The Living City — 12

Press, 1 August 1981, Page 16

The Living City — 12

City Library

The Canterbury Public Library had its beginnings in the 1850 s in the Canterbury Mechanics Institute, an organisation formed for the purpose of providing reading rooms for working people. The half-acre site on the corner of Hereford Street and Cambridge Terrace — once the burial ground of the Puari Pa — was bought by the institute for £262 10s in 1862, and a two-storey wooden building was erected a year later.

At that time there was no public library in Christchurch. The Provincial Legislature began an attempt to do something about this in 1870, when it enacted an ordinance setting up a board of trustees “of the Canterbury Museum and Library,” but the endowment that it gave the board was too small to provide a library as well as a museum.

Thus in 1874, a year after Canterbury College was constituted, the trustees handed over responsibility for the creation of a library to the university. Before the official handover the university had taken over the premises and books of the Literary Institute (the mechanics had changed their name in 1868) to secure the nucleus of a public library; after it a leading provincial architect, W. B. Armson, was commissioned to design a new building, and the contract to construct it was let to Joseph Woods. This brick building, which is now the oldest surviving part of the library complex, was opened in 1875. Owen Lee’s drawing shows its rather grand main east window, with the stone arches and pillars, which, though the shrubs beneath are of fairly recent planting, must otherwise look today much as it did a century ago. In that intervening century the Canterbury Public Library has had a chequered career. The buildings went up piecemeal — a room added in 1894, the librarian’s house (now obscured from view by the recent prefabricated wing) in the mid-1890s, and a gallery around the original reference library in 1897. A women’s gallery was opened in 1903, and closed two years later because of damage and lack of patronage.

The corner block which now dominates the complex

was built in 1902, and occupies the site of the original building of the Literary Institute. Another wing was added in 1924, by which time the Christchurch City council, despite a prolonged row with the university over financing which had led to litigation in 1912, was contributing to the library. The university appears to have assumed its role as provider of a public library service with some reluctance, but it proved equally reluctant to relinquish control, and a controversy (much of it centred on the disposition of a large bequest made to the library in 1896 by a Springston farmer) dragged on for three decades before Parliament eventually enacted legislation in 1948, passing ownership of the library to the City Council.

In its early years the library was financed from the University’s endowment and by subscriptions which, in the 1870 s, when the lending collection contained only about 4000 books, cost half-.a-crown a quarter. Later, bequests eased the burden on the university, and about 1920, after years of negotiations, the City Council began an annual grant. •', ■

After the council took full control it embarked immediately on a ratepayer-funded programme ,of expansion, and for many years maintained a free lending service to all Canterbury residents. About 10 years ago rising costs forced the council, after failing to persuade other local bodies to contribute, to withdraw free-borrowing rights from all except residents of Christchurch city.

Today, the time of the library on its historic site is numbered, and a new library building is nearing completion in Gloucester Street. The old complex of buildings has been sold to a construction company, which will convert it to office blocks after the library moves. But the exterior of the old buildings will be preserved, so that the appearance at least of the site’s interesting links with the literary and architectural tastes — and politics — of colonial Christchurch will be maintained.