Swiss Cottage Library

Sunday’s Observer carried an article, though it doesn't appear in the online edition, on Swiss Cottage Library, recently refurbished. Observer Magazine, 19 September 2004: pp 40 - 41
Swiss Cottage is one of Sir Basil Spence's buildings, as is Sussex University where I now work (part of the time) and it's very good that Camden have restored it, though a pity that they did not do the same for the swimming pool. I have fond memories of both, though in the time I knew it I think Spence's achievement was rather taken for granted:
a) when first in London in the late seventies, a favourite Sunday morning activity was to go by bus from Temple Fortune to Swiss Cottage for a swim in the pool, followed by a liquid lunch in the Crown, or Crocker's Folly, though we would be thrown out at 3, this being in the dark days before all-day opening
b) the statute of Freud by Oscar Nemon that stood outside the library (apparently moved in 1998), marking both the Freudian connections of the area (I remember childhood visits to some Freuds, friends of my mothers who lived north of Regent's Park) and the fact that the library held psychology under the LASER subject specialisation scheme for public libraries in London and the South East.
c) it was here that I went to consult what seemed to be the only copy in a London public library of the English translation of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia (Большая Советская Энциклопедия) (now online in Russian only), sadly lost when Camden destroyed the best public reference libraries in London.
It seems to be the season for library refurbishments, for the London Borough of Barnet's Hendon library, the second library I ever worked in, is about to reopen. It has a place in history as the library where Eileen Colwell did her pioneering work with children.