Next week will see campaigners battling to preserve one of Manchester’s most unique walkways presenting a dossier of evidence challenging Council plans to close Library Walk.
The Planning Inspectorate has called a Public Inquiry in response to hundreds of objections from people who want to preserve the right to walk the streets of the city, and to ensure they are accessible for disabled people.
They face Manchester City Council who applied for the order to remove the public right of way from the curved city centre walkway connecting the Central Library and the Town Hall with plans to instal a £3.5m Ian Simpson designed glazed link part way along the passageway, and close it off late at night over concerns for public safety.
Morag Rose, Spokesperson for Friends of Library Walk says
“We are fundamentally opposed to the closure of public space. We believe everyone should have the right to enjoy our cities streets. Library Walk is beautiful, and of significant architectural merit. We have testimonies from 100s of people who love and cherish it and want to preserve the right of way for future generations. The Council has only spurious arguments, we believe our evidence can successfully challenge every one of them. The closure sets a terrible precedent which blights the cityscape and wastes £3.5million which could have been used to significantly improve the public realm instead of stealing it.”
Meanwhile author and journalist Owen Hatherley has voiced support, saying
“Library Walk is not only an extraordinary architectural space, an effortless transition between a classical library and a gothic town hall, it is also an extraordinary public space, free, atmospheric and wholly unique, in a city which has been lately intent on privatising and filling in all free spaces. In between these two masterpieces of public provision, to shove pointlessly this stunted black glass stub is inexplicable and inexcusable. A council that is – rightly – proud of these buildings should not be reversing the public-spiritedness that lay behind them in the first place”.
Witnesses who will be speaking at the Inquiry include representatives from The Open Spaces Society, Manchester and Warrington Quakers, The Twentieth Century Society, Manchester School of Architecture, Manchester Disabled People’s Access Group, Liverpool School of Architecture, Manchester Modernist Society and Friends of Library Walk as well as concerned citizens and experts in planning, architecture, Manchester history and urban space.
Like your group I am fundamentally opposed to the closure of Library Walk. The only way to save people’s embarrassment would be for the glazed link to be open for 24 hours of the day. I recognise that this is not the most desirable way to proceed but it may be the only way that individuals and groups and the city council can find a way to solve this problem without either losing face.