognised by Bruce, who remarked on the wisdom of Watts for initially promoting secular schools, then later urging the need to compromise over the central problem of religious and non-denominational teaching (119-20). Wikipedia does also mention his active involvement in higher education as "secretary to the Owens College extension committee, which raised funds for new building and endowment". This led eventually, it should be added, to the creation of the Victoria University of Manchester. Furthermore, we are told, he was "closely associated with the co-operative movement", with no further details.

Three of his books are listed by Wikipedia: The Facts of the Cotton Famine (1866); The Catechism of Wages and Capital (1867); and [The] Facts and Fictions of Political Economists (1842), which it is said influenced Engel's theory of political economy. Apart from the reference in the note on Engels, the main source for the whole entry on Watts is given as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, but missing is the interesting fact that the biography was written by Charles William Sutton, who happens to have been the Chief Librarian of the Manchester Public Libraries from 1879 to 1920. It is he who elaborates on Watt's role in the free library foundation by adding that telling detail: "the novel feature in his suggestion" was "that it should be a free lending library". In other words, Watts helped bring out what the Act didn't specify but was fully capable of achieving. The final summary of his life in Sutton's biography includes this important phrase which is worth quoting in full: "His influence with the working classes was always very great, and his conciliatory advice was often found to be of the utmost value in trade disputes". One reason for this, not mentioned by Sutton, is that in his Catechism book Watts tried to persuade workers not to go on strike, because they would never make up the money lost in doing so. In "The Facts of the Cotton Famine" he praised Robert Owen for, amongst other things, setting up "the first infant school in the kingdom, at the village of New Lanark, in Scotland" (73). But he then says, "Owen's error was in thinking too well of humanity. He looked upon man as if he was always a child, and upon hereditary predisposition as a matter of no importance" (76). On the other hand, the more realistic "co-operators", in the co-operative societies, "appeal to a motive which is common to all"; "and they reform the man whilst apparently pandering to his love of gain" (76).

Engels: conflict

Much more could be added on Watts's involvement with the cooperative movement, especially his efforts to run a cotton mill on cooperative lines, and on his social and economic ideas. However, the crucial point to be made here is that Watts was the principal insider, and the most significant link, within the rapid process of change from the radical utopian socialism of the Owenite Hall of Science to cooperation between capital and labour through free education in the shape of the Campfield lending and reference library. It was no wonder that Engels altered his feeling of admiration to one of disappointment and sarcasm towards Watts, whom he derided as the real broker selling off the Owenite Hall to create a free library to buy off the workers, as Engels explained to Marx in a revealing letter dated February 5th,1851, Manchester: The Free Traders here are making use of prosperity, or semi-prosperity, to buy the proletariat, and John Watts is acting as broker. You know Cobden’s new plan: a National Free School Association to put through a bill empowering townships to impose local taxes on themselves for the erection of schools. The thing is being pushed splendidly. In Salford a Free Library and Museum have already been established as well — with lending library and reading-room gratis. In Manchester the Hall of Science — and here, as the Lord Mayor of Manchester most graciously acknowledged, Watts was really the broker — has been bought up by public subscription (about £7,000 was collected altogether) and will also be transformed into a Free Library. At the end of July the affair is to be opened — with 14,000 volumes to begin with. All the meetings and assemblies held for these objects resound with the praises of the workers, and especially of the worthy, modest, useful Watts, who is now on the best of terms with the Bishop of Manchester. I am already looking forward to the outburst of indignation at the ingratitude of the workers which will break loose from every side at the first shock."

Well, the ploy worked. Engels had gone to Manchester to run his family's cotton mill, expecting to find the working class ready for socialist revolution, evidence for which he documented in his famous The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). However, softened up by free libraries, museums and education, and some money, the majority of workers seemed to prefer the harshness of Victorian progressive values to revolutionary suicide on the barricades. Arguably, the Deansgate library building remains as a monument and a memorial to this evolutionary development in Manchester and the rest of Britain; and also to the mysterious Dr John Watts, who, to use his own metaphor, is the dead but living embodiment of that process. An undeservedly forgotten figure, he pops up ubiquitously in the context surrounding and explaining the Deansgate free library.

Claims and counterclaims to preeminence

John Watts does not figure at all in one of the best books on the city of that period: Gary Messinger’s "Manchester in the Victorian Age: the Half-known City'' (1985). Its chapter 9, however, highlights three aspects of cultural improvement in which Watts played his effective background role: public education, university expansion and "Britain's first public library" (132). This accolade of "the first" is only slightly modified by the statement that although "Manchester was not the first to adopt Ewart's Act, it was the first to produce tangible results" (135). Messinger's vivid account of the library's opening ceremony comes from Edwards via Credland (136-39). Perhaps predictably, he makes no mention of the later temporary Reference Library or of the Deansgate Branch. Instead, as one would expect, he goes on to celebrate the opening in 1899 of the privately endowed, neo-Gothic, "architecturally stunning", but "ostentatious", John Rylands Library, which "quickly became one of the world's major repositories of medieval and renaissance materials" (139).

The importance of the Deansgate Branch free library was partly to be overshadowed by this glamorous newcomer, just up the road, in the centre of Deansgate. Indeed, most of its subsequent history became lost in a murky obscurity, and with it some of its initial modest celebrity. There were contemporaries of Credland who wrote enthusiastic histories of the growth of public libraries. For example, Thomas Greenwood in his Free Public Libraries (1886) expressed his pride in having “as a youth, made use for years of the first Free Library” (x) and going “backwards and forwards to the Old Campfield Library as a borrower” (25). He quotes at length the Illustrated London News describing the Campfield opening in 1852, but refers only once briefly to the Deansgate branch opening in 1882. Unbeknown to him, however, he pinpoints the branch’s importance by reproducing a table of annual issuing figures from the latest report of the libraries committee, which places Deansgate at the beginning of the six lending libraries, with the column of its annual issues starting in 1852-53 up to 1883-84, and including four years “closed” from 1887-88 to 1880-8 (50). There is something magically real about the branch’s double existence, fully functioning before it was built and closed before it even opened. Indeed the logical contradiction involved here, especially when it takes several pages to be explained, must have contributed to the branch’s eventual disappearance from official information to the public. Meanwhile another historian (and librarian at Bootle) John J Ogle in his The Free Library: its History and Present Condition (1897) lists the opening dates of all the Manchester branch libraries, followed by a separate mention of the “Deansgate Branch, opened in 1870,” which “may be considered the joint-inheritor with the King Street Reference Library of the Campfield establishment” (162). The status accorded to Deansgate is certainly the right message, marred somewhat by the mistaken date. It has to be a simple oversight, for the joint inheritance must have occurred after the closure of the Campfield building which is correctly given as 1877. Ogle also cites a pamphlet by William R Credland, The Free Library Movement in Manchester (1895), which is presumably the precursor of Credland’s history of five years later. One more library historian from shortly after was Alfred Cotgreave, who in the preface to his Views and Memoranda of Public Libraries (1901) praised Greenwood for his successful promotion of free libraries especially in the London area (iii-iv). Cotgreave’s book focussed on the visual appearance of buildings and the names of the architects. The Manchester section has a drawing of the John Rylands (64), two photos of the exterior and interior of the Central Reference in Kings Street (62-63), and a drawing of the Old Campfield Building (61). Unfortunately, there is no sighting of the Deansgate branch; but at least it is mentioned in the caption underneath the Campfield picture, as follows: “The above building was taken down in 1878, the Reference department being then removed to the old Town Hall, and the Lending department placed in a new building in Deansgate.” It looks like Cotgreave, a borough librarian at West Ham, had not seen either the new building itself in person or the photos in Credland’s recent history.

The last time the Deansgate branch enjoyed any degree of limelight was due, in fact, to Credland, when he produced the supplemented and abbreviated version, or “second edition”, of his history, entitled Manchester Free Public Libraries: Handbook, Historical and Descriptive (1907). In the first edition, the History of 1899, the list of branch libraries (p. 270) had been chronological, except for the Deansgate branch which was placed at the head in prime position. In the second editon, the list of fourteen "Lending Libraries" (67) is this time alphabetical, with the Deansgate included among the others. However, it is given a special prominence by another means, through an important little modification to the separate section that deals with it. Whereas the 1899 edition began with the closure of the original Campfield library in 1877 and the transfer of books, this new edition adds the following initial sentence, straight after the section title "Deansgate Branch": "This library, the first of the lending libraries, was opened at Campfield, in the same building, and at the same time as the Reference Library, namely September 6th, 1852." Clearly there is a deliberate fusion, rather than confusion, of this library with the first one; it is the same library, but in a different building. It may have a different lower category as a branch library, but it inherits and partakes of the status of being the first free public library, though now in a better, improved, purpose-built building. In this way Credland emphasises the preeminence of the Deansgate branch over the other branches, a preeminence it shared with the Reference Library, which the reader knew was in a building equally splendid, but borrowed and adapted, and only on a temporary basis; for, by 1907, it was threatened with imminent sale and closure.

The opening section of the Handbook is a "Historical Notice", which begins: "The Manchester Free Library was one of the first to be established under the Free Libraries Act of 1850." (9) Although Credland seems not to claim the status of being the very first, he nevertheless repeats the well-known account of the celebrated inauguration, with the special letter from the Prince Regent praising Manchester's leadership. Maybe someone had questioned Manchester's claim to fame, and Credland was hedging his bets. Certainly, there have been several more recent attempts to question it, most notably by Thomas Kelly in his A History of Public Libraries in Great Britain 1845-1975 (1977). He recognises Manchester was considered the first, but "we now know Winchester (1851) has this distinction" (41). However, he does admit that Winchester was only a tiny library, its stock was small, and it was subordinate to the museum (56). Some have insisted that Salford was the first, but it is usually pointed out that it was the first under a different Act, the Museums Act of 1845. And others have pointed out, such as Bradshaw’s Illustrated Guide to Manchester (1857) and Salford's own website, that (despite what Engels says in the 1851 letter previously quoted) the Salford library did not open a lending section until 1854. A similar problem occurs in the case of another candidate, Warrington, which restricted borrowing, to subscribers only, for many years after it opened. If it is accepted that the 1850 Act was intended to give free access to both consulting and borrowing books, then Manchester, as both a reference and lending library, was unquestionably the first public free lending library in the UK. As Edwards put it in his Memoirs of Libraries (1859), the “Manchester Library was not only the first Library established under ‘Ewart’s Act’, but was the first institution within the United Kingdom, however supported, which combined a Free Library of Reference, open to all comers, with a Free Library of Circulation, open to all persons whose responsibility was sufficiently vouched for.”

Indeed, one could go further and claim it was the first such library in the whole world. The closest competitor is most likely to have been the Public Library of Boston (MA); but Boston only started lending afterwards in 1854 ((20)). Another possibility would be New York. Yet it was a New Yorker, the distinguished lawyer Mr Dudley Field, at the opening of the Chorlton and Ardwick Branch in 1866, who said he was sorry his own city "had no library like that which they were now inaugurating", and that "they had plenty of libraries, but they had there no free library like those in Manchester." However, he was proud to say that in America, and especially the State of New York, everyone was provided "with the means of free education" in the "public free schools" (Credland, History, 85-86). The main objection to the Manchester claim came, as it were, straight from the horse's mouth, from Edward Edwards's own advocacy in the Ewart Bill committee, and his book on Free Town Libraries, in which he was impressed by the sheer number, 340 in 1857, of municipal libraries in France, state-owned after the French Revolution (200). But the objection is rebutted by his own findings: that "the majority of them" were "poorly maintained and little used" (210), and "in a state of torpor" "or half activity"(221). Their very inadequacy led to the experiment with Bibliotèques Populaires in the 1860s (220-1). One conclusion might be that France had the first failed system of public libraries. Indeed this is confirmed in a more recent study by James McIntosh, "Public Libraries in France" (1955). The main problem of defining what was first comes from the looseness of the terms ‘free’ and ‘public’. Edwards had influenced Ewart and his committee initially with an article of 1848 that magnified the relative underprovision of the UK by comparing the number and size of libraries at home and abroad under the umbrella term of public, which included national and university and various other forms of library more or less open to the public. The stricter category of free public and lending adopted by Edwards after the event enabled the Manchester library to acquire that greater degree of originality, both national and international.

Post-1907 obscurity

Following Credland's Handbook of 1907, the Deansgate building was left to carry the free-library flag on its own in the centre of Manchester, because the old Town Hall housing the Reference Library was sold, as we know, in 1908 (according to Black, 166-67) and then demolished in 1912, when Black, elaborating on Kelly (139), tells how the reference books were moved to temporary accommodation in wooden huts next to the old infirmary in Piccadilly, where they stayed for a good twenty-two years, until, that is, the brand new Central Reference Library was opened by the King in 1934. Whereas Black says nothing at all about the Deansgate branch, Kelly devotes just one line to its opening in 1882 (43), without any mention of its continuing presence until it was closed in 1934. One very rare notice about its closure, as well as its importance, is to be found in the 1933 volume of The Librarian and Book World: "The Deansgate Branch Library, which is to be closed to make way for the lending department in the new Reference Library, stands on the site of Manchester's first Public Library, opened in 1852" (214). Knowledge of the essential connection between the two first libraries was therefore still existent, though not common, amongst the library profession, going right back to another publication (by the Library Association), The Library Chronicle, which in its first volume of 1884 noted the published lending catalogue of "The Deansgate Branch Library", which, "as many of our readers are aware, is the successor of the first Free Lending Library opened in Manchester, at the building previously known as the Hall of Science, Campfield" (53).

Kelly's omission, however, is more understandable considering that the Deansgate branch seemed to have been sidelined, or even forgotten, by the City Council's own library committee and librarians. For it is very difficult to find any other mention of it anywhere during those solitary years. Symptomatic is a volume edited by H M McKechnie, Manchester in Nineteen Hundred and Fifteen (1915), from the programme compiled for participants in the annual meeting of the British Association. Next to a three-page section on the John Rylands is a two-page section on the Public Libraries by Ernest Axon (58-60), which concentrates on the main Reference Library housed in temporary accommodation in Piccadilly, without acknowledging the existence of the Deansgate branch. Previous to that, the Chief Librarian Charles Sutton, no less, had omitted any mention in his revised Handbook and Guide to Manchester (1907), printed for the Pharmaceutical Society, likewise meeting in Manchester. Was this due to lack of space or was the building lost from view? The omission of the city’s most central branch library at Deansgate by two of the main librarians is both glaring and puzzling.

George Meek, architect

There is the possibility, one may suspect, that it could have had something to do with another mystery man, the architect George Meek, who we know was directly responsible for the Deansgate building, at least under the surveillance of Allinson, the City Surveyor. The rest of his life, however, is shrouded in obscurity; after such a highlight to his career he seems to have disappeared without further trace. The only information easily available is the curious, and rather shocking, entry in an online listing of Architects of Greater Manchester 1800-1940, which says the following:

George Meek joined the Manchester Corporation Surveyors Department about 1872 (notwithstanding the death notice) and over a career spanning 30 years rose from draughtsman to chief architectural assistant - effectively city architect - at a salary of £270 per annum. At the beginning of the twentieth century Manchester Corporation had serious concerns regarding the building side of the City Surveyor’s department, matters which came to a head in January 1902. Problems with a workshop building in Jackson’s Row and a housing scheme in Miles Platting for which Meek was deemed partially responsible provided the necessary excuse. At the meeting of the Town Hall Committee in January 1902 a resolution was passed that George Meek had forfeited the confidence of the committee and that he be requested to send in his resignation. The city council subsequently advertised for a City Architect at a salary of £600 per annum. Following his effective dismissal, Meek commenced independent practice in Manchester in 1902.".

There must be more to be unearthed about this shady business; whether it would be kind to do so is another matter. Twenty years after designing the one building that made what little there is of his reputation, Meek was thus consigned to obscurity. It may be the disreputable circumstances around his dismissal that were the reason why the city librarians, after 1907, avoided mentioning, not only his name, but also the library associated with it. That association was eventually documented and preserved in the 1974 Grade 2 listing. And it survives to this day because recent observers have admired the building, taken photographs of it posted online, and, in the case of a notable tourist guide, called it one of the most beautiful buildings in Manchester. Ed Glinert urges customers to forget Bath, Brighton or Barcelona and stop to "marvel at the exquisite Italianate features of Chepstow House and George Meek's Castlefield library"; and displayed on his website in prime position is a striking photo of the building's extremely photogenic facade.

Unadmired, unappreciated, forgotten and no doubt further obscured by city soot and grime, the library must have continued in use during the early part of the twentieth century. One brief reference shows that, as well as for lending, it was being used to house a store collection of presumably unused books. In 1922, according to a biography of Louis Stanley Jast, the Chief Librarian who succeeded Sutton, it was officially designated as the Store Library, after the Patents collection had been removed to the Piccadilly site to create more space. This apparent upgrade, more like part of a continued downgrading, did not prevent its closure as a library in 1934, when the new Central Reference (and Lending) Library was opened. It is anyone's guess what it was used for in the next forty years; some kind of offices probably, or simply left vacant and derelict. A black and white photograph of the building in 1971, which displays on its Tonman Street corner facade the huge letters, "City Hall", with a barely visible, blackened arrow alongside, suggests that by then its only public function was as a mere signpost to the more important City Exhibition Hall behind it, in what had been the Lower Campfield Market, and was later to become part of the Museum of Science and Industry. It was not even mentioned by the respective chief librarians on the occasion of the anniversaries of Manchester’s first public library in 1952 and 2002.

Castlefield regeneration

At some stage in the 1960s the whole area was in danger of being demolished and rebuilt, as indicated in a recent online article, which has a good photograph of the Deansgate crossroads, with the corner of Meek's building and its elongated chimney facing across to the new Beetham Tower, and an aerial photo from the 1930s showing St Matthew's Church between the markets, behind the library. Fortunately, the archeological discovery of Roman remains in the 1970s helped trigger the Castlefield conservation and regeneration projects. The Deansgate building was rescued initially, as mentioned before, by its grade 2 listing in 1974, followed by its conversion into the Castlefield Visitor/Information Centre (downstairs) and Urban Studies Centre (upstairs). This was in early 1983, according to a short, well-informed report on the new Castlefield Urban Heritage Park by Derek Brumhead, in the AIA Bulletin for that year: "The opportunities for education are being met by the establishment of a Visitors' Centre in the former public free library (1882), another renovated building in the corner of Liverpool Road and Deansgate. This will also house the Manchester Education Committee's Urban Studies Centre which provides guidance, resources and well researched trails for students of all ages." Brumhead, who was Head of the Adult Education North Hulme Centre at the time, also supplies a very clear map of the fourteen most significant buildings from a heritage and tourism point of view, including a clearly marked number 6, "Free Library". The building must have served this tourist purpose for about a decade, until a new visitor information centre was being erected further down Liverpool Road, probably towards 1993. What remains uncertain is the precise date when the new centre was planned and when the old centre was removed from both levels of the Deansgate building. Some new development was taking place, specifically the establishment in 1992 of Dimitri's, the Greek restaurant that is still a feature of the ground-floor corner with Tonman Street. This focus on Dimitri's, by the way, is the only mention of the "old Library and Market Building on Deansgate" in the standard work, Manchester: An Architectural History (2000) by John Parkinson-Bailey.

Enter the Spanish connection

The building's eventual salvation, however, especially the upstairs free-library part, came just before that, round about the year 1991, due to a very curious set of circumstances. The Spanish Government launched an international project to promote Spanish language and culture through the creation of Cervantes Institutes in major cities. Plans were afoot for institutes in Liverpool, London and Leeds. Manchester already enjoyed a Spanish Embassy funded body called the Agrupación de Lengua y Cultura Españolas, active in collaboration with the three university Spanish departments in Manchester and Salford. Whether this was an advantage or disadvantage in acquiring an institute was not quite clear. The then acting chairman of the Spanish Department Board at Manchester University, on 19 December 1990, wrote a letter to Señor Enrique Wulff, Education Counsellor at the Spanish Embassy, emphasising the suitability of Manchester as an excellent venue for an Instituto Cervantes. As it happened, the acting chairman was lecturing at the time on the Spanish novelist Pío Baroja, one of whose characters, Horacio, in his trilogy La Lucha por la vida (1904), laments having been brought up in Málaga instead of the wonderful city of Manchester. Investigation into this background led to the book on Victorian Manchester by Messinger already quoted above, and to the discovery about the first public library. Further research then led to the site in the city centre, the opening attended by Dickens, and the replacement of the original by a new building that still existed. Casual conversations on a Bramhall tennis court with a Council official revealed that the building in question was owned by the Manchester City Council, which was undecided what to do with it. It was suggested that Manchester would benefit enormously from another Spanish Cervantine connection alongside the rich Hispanic holdings of the John Rylands Library in Deansgate. Information was sent to the Director of the Spanish Agrupacion, Señor Antonio Gil, in the form of copies of the relevant section in Credland's Handbook and two pages from a Guide Across Manchester (1987), with its reference to the Deansgate "former Free Library which now houses the Castlefield Visitors' Centre", accompanied by a prominent and finely drawn picture of the building. Shortly after that, in March 1991, a meeting was arranged between the Spanish delegation and representatives from the Spanish departments of Manchester, the then Polytechnic and Salford in order to view the building and discuss the possibilities over dinner in a nearby Spanish restaurant. The Embassy Counsellor was informed of the meeting in a letter of 19 March by Señor Gil, who confirmed that the City Council was willing to provide these premises as an Institute for Manchester and Salford. He extolled the suitability of the building, its central position, its spaciousness and the nobility of its architecture ("arquitectura señorial"). Professor Leo Hickey of Salford, in a letter of 22 March to the Spanish Ambassador, stressed the appropriateness of the premises as neutral ground where the four university institutions of Manchester and Salford (including UMIST) could collaborate equally. He also pointed out that the Council was offering a building that enjoyed protected status, listed Grade 2 as being of special historical interest, adding that it had formerly been a library, as shown in the page he attached from the Guide across Manchester. He looked forward to forthcoming negotiations about the arrangements for suitably refurbishing the building, in order for it to resume its important cultural and educational role.

Establishment, eventually, of the Manchester Cervantes Institute

Later that year, in a letter of 23 September 1991, written to his Manchester colleagues and copied to all the relevant Spanish authorities, Professor Hickey announced a hitch in the proceedings, which put at risk the generous offer by the Council of its listed building. He urged the Spanish Government to conclude the contract as soon as possible. This forceful and forensic letter must have had the desired effect; for the Bulletin! of the University of Salford (Autumn Term 1991, second issue), alongside a photo of the six top officials involved, reported that "negotiations which could lead to the establishment of a Cervantes Institute serving the Salford and Manchester area were held recently at the University." (p. 5). The "Cervantes Centre negotiators" on the photo were named as "Dr Wulff, Dr Gimeno, Councillor Arnold Spencer (Chair, Cultural Services Committee, Manchester City Council [...] Dr Francisco Ariza (Head, Spanish Department, Manchester Polytechnic), Professor Hickey, Antonio Gil (Director, Spanish Centre, Manchester). Alan Hoyle of the University of Manchester was absent when the photograph was taken." These negotiations would eventually reach a satisfactory conclusion, which involved setting up the contract for the new Institute and setting in train the plans for refurbishing the building. The most public and official indication of this was to be seen in the first number of a lavish new journal, Donaire, published by the Embassy of Spain's Education Office (September 1993); at the end of it, three places were listed under the heading "Instituto Cervantes": London, Leeds, and Manchester, with Manchester's address described as "provisional" (p. 69).

The negotiations, however, it has now emerged, had not gone smoothly. Señor Antonio Gil is the key witness for what happened. According to him, the friendship between Professor Ariza and Councillor Spencer was crucial in persuading the Council to make their offer of the building. In accepting that offer on the Spanish side, it turned out to have been vital that Antonio Gil's letter of 19 March 1991 to Enrique Wulff was copied to the Spanish Ambassador in London by the Spanish Consul in Manchester, Santiago de Churruca, Count of Campo Rey, with a note confirming the excellence of the building as a location for a Cervantes Institute. The building had been visited at the time of the Salford photo (end of 1991) by Juan Gimeno, the Secretary General of the Instituto Cervantes organisation in Spain, but problems arose when he resigned in 1992 after the first Director in charge of the Instituto was named as Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz. The latter wrote a letter to Professor Hickey on 12 June 1992 announcing that, for budgetary reasons, the plan for a Manchester centre had been put on hold, or, in other words, halted until further notice.

Nevertheless, three days later on 15 June, Antonio Gil received an urgent telephone call from Eduardo de Zulueta y Dato, an ex-ambassador now Director of Centres for the Instituto Cervantes, who said that the letter from Sánchez Albornoz had been sent by mistake, and that he, Zulueta, was in London on his way to Manchester to explain matters. Ambassador Zulueta met Professor Hickey, along with other colleagues summoned by Señor Gil, and disclosed that there was a serious division of opinion among the heads of the Instituto Cervantes in Spain as to whether to continue with the Manchester plan or to honour the commitments already made for centres at the universities of Liverpool and Leeds. Although Manchester was regarded as an excellent location, three institutes so close together would not have been ideal, and it was deemed easier to cancel Manchester as no firm commitment had been made there. However, the Spanish Ambassador in London, Felipe de la Morena, shortly after the Albornoz letter was sent, had spoken to Albornoz and to Zulueta to persuade them that cancelling the Manchester operation at such an advanced stage would be a tremendous error. So Zulueta had quickly travelled over, and on his way from the railway station had stopped by to look at the Deansgate building; thereupon he had taken the view that the decision should be reconsidered and that Spain should go ahead and open the Manchester institute in the city-centre building offered by the Council. He then returned to Madrid with everyone reassured that the issue was now finally decided in favour of Manchester.

Antonio Gil, looking back on the events leading up to the signing of the contract, draws attention to the important step taken by Juan Gimeno and himself (in late 1991 and early 1992) to request from the City Council a two-year period free of rent in order to carry out the necessary work of refurbishment. In April 1992 the Council Planning Officer, Stuart Shore, accepted the request in the following form: after the signature of contracts, the first year of lease would be free of rent, and the equivalent of the second year of rental would be given as a grant of £70,000 by the Central Manchester Development Corporation.

Perhaps most decisive of all was the extraordinary fact that five distinguished, high-ranking, Spanish officials (Gil, Wulff, Gimeno, Campo Rey, and Zulueta) had looked at the Deansgate building, and found it so attractive and impressive that they all considered it an eminently worthy site for a new Cervantes Institute. As a result, the contract was finally signed in March 1994. Later on in 1994, the Spanish and Portuguese Department at Manchester University broke the news, rather discreetly, in the leaflet issued to applicants for admission. It said that reflecting "Manchester's prestige as a centre of excellence for Hispanic studies", "the consular branch of the Spanish Embassy in the city is now joined by the newly-founded Instituto Cervantes", which is "located on the site of the first Free Public Library" (p.3). The leaflet for the following year went even further and claimed it was "on the site of the world's first Free Public Library” (p. 3).

Opening of the Instituto Cervantes

The rehabilitation of the Deansgate building took another two years. The Spanish government spent a total of approximately £500,000, employing the Barcelona firm Contratas y Obras and the architect Sergio Marrero. Work was delayed amongst other things by damage to windows from the IRA bomb in 1996, as the Institute's first Director, Antonio Gil, remarked in a recent interview to his local Granada newspaper, which incidentally implies that he became director of the new Institute as early as 1992. Gil has now clarified the three stages of his position in relationship to the Institute, which reflect the complex and delicate process moving towards its foundation. In September 1992 he was named as overall coordinator for the Instituto Cervantes of Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool; in January 1994, after the closure of the Institute in Liverpool, he was named the director of the Institute in Leeds and coordinator of the Institute in Manchester; and in September 1995, after the repair work had begun on the Deansgate building, he was named the Director of the Instituto Cervantes of Manchester and Coordinator of the Instituto Cervantes of Leeds. He remained in post at his headquarters in Manchester until February 1998, when he left to become the director of the Cervantes Institute in Cairo, Egypt.

The Manchester Institute was officially opened on 19 June 1997. According to the only report of the event that has come to light, in Madrid's El País ("El Instituto Cervantes inaugura nueva sede en Manchester"), among the guest speakers taking part in the opening ceremony were the eminent Hispanist historian from Oxford Raymond Carr, the distinguished Spanish journalist Tom Burns-Marañón, and the Peruvian-Spanish novelist Mario Vargas Llosa.

Quixotic library and freedom

The intervention of Vargas Llosa seems especially appropriate, for later on he wrote the prologue to the Spanish Royal Academy's commemorative fourth-centenary edition of Don Quixote, "Una novela para el siglo XXI" (2005). In it he called the novel by Cervantes a song to freedom, freedom in fiction from the restrictions of authority and power. Things of course had moved on from the seventeenth century. It is possible to see now that the nineteenth-century free library movement was organised by some, more enlightened, authorities in power to encourage and improve individual freedoms. The freedom to read and think and search out for the truth behind the more complex reality that books depict is the positive aspect that Vargas Llosa extracts from Don Quixote. The main character is of course driven mad by his obsessive reading of romances of chivalry, but in the second part of the novel he becomes less mad, older, wiser and more open-minded. In the first part, the local authorities (the priest and barber) burn most of the books in Quixote's library, an episode which can be seen in two ways, as a sensible rooting out of nonsensical fantasy, or an authoritarian control of the mind, censoring books and shutting down the open spaces a library provides.The Deansgate library did not suffer that fate, surviving as it did two world wars, but it had become lost in obscurity and eventually closed down. Happily, it was reopened as an educational institute with its own in-house library, now named after the Chilean writer Jorge Edwards, who also has interesting things to say about the persecution of books and their authors.

This library, like all modern libraries, is connected to, and is in danger of being supplanted by, the world wide web, which is a fantasy become reality, reminiscent of the globalised Library of Babel, imagined in one of his Fictions by the blind Argentinian writer and librarian, Borges, a library like the vast universe creating both finite order and infinite chaos. The internet gives access to information that has rescued the Manchester Free Library from oblivion. It also shows how all the freedom in the world to do research can still not prevent it remaining completely lost from view. This applies both at a postgraduate and at a professorial level. The latest book by Professor Paul Readman, Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity (2018), has a detailed and informative chapter on the urban landscape of Victorian Manchester, which highlights Shaw’s book on Manchester Old and New for its historical “antiquarian topography” (233) but fails to mention its important, though fragmentary, focus on the new development of free libraries. As a result Readman’s survey of Manchester’s civic architecture jumps from the Free Trade Hall and the new Town Hall to the John Rylands Library, oblivious to the Deansgate Branch Library and Market in between.

PhD research

This blind spot (or is it a blind eye?) is also the case in two excellent and very informative PhD theses which have delved into the complex reality of Castlefield, that part of Manchester that created and then concealed the free libraries. If the novel perspective fabricated by original research to discover knowledge is too fixed and rigorous, some important things can be missed. Theories can illuminate reality and produce blind spots at the same time. The thesis by Rebecca M Madgin, “Urban Renaissance: The Meaning, Management and Manipulation of Space, 1945-2002” (University of Leicester, 2008) is structured as a comparative study of Castlefield, Leicester and Roubaix in France, which reduces the room available for a sighting of the Deansgate building. It includes a welcome interview with Derek Rhodes, the City Council Conservation Architect (84), and brings things more up-to-date with the Barça Bar in "Catalan Square" (171). But there is no mention of either the Spanish institute or the free library, whose ghostly presence is barely glimpsed behind the one reference to "the provision of a heritage and visitor centre" (118).

The other relevant dissertation is by Michael E. Leary, “The Production of Urban Public Space: A Lefebvrian Analysis of Castlefield, Manchester” (University of London, 2010). This does a lot of leg-work to uncover, for example, the crucial role of the local architect David Rhodes in realising the historical importance of the area, when he was commissioned to look for parking space by Granada Television (168-69). The four key items of interest for Rhodes and the Council in developing the conservation and regeneration projects were the Roman fort, canals, warehouses, and railway (183 and 220), but not the libraries. After a passing reference (19), there is only one other mention in the whole thesis of the "Manchester Free Library"; it comes in a quotation from the Manchester Guardian of 1852 which describes the disturbance affecting the new library from "the hideous din of the multitude outside" attending the open-air fair. The author of the thesis, however, seems not to see the library in the quotation, nor along with it the new working-class culture of self-education, because his main interest is in the Lefebvrian "contradictory", "unruly", and "differential space" which the authorities had succeeded in having "abolished", "suppressed" and "neutered", by building the covered markets and other actions. (256-57) But the action of creating free libraries is not specified or investigated as one of them. Hidden from view, consequently, is the significant presence of Dickens giving his speech at the opening of that very library in the September of the same year, 1852.

Back to Dickens

In the following year, Dickens continued to emphasise the liberating role of fiction when he published an article on "Manchester Men at their Books", in Household Words. It reviewed in detail a report on the first year of the new library, published by the Chief Librarian, Edward Edwards, who somewhat disapproved of the borrowing to excess of novels as a mere pastime, instead of for improvement. The Dickens article on the contrary said approvingly: The reference library is crowded in the evening with working men; and their great delight and refreshment appears to consist in an escape from routine life to dreams of romance or peril, in relieving the monotony of toil with tales of battle, shipwreck or adventure. In a word, the imagination, even in Manchester, refuses to be crushed. The pleasure book most read, during the first six months after the library opened, was -- the Arabian Nights." The next favourites appear to have been Ivanhoe, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders. A year after, Dickens went even further with his novel Hard Times (1854), based on Manchester as well as Preston. In it the narrator points out: "There was a library in Coketown, to which general access was easy"; and that "Mr Gradgrind greatly tormented his mind about what the people read in this library". For Gradgrind, the apostle of facts, was worried that library fiction, "mere fables", would promote what he most abhorred, "wonder", and "wondering" (86-87), especially if prompted by the author's "fanciful imagination" (89). Dickens the novelist may well have exaggerated his satire on hard-boiled rationalism; yet his view of the real world had been more balanced in his Campfield speech, where he wittily connected the library school of free books with the Manchester School of free trade economics, stating categorically, it is worth repeating, that capital and labour were "mutually dependent and mutually supporting" (Credland, p.12).

These three points made by Dickens in his speech, the anonymous article and his novel are all missed in an otherwise illuminating chapter by John Sutherland on “Literature and the Library in the Nineteenth Century”, which accepts that “Manchester became the first civic authority to establish a rate-supported (misnamed “free”) public lending and reference library under the 1850 Libraries Act” (129). As well as missing the whole point of libraries free for the users, Sutherland says that Dickens after his speech “came to have second thoughts about the Manchester Free Library” (130) because, it is alleged, there was a marked “prejudice” against fictional novels inherent “in the DNA of the free library institution” (131). Sutherland can only argue this by omitting Dickens’s third thought outlined in his journal’s positive article review of the first librarian’s report, and by substituting instead a derogatory verdict on reading the “garbage with which the shelves of circulating libraries are filled”, as pronounced in his  “gospel of self-help” by Samuel Smiles. This emphasis, it should be said, distorts a passage that begins: “The Novel is the most favourite refuge of the frivolous and idle. As a rest from toil and a relaxation from graver pursuits, the perusal of a well-written story, by a writer of genius, is a high intellectual pleasure […] But to make it the exclusive literary diet, as some do—to devour the garbage […].

Smiles in any case had little to do with the Free Library, even though his brother Robert Wilson Smiles was its second Chief Librarian from 1858 to 1864. The first librarian, Edwards, in his Memoirs of Libraries (1859), preceded his cavils about excessive novel-reading by uneducated youths with an expression of pride in the quality of the works of fiction available in the lending library, both standard classics and “many works of recent date”, which have become “the vehicle of the best thoughts of some of the best thinkers.” (811-12). He repeated the same in his Free Town Libraries (1869), adding that it “was foreseen” that in the lending section “a good provision of Prose Fiction must needs be made”, and that the “books of Fiction so provided and so used are (it is almost needless to say) among the best of their class”, including the likes of Scott, Defoe, Lytton, Dumas and Dickens (78-79).

Present Situation

Perhaps one lesson to be learnt from Dickens and applied to the free library phenomenon is to discover the facts first, not an easy task, and then interpret them with the aid of a fanciful, unfettered imagination. What facts emerge if one googles “first free public library”and then “Manchester”? Manchester City Council heads its list of Manchester Firsts with the 1653 opening of Chetham's, the “nation’s first free public library”, with no mention of the 1852 Campfield library. Wikipedia’s Timeline of Manchester History says “the Chetham's Library opens” “as Britain’s first free public library”, but alters the year to 1656. It does include the 1852 “public library in Tonman Street” as “the first in England to offer free lending under the Public Libraries Act 1850.” The Wikipedia entry on Chetham's Library readjusts the definition and the date, calling it “the oldest free public reference library in the United Kingdom”, “in continuous use since 1653.” Also gleanable from the history section of this entry is the fact that the library was privately funded as a charitable institution through the will of Humphrey Chetham, giving free access, not to the public, but only to scholars, for the consultation of books that were protected from theft or borrowing by chains (and later iron-bar gates). Alongside is a photo of the famous “window alcove in which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels worked”, “in the summer of 1845.” Given these facts, one may wonder how appropriate was such a special library for the two principal members of the avant-garde Communist elite, and whether, if they had reunited in Manchester after 1852, they would have preferred the lesser privacy and greater contact with workers of all classes in the new free and very public library. If the angle of vision is slightly altered by switching the adjectives of the Google search to “first public free library”, up comes, serendipitously, the website of the Working Class Movement Library, specifically its page celebrating the book that describes the opening of the Campfield Free Library, which happens to be Credland’s History. The page has three illustrations: two drawings of the Campfield library and its opening ceremony, plus the Credland  photo showing the interior of the Deansgate branch. Unstated, but visually implied, is the intimate connection of the two libraries. Moving on and away from the Google search, one wonders what on earth Credland and Engels, or come to that Watts, would have made of the Deansgate building today. Yet it would be pointless to fantasise. More relevant is to apply the living brain behind the current article to try and grasp the essence of the present situation, and summarise what the edifice looks like, what it is, what it has been, and possibly will be.

The noble structure of the building which is now home to the Cervantes Institute, with its eccentrically tall chimney, might well be a fanciful reminder of some Quixotic lance, raised as a necessarily chivalric response to the challenge presented by the erection, across the road, of the enormous skyscraper of the Beetham Tower, not quite a Tower of Babel, more like a Hilton Hotel. Instead of grumbling about a possible negative aesthetic impact on the area, or about entrepreneurial capitalist excess, one could and should be inspired by Cervantes and Dickens to imagine the Tower as a huge pin on the Google map of Manchester, conveniently marking the exact location, not only of the Instituto Cervantes, but also the rebuilt, first, free, public, lending library in the world.