Whitechapel Library - that great library of the East End - finally closed its doors on Saturday 6th August 2005, after more than a century of use.

To those who used it down the years it was much more than a simple storehouse of books, as the poem here by Bernard Kops well shows. From its early years it was known affectionately, but accurately, as the University of the Poor (and not ‘of the Ghetto’, as has been said), a haven for those many without the means to buy books. It was certainly a meeting point where intense discussions took place, where Isaac Rosenberg met with Mark Gertler, John Rodker, David Bomberg and others, and where in more recent times people’s eyes were opened to work of poets such as Nazrul Islam or Jasim Uddin.

Bill Fishman recalls frequent visits to the Library as a youngster to do homework, sometimes interrupted by the voices of Hasidic scholars rising above the Silence of the Library. By 1960 it held substantial volumes of Judaica, in Yiddish, Hebrew & English and latterly the Whitechapel Library was one of the first in the country to introduce significant numbers of new books in Bengali, reflecting the demographic changes in Tower Hamlets. The then librarians Neil Veysey and Kanai Datta spent real energies establishing a strong Bengali-language section and introduced books in Urdu and Hindi also. Kanai Datta in particular was instrumental in achieving this, allowing the work of Rabindranath Tagore, Kobi Nazrul Islam, Manik Bandhopadhyay, Shamsur Rahman and many others to come to Bengali and non-Bengali speakers alike.

Built in 1901 with funds raised by Canon Barnett (yes, as of the local school) and his wife Henrietta, Whitechapel Library not only provided throughout its life books of and for the main spoken languages of Tower Hamlets, it also provided the very first Children’s Public Library in the UK. The historian-polymath Dr. Jacob Bronowski wrote of his use of the Library: “I wanted a book which I could read, which I could follow, and from which I could learn good English.” He asked and got it from the Librarian, and as he went on to say, “From that time on, much of my education was formed by public libraries”. Such was their vital function, their creative art.

It was a vibrant place: Joseph Leftwich wrote how Isaac Rosenberg, the great East End poet who died in the First World War, would “run off to the Library whenever he could, to read poetry and the lives of the poets, their letters, their essays on how to write poetry, their theories ….” Rosenberg’s plaque is on the street wall by the Library’s entrance: apt spot, for that is where so many people walked in from Whitechapel High Street, coming from homes in Brick Lane, Hanbury Street, the Chicksand Estate, Henriques Street, Backchurch Lane, the Berner Estate, Commercial Road, Fieldgate Mansions, Watney Market, Shadwell and the whole of what has been, and still intimately is, the inner East End, Stepney to Spitalfields. From small children to old men and women crossing busy streets to get there: this Library was, until a few days ago, simply a place freely to walk into, to read and write in, browse at, rest and be revived by. It is easy to underestimate the Library’s importance and easy, in the climate of spun politics, to lose what cannot really be replaced.

It was like a table that people could come to for sustenance: you walked in and sat down and some time later you walked out, back onto the street again. A few years ago Rachel Lichtenstein and Alan Dein ‘exhibited’ a table from the Library in the Whitechapel Art Gallery next door, curating memory and history through people’s words: the atmosphere of the Library as much as its presence has meant very much to many people. It was “an orchard within for the heart and the mind”. Maybe the new Ideas Store that is to replace it will also be an orchard with fruit and warmth and shade. Even so there is now no longer a Public Library in Aldgate East. And the hearts and minds of many people will be saddened, lessened, by that. Whitechapel is neither a university nor a ghetto, but the loss of this library seems salutary and painful.