Helen Marsh
Knows where everything is, including the ladder key and your overdue habits. Forgives both.
EST. 1913 · VOLUNTEER-RUNYOUR LIBRARY · WATTLEBROOK
A building full of borrowed things
Wattlebrook has been lending since 1913 and has been volunteer-run since the council tried to close it in 1998 and the town said no. This is what you own a share of.
The rooms, honestly lit
The collections
18,000 books across two floors: strong local history, a serious children's wall, large print that gets restocked monthly, and a returns trolley with better taste than most bestseller lists. Anything we don't hold, we borrow from a library that does; interlibrary loans are free and take about a week.
CARD INDEXSTAFF & VOLUNTEERS
The people (and the cat)
Edith Crane
Forty years a schoolteacher; now issues cards and reading orders with equal authority.
Ray Delgado
Fixed the roof, the boiler, and the flagpole. Refuses to fix the creaky third stair ('it's the alarm').
June Petty
Does the dragon voices. All of them. Has strong views on picture-book endings and shares them.
Biscuit
Arrived in a returns crate in 2019. Now supervises the warm patch by the local-history shelf.
THE RECORDACCESSIONS · 1913 ONWARD
Stamped into the record
- 1913
Opens with 400 donated books and a coal stove. The stove is gone; some of the books are not.
- 1954
The flood reaches the second shelf. The town dries 3,000 books on church pews and returns every one.
- 1998
The council votes to close the branch. Four hundred residents attend a meeting with seating for sixty. The library stays; the volunteers begin.
- 2021
The old storeroom becomes the Commons: community room, study desks, the good wifi, the kettle.
Access, plainly
Step-free entry from Corbett Square. A hearing loop at the desk, large-print and dyslexia-friendly shelves, a quiet first hour on Wednesdays, and staff who will fetch, carry, and read aloud without being asked twice. If something here doesn't work for you, tell us and we will change it.