Authors will join hundreds of protesters in the first national demonstration to protect library services held in London on Saturday, in response to a string of closures over the past five years.

The children’s laureate, Chris Riddell, and the former children’s laureate Michael Rosen as well as the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, and an estimated 1,800 protesters from across the country will march from the British Library to Trafalgar Square.

Riddell, the author of the Goth Girl series, said the threat to libraries amounted to a “tragedy for the literary culture of our country”. He added: “Libraries are cultural hubs that, if nurtured by government, have the ability to transform lives. We must all raise our voices to defend them.”



Children’s laureate Chris Riddell will join the protest. Photograph: Lauren Hurley/PA

Library services have come under increased pressure due to cuts in funding to councils since David Cameron took office in May 2010.



Around one in eight council-run libraries has closed or been transferred out of the public sector in the past six years, according to research by the House of Commons library service and the BBC – a far faster pace of closure than in the previous five years under the Labour government.

Total spending by councils on library services fell by a fifth between 2010 and 2015, according to the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG).

Rosen, who was children’s laureate from 2007 to 2009, said: “How hypocritical of a government that claims to be on the side of the disadvantaged for them to be kicking away the means by which people can get access to knowledge, wisdom, fun and communal life.

“The austerity their cuts are based on is bogus. There is money in unpaid taxes, quantitative easing and hoarded super wealth. What the government is saying is that the poor don’t have the right to have knowledge and wisdom.”

The march has been organised by Unite, the Public and Commercial Services Union and the Barnet branch of Unison.

Research by the BBC this year found that a quarter of all jobs in libraries had been lost since May 2010 – 8,000 in total. Meanwhile, 15,500 volunteers have been recruited in what a Unite spokesman described as a “deprofessionalisation” of library services.

Last month Walsall council announced it would close 15 of its 16 libraries, and residents told the Guardian they stood to lose vital community spaces as well as reading resources. In London, the boroughs of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea have both announced plans to cut library services, according to Unite, while in Bromley the union has campaigned against plans to privatise services.

Planned cuts have sometimes been so severe that the government has been forced to step in to investigate whether councils are meeting their legal duty to provide comprehensive and efficient library services, as it did in Lancashire last month.

The erosion of library services has long provoked outcry from authors. In a 2013 lecture, Neil Gaiman said local authorities that closing libraries to save money was “quite literally stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.”

Alan Gibbons, one of the march’s organisers and the author of Shadow of the Minotaur and other children’s books, said: “Libraries are places of learning and opportunity. They are community hubs in areas where there is no other collective meeting place.

“They provide advice, books, computers, storytelling, information and education. Any government that allows them to close can’t claim to want a literate society. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”

John Bird, the founder of the Big Issue, will address the march in London. He said libraries were vital for boosting literacy, an issue on which he campaigns. “I’m especially interested because I learned to read in a boy’s prison at the age of 16,” Lord Bird said. “Probably 70% of the people we work with [at the Big Issue] have literacy issues.”

Teresa Pearce, the shadow secretary of state for communities and local government, called on the government to increase council funding in the autumn statement to protect libraries. “The Tories must urgently recognise that libraries are an integral part of our social fabric, which will be difficult to regain once lost,” she said.

The DCLG was contacted for comment but did not respond.

Additional reporting by Pamela Duncan