Maesteg: Probably the Only Town Where A Library Could Kill A Market

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Being the only Saturday this month that I'm not working, I had intended to spend the day going up to the Valleys and watch Ton Pentre FC play and see if  I could pay £10 entitling me to part (a very small part) ownership of the club for a year.

But events changed my plans. And it involves this building which I visited today.

Maesteg Town Hall

You may remember I visited this place in April where I saw Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood whilst she was electioneering for the National Assembly of Wales vote. It is used as a performance venue with an indoor market at the bottom, Little did I realise then that it's future was in jeopardy.

Market Entrance

Apparently the building is in a dangerous state and is in danger of closing unless a substantial sum of money is spent on repairs. Something the Bridgend Labour council say they cannot afford to do. Although presumably it's fine for the next few months in view of the posters advertising shows by TV comedians, tribute bands and the local pantomime.

I am no expert. But presumably the building has been like this for a while. You would have thought that the EU money used to move the Bridgend Town Centre library outside of the town centre would have been better spent on keeping the library (radical thought) in the town centre and making building repairs to Maesteg Town Hall. But Bridgend Council appear to either like grand ideas or leave things to rot. If this place actually does close down then Maesteg might begin to experience the slow decline of Bridgend Town that I've posted about from time to time. And that would be a tragedy.

So what are the council going to do? Well they are applying for, wait for it, access to an EU fund which is administered by the Welsh government. Now apparently they can still apply for money, which will take a proportion of the costs of dealing with the building's structural problems but you can't helping feeling that they've put all of their eggs in one basket.This is because there's no guarantee that even if they are eligible they will get the money and the council suggests that if the place is not regenerated it will face what the local paper called "an incremental closure". In plain English a slow and probably agonising death.

Now no one is opposing the regeneration of the Town Hall.  Where the anger has surfaced is regarding the council's actual regeneration plans. The idea is to turn the town hall into a "Cultural Hub", which will include merging Maesteg's two libraries into one super library. This library (which apparently according to a council official in the local paper) will be not "traditional" but should be thought of as a "vibrant space". And of course the first thing you think of in a library is vibrancy.

It's where this library is proposed to be put that has caused the controversy. For it's proposed to be placed where the indoor market is now, and where it has been for the past 135 years. Thus small businesses are threatened with closure and people with redundancies.

And this is typical Bridgend Council. Going through with a grand gesture without thinking it through. It will be added to the list which includes the aforementioned Bridgend Town Centre but not really in the Town Centre library, the pedestrianisation of Bridgend Town and now it's proposed depedestrianisation .

Now those of you who have read my blog recently may think that I would approve of this being a fan of all libraries bar one (which I'll refer to later) but you would be mistaken. Firstly regular library users are decent people. They are not the sort that would demand a mega library and to hell with the consequences to small businesses, people's jobs and possibly even their lives. We are not like that. We read regularly and therefore we care.

Even if we ignore the issues surrounding the market there are other issues as well.Let me stress that I have never been to the two libraries in the Maesteg area. But I wonder whether the combined floor space is equal to what is a relatively small indoor market. We need to know this. Is there a possibility that the Maesteg library reader is being short changed?

Finally the experience of the Bridgend Town Centre not in the Town Centre library does not bode well for the proposed merged Maesteg library. It is the library that I hate with a passion best described as psychotic.Impersonal, badly referenced and quite frankly about as homely as a fire in a firework factory I avoid it like the plague and haven't entered the place for about two,possibly three years.

I went in the market today.

There's the book stall on the left

I brought forward my £1 a week Penguin/Pelican paperback budget to spend on the bookstall for the Maesteg Animal Welfare Society (MAWS) who were selling books (whether hardback or paperback) at 50p each.

I bought two Penguin paperbacks.

Daphne du Maurier - The King's General

John Briley - Cry Freedom

I like Maesteg's indoor market. It's closure would not be a good omen to the town for the future. Incidentally speaking of omens this was what was on a window of the town hall as I was walking away from the place. Which struck me as ironic given that the market is under threat from a library.

Irony writ large

There is a protest meeting in the Masonic Hall at 7pm on Tuesday. If I wasn't working would've gone.

You might ask what would I do with regard to the town hall. Honestly I don't know. Sometimes though in life you don't know the solution to a problem but you know what aspects are wrong. The closure of the indoor market is just plain wrong, and even worse coming from a Labour council, cruel.

Until the next time