Reading Rooms and smaller buildings

Although Carnegie Libraries are most often identified as urban buildings, a large number of the grants issued under the Library grant scheme were for small communities in rural areas, especially in Carnegie’s native Scotland. Many of these grants were extremely small with buildings costing in the region of £50 in total to build. Nevertheless the same grant application process was required, providing a site, demonstrating evidence of a local subscription and making a commitment to provide a reading room. Many of these buildings were therefore defined as a “village hall and reading room” or a “local institute” – very few still contain a reading room and many seem never to have done. Interestingly, their survival rate as versatile community buildings is significantly higher than that of the more designated library buildings.

There are just a handful of sheet metal Carnegie Library buildings, however they belong to the same era of opportunity offered by the availability of new prefabricated components. Their merits were also promoted “for churches, mission rooms, schools, lecture and drill halls, dwelling houses, billiard rooms, shooting lodges, workmen’s cottages, cricket pavilions etc”^[1]

Our research has identified 77 such smaller buildings which received funding under a library grant but which were not primarily purpose built libraries. Of these, 16 are in England, 4 in Wales and 57 are in Scotland. The grant amounts and the dates of the grants have been noted from the lists in the archives of the Carnegie Corporation of New York held at Columbia University and supplemented by reference to records of the Carnegie UK Trust archives held in the National Archives of Scotland.

^[1] Advertisement from Isaac Dixon & Co. Windsor Ironworks, Liverpool in SEARS, J. E. (1893). The architects’, surveyors’ and engineers’ compendium and complete catalogue … seventh annual issue. p.388