Tuesday 12 July 2011

Library in a Phone Box #20 Cowlinge, Suffolk

Continuing on the ttopic of phone boxes which have been turned into libraries as mentioned previously in this blog...
There's something special about this one, all the other phone box libraries I found by searching google, but this one, this has a black swan-like magic.

A colleague at work who had previously taken the piss about me going on about phone box libraries, he got lost the other night in the wilds of Newmarket, and pulling up at a pub, found at the phone box there was actually Cowlinge Public Library. This one isn't in google's search results.

Cowlinge is a sleepy village in rural Suffolk with a population of around 280. The centre of the village is The Three Tuns pub, outside which their library can be found.

A bit of research finds that in 2008 BT disconnected the kiosk as it was getting about one phone call a year, and after a bit of wrangling over electricity bills with EDF, it was sold to the parish council earlier this year.

There's no other information about when or how the library came about, so I guess its some kind of spontaneous community thing, in the absense of other council library provision.

The layout is slightly different to the usual design, with two four-shelf bookcases on either side of the box, the side facing the door has a small 'no smoking' notice.

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