After our well publicised local campaign, I am pleased to announce that the City of London agreed to extend the hours at Artizan Street Community Library. This is fantastic news! In addition to extending the hours the City will also now be trialling a Saturday opening slot for six months.
From 14th May 2018 the new Library hours will be as follows:
Monday- 8am-7pm
Tuesday- 8am-5.30pm
Wednesday- 8am-5.30pm
Thursday- 8am-5.30pm
Friday- 8am-5.30pm
Saturday- 9am-1pm
This really is tremendous news for the local community and it will now mean that this wonderful resource is available for even more people to use on a daily basis.
Thank you to everyone who signed the petition and to the parents who came to the Guildhall last month to hand-in the petition. We couldn't have got this result without all of your support.
We need opening hours at Artizan Street Library that work for our community.
We want the committee to work with the community to establish a new spread of opening hours, and ensure the needs of local school children, students, workers and other residents are put first in this decision.
We propose a spread of hours comprising at least 3 evenings per week, so the library may be a resource for a greater number and variety of people.
We propose that the library opens on Saturdays so that parents and children can visit at their leisure. The Barbican library is open Sat: 9.30am–4pm, that’s what we need in Portsoken.
Why is this important?
From Tuesday to Friday, the library closes at 4pm, and it doesn’t open at all at weekends. Many children and students in local schools finish too late to to use the services after school, and residents working 9-5 jobs do not have much opportunity to access the library at all.
The current opening hours seem only to serve the needs of the City workers coming into the area during the day, rather than the people living in the local community.
This issue has been raised in a recent customer survey, and a consultation into a new spread of opening hours is under way. We, the residents of the City of London, want to make sure that our voices are put front and centre on this issue, rather than the corporations and City workers, which is too often the case.