Article in the Daily/Sunday Telegraph, date unknown, by Sukhdev Sandhu

University of the Ghetto makes way for 'ideas store'

At 5pm tills Saturday, a member of staff will call for closing time at Whitechapel Public Library. As she does so, it will mark the end of one of the most remarkable institutions in the East End of London. Ever since it first opened its doors to the public in 1892, the library, often described as the 'University of the Ghetto", has been a haven for generations of refugees and migrants.

A newspaper article from 1900 reported that nearly 3,000 local people, most of whom had fled pogroms in eastern Europe, were packing the reading rooms. Until the 1970s, when they completed their exodus to the elevated heights of Stamford Hill and Golders Green, working-class Jewish men and women went there to read the books and newspapers that they lacked in their tenement homes.

It was here that the war poet Isaac Rosenberg met future artists such as Mark Gertler and David Bomberg. It was here that the novelists Simon Blumenfeld and Willy Goldman, historian Jacob Bronowski, and playwrights Arnold Wesker and Bernard Kops educated themselves. Kops wrote a poem about the place in which he confessed: "The door of the library was the door into me."

Rachel Lichtenstein, co-author of Rodinsky's Room, a book of essays about Whitechapel, says: "It's not like a synagogue that has lost its community. It has never closed its doors. Historically, it's unique."

The library, unlike many up and down the country, is still very popular, though its users these days come from Mogadishu or Sylhet rather than Polish shtetls. Many young Muslims, especially girls, see it as a vital breathing space away from home and the local mosque.

The library is loved by the local community. Its history reflects their struggles and yearnings. Not only does it stand halfway between the sites of two bomb blasts - that at Aldgate tube station last month, and that of the Brick Lane restaurant attacked by a xenophobic nailbomber in 1999 - but it was itself damaged by German planes during the Blitz. Yet it has survived for decades.

Peeling and underfunded it may have been, but no one ever went there for its decor. They did so because it represented an ideal of autodidactic self-improvement, because it offered a community based on knowledge and ideas rather than bloodlines, and because, in an age when so much public culture is becoming privatised and niche-driven, it has remained friendly and open to all.

The building's lack of architectural frills recalls an era when libraries were about edification rather than entertainment. The library building has been bought by the Whitechapel Art Gallery next door and, come September, a new library will open on a site next to a local branch of Sainsbury's. It will be rechristened "Whitechapel Ideas Store".

Designed by architect David Adjaye, it will be sleek and smart, decked out with a cafe and dozens of internet terminals. Perhaps this is the right thing to do when applications such as Google have taken over many of the functions of reference libraries, and chains such as Waterstone's have tried to make book-browsing and purchasing an aesthetically pleasing activity.

Still, the shift from "library" to "store" is a telling one: retailing is sovereign these days. What's lost in the translation is not just the ideal of knowledge as standing a little apart from the rest of the leisure economy, but the historical continuity that the Whitechapel Public Library's name and the building itself guaranteed.

In the book of the East End, its closure is one of the very saddest stories of all.