THIS weeks Redditch Standard letters.
A MATTER of semantics.
I attended the Headless Cross library consultation to explain how I could provide a better all year round eating venue without demolishing the library, at a cost of £500,000 and completed in six months.
We also discussed the size of the library.
The guys I spoke to didn’t know the size of the new library but told me it was 11 sq metres bigger.
This puzzled me because I had measured the floor space using the plans in the library which have a scale on them (most of the Tory advertising carefully omits this feature).
I calculated 250sq metres in the lower ground floor (which may actually, it says not be used for the library) plus 350sq metres on the ground floor and 300sq metres on the first floor, totalling 900sq metres.
The existing library is not quite rectangular but averages at 25 metres by 31 metres plus lifts and stairs (I also excluded those figures from the new library as they are not productive space).
Three floors of 775sq m comes to 2225sq metres – a fair bit bigger.
So I puzzled over how you fudge the figures to get down to the town hall size. It’s like this: deduct 500sq metres of DWP which the county council pinched from our library a few years back, deduct 3rd floor meeting rooms and staff areas and archives comes to 1025sq metres.
But hang on, the library and the district council both had meeting rooms before so, why are we deducting this figure? Lots of people use the meeting rooms and give the county council an income to spend on books.
Anyway, we are now getting close. Next, you have to add on two enormous unusable corridors in the new library measuring 84sq metres each 900 plus 168 equals 1068.
I rounded up on the new plans and down on the existing library which I guess is the difference between 43 metres and their 11. But why are we adding in the corridors? The existing library has no corridors not lined with books.
We can’t put books in the new corridors because they would create a fireball tunnel in the event of a fire.
Perhaps someone from the Conservatives could print the plans with a scale and we can play count the squares of useable space.
I do so hate deceit. The new library is not bigger. It is smaller by a whole 1m325sq metres because we can put the DWP in the Town Hall and get our whole library back. Does anyone else remember how the computers were on the third floor and the whole of the second floor was books?
That is the genuine size of our library.
Please do not be conned.
Margot Bish
Abbeydale
THE ex-nurse’s letter was very interesting if a trifle confused and inconsistent in places.
There is no one alive today who can accurately say there was ‘no welfare’ as the ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909 introduced old age pensions and subsequent related legislation in 1911 a measure of unemployment pay.
It was ‘…a War Budget…for raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness’ in Lloyd George’s fine words.
This was extended and refined post First World War and though it is true that under the financial exigencies of the depression the payments were reduced and put under strain. they were never abolished.
It is significant that someone receiving just enough to live on is often dubbed a ‘benefit scrounger’ or ‘welfare dependent’ but a large landowner receiving millions of taxpayers’ money is never a ‘subsidy scrounger’ or a major shareholder whose company gets millions ‘grant dependent’.
This attitude, if not those very words, permeate her letter. One rule for the rich, another, much harsher one, for the poor.
K Wass
Matchborough
I’M just trying to see what Redditch residents think of the idea of renaming the Birmingham Road?
Yet again we have ‘temporary traffic lights’ hindering movement through there.
One name that would be more appropriate I believe would be ‘Mussolini Way’ after the Second World War fascist dictator whose corpse was dug up and relaid almost as many times as the road itself.
Steve Jones
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Actress and broadcaster
Sightsavers Ambassador
