Primrose Hill Library, run by volunteers, opens its doors with promise of after-school clubs and film nights
Thursday, 3rd May 2012
Friends of Primrose Hill Library board members Anna Locke, left, and Sharon Ridsdale with International lawyer Polly Higgins, centre
Published: 3 May, 2012
by PAVAN AMARA
THE new Primrose Hill Library officially opened its doors with around 60 people squeezing in to hear a talk by international lawyer Polly Higgins on Monday.
The Sharpeshall Road library, formerly known as Chalk Farm Library, was handed over last week to a group of volunteers who will run it independently.
Campaigners have already raised £588,000 from about 500 people.
Sharon Ridsdale, a board member of the library’s Friends group, said: “This week, we’re going to be forming sub-committees for IT, for volunteering, for designing the interior space and for people dealing with the books.”
The library is expected to run six days a week, with three people needed at any given time to staff it.
A core group of five volunteers who have had Criminal Records Bureau checks will work in the children’s section.
Ms Ridsdale said: “We’re building up links with the schools, with Haverstock, Primrose Hill Primary, St Paul’s Primary, and are going to be offering after-school clubs to develop literacy and numeracy, because we realised all the after-school clubs finish at 6pm. For parents who work late, the children can come here, and we’re thinking of starting an evening children’s chess club, even film nights for adults and children.”
Ms Higgins, an international lawyer who has proposed a Universal Declaration of Planetary Rights to the United Nations, spoke about ecocide – the murder of the earth.
“Genocide is mass murder, and at the moment there are companies murdering the planet,” said Ms Higgins, who admitted she squatted in a bank not far from the library before becoming a lawyer.
“Ecocide leads to resource depletion, and that leads to conflict, which leads to war and even further damage and destruction. The word ecocide has been around since the 1970s, but I want to give it a legal definition now. We need to attach responsibility to human beings at an international criminal level if they harm the planet.”
Ms Higgins has worked in corporate and employment law, but says she has “always looked at the law through an unconventional lens”.
“Seven years ago I was representing a man at the Royal Courts of Justice who suffered injury and harm,” she said. “I looked out of the window and thought: ‘The earth is suffering from that too.’ It then occurred to me that the earth needed a really good lawyer. It was a pivotal moment in my life. It was when I was speaking on a podium at Copenhagen’s climate change negotiations that a lightbulb went off in my head – ecocide should be an international crime.”
The libraries at Belsize and Heath have also been handed over to volunteers after the Town Hall said it could no longer afford to manage them.
