The Role of Libraries in Keeping Communities Together

Swindon Central Library opens at nine on a Tuesday morning. By half past nine, two things are happening simultaneously that would not have been predicted by anyone designing a library in 1970. In the main reading room, a digital literacy session is underway, with six older residents learning how to use NHS online services and set up a video call. In the meeting room downstairs, a social prescribing navigator from the local GP practice is meeting clients referred to the library because they are isolated and need support that a medical appointment cannot provide. Neither session involves a book.

That is not a loss. It is an evolution. Libraries are doing more than they ever have, for more people, across more areas of need, at the same time as facing a sustained period of cuts, closures, and reduced opening hours. Understanding what libraries actually do now, as opposed to what people assume they do, matters enormously for the communities that depend on them.

What Modern Libraries Actually Offer

The lending function remains. Libraries in the UK still issue tens of millions of items each year across physical books, audiobooks, e-books, and DVDs. But the service portfolio has expanded substantially, and in many libraries the non-book services now account for a majority of footfall.

Warm space programmes, which expanded significantly during the energy cost crisis of 2022 and 2023, provided a heated, safe, and welcoming space for anyone who could not afford to heat their home adequately. Wolverhampton City Library, Bradford Central Library, and dozens of smaller branches across the country provided warm spaces during the coldest months, often staying open beyond their usual hours and providing hot drinks. Many have continued some version of the programme because the need did not disappear when the headline crisis faded.

Digital access is another function that has grown. Libraries provide free internet access and computer use, which is more significant than it might appear. For people claiming Universal Credit, which requires online access to manage claims, or for people applying for jobs in a market where almost all applications are submitted online, a library with free computers and a member of staff willing to help is not a convenience. It is a necessity. Citizens Advice estimates that around a million Universal Credit claimants struggle to access their online accounts without external help. Libraries provide a large proportion of that help.

Community meeting rooms, available free or at low cost, are used by local groups that would otherwise have no affordable base: residents' associations, craft groups, addiction recovery support groups, parent and toddler sessions, informal tutoring. In areas where pub meeting rooms are disappearing and village halls are either closed or too expensive for casual use, the library meeting room has become the default community gathering space. Hebden Bridge Library runs over forty different regular group sessions each month, most of them run by local residents who book the space independently.

Social prescribing, where GPs refer patients to non-medical support rather than or alongside clinical treatment, has found a natural home in libraries. The combination of a welcoming physical space, a non-stigmatising setting, and existing connections to community groups makes libraries an effective point of contact for people experiencing loneliness, mild depression, or anxiety. Libraries in Lambeth, Oldham, and Somerset have all developed formal social prescribing partnerships with primary care networks, with link workers based in the library rather than in a surgery.

The Political Context of Library Closures

Around eight hundred public libraries have closed in the UK since 2010, a reduction of approximately eighteen percent of the total estate. The closures have not been evenly distributed. They have fallen disproportionately on smaller, more deprived communities where residents are least likely to have alternative access to the services a library provides: internet access, quiet study space, free heating, community connection.

The legal framework for library services, the Public Libraries and Museums Act 1964, requires local authorities to provide a "comprehensive and efficient" library service. The definition of what that means in practice has been contested across multiple judicial reviews, with courts generally reluctant to define the terms in ways that constrain council decision-making. This has given councils significant latitude to reduce services without technically breaching their statutory duty, a latitude that has been widely exercised under financial pressure.

The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) has documented the cumulative impact: reduced opening hours at a majority of remaining libraries, reduced stock budgets, reduced staffing, and the conversion of many libraries to volunteer-run operations that, whatever their merits, tend to have less consistent opening times and less capacity to provide the more complex support functions that professional staff manage.

This is the political and financial environment in which libraries are simultaneously being asked to do more. Food bank partnerships, digital inclusion services, social prescribing hubs, warm spaces: these are not what most councils budgeted for when they set library allocations. They are responses to need that library staff have developed because the need was there and nobody else was filling it.

Pushing Back on the Books Assumption

The idea that libraries are primarily about books is not wrong historically, but it understates what libraries have become. More importantly, it generates a specific kind of public debate that is not useful: whether e-books and Amazon have made libraries redundant as lending services, with the implicit conclusion that if the lending function can be replaced, the institution can be closed.

This argument ignores almost everything a modern library does. You cannot replace a warm space programme with an app. You cannot replace a social prescribing navigator in a non-clinical setting with a website. You cannot replace the retired teacher who helps someone fill in their Universal Credit claim on a Thursday afternoon with a chatbot. The lending function is the most visible part of what libraries do. It is not the most irreplaceable part.

The communities that understand this tend to fight harder for their libraries and to use them more fully. Libraries that communicate clearly about the full range of what they offer, rather than defaulting to a books-and-reading identity, build broader coalitions of supporters. A library that is known as the place where you can get warm, get online, get a referral to the right support, and meet people, is harder to close than a library that is known only as the place where you return your thriller before the fine kicks in.

If your local library is under threat, or if you want to strengthen it before it reaches that point, the most effective thing residents can do is use it visibly and loudly across the full range of its services. Attendance data is the primary evidence councils use in making closure decisions. For more on the community infrastructure that libraries sit within, our piece on how community noticeboards work in the digital age looks at another form of community communication that is often underestimated. And our article on the quiet power of local food banks covers a parallel story of institutions doing more than their name suggests, in conditions that require constant justification. See also our stories section for further accounts of community institutions and the people who sustain them.