The carpet is filthy. Guests are about to arrive. You have several choices: buy a carpet cleaning machine (around £130 upwards), pay for a professional cleaning company (about £40), or rent a machine from a private hire firm (around £29 for two days). Or, if you live in West Norwood, just pop down the road and borrow one for £9.

It isn’t only domestic cleaning equipment that is available for knock-down rates in this area of south London. The Library of Things, a new “borrowing space” social enterprise, stocks everything from DIY equipment and camping gear to kitchenware and wetsuits.

The concept is simple, says 26 year-old co-founder Rebecca Trevalyan. Anyone can become a member, it’s free to join, and up to five items can be borrowed per week. The carpet cleaner is one of the more expensive items but most are charged out at somewhere between £2 (for a garden fork) and £4 (for a bread maker). All are listed in its online catalogue.



Library of Things co-founder Rebecca Trevalyan Photograph: Sebastian Wood

“The way the Library of Things works is that we own all the things ... and people come to borrow them at a very low cost,” says Trevalyan, who balances her time with a day-job at Impact Hub, a collective of social entrepreneurs and activists in Brixton. “All the items are priced depending on their value and how much people want to borrow them.”



Launched last month, the initiative has attracted only about 150 members so far but has big ambitions. Trevalyan and her two co-founders covered their start-up costs with a successful Kickstarter campaign. In addition, a local outlet of DIY retailer B&Q donated £1,000-worth of stock, while outdoor brands Berghaus and Patagonia gave backpacks, travel duffle bags and other goods.

“We wanted the items to be firstly of good quality, so not previously used where possible, and we had to know that they were safe, particularly where they were electrical,” says Travalyan.

In addition to borrowing fees, the founders hope to generate revenues through the sale of branded merchandise and ancillary products, such as screws and cleaning fluids. They have also won a Scaling Catalyst Award from the Royal Society of Arts to fund an explanatory toolkit for other organisations looking to copy the model. Travalyan and her colleagues organise “boot camps” to train others to set up their own libraries.

Inside the Library of Things Photograph: Sebastian Wood

“We’re hoping these will be in all sorts of different contexts, such as libraries, housing estates, community centres and shops,” says Travalyan.



Alternatives to buying products outright - lending, leasing, swapping and so on – are nothing new, but the digital revolution has seen an exponential rise in non-ownership models. The so-called sharing economy is set to be worth $335bn per year globally by 2025 – equal to the projected value of the traditional rental sector.

The sector’s big brand stars – including Uber, ZipCar, TaskRabbit – are quick to use the word “disruptive”. And they are creating a radical shake-up in their respective sectors. That’s why the global hotel industry has opposed accommodation site Airbnb, for example.

The aspirations of the Library of Things however are different and potentially far more radical. “We’re interested in how we can make the organisation accountable to the community and for our members to be on a genuinely peer-to-peer level,” says Trevalyan. That’s very different from an Uber-style model, where the sharing platform is privately-owned and operated.

The Economy of Hours (or Echo for short), a job-share platform based in London, has a similar philosophy. Its network of more than 3,000 users trade their time and skills equally among themselves. An hour of one person’s time is worth an hour of someone else’s, regardless of whether it’s a logo-design they’re offering or a haircut. Unlike much larger equivalents, such as TaskRabbit, Fiverr or PeoplePerHour, no money changes hands.

“The idea of democratisation, of creating something that everyone can take part in, where everyone can be valued equally and hopefully participate on an equal footing, that’s very much our core philosophy,” says Sarah Henderson, director of operations at London-based Echo, which is registered as a community interest company.

The limiting factor, she admits, is money. Without any profits, Echo relies primarily on grants, volunteers and general goodwill. This covers the wages of three paid staff - which is three more than the Library of Things at present.

Scaling up such models is always a challenge, says Ben Kellard, head of sustainable business at the specialist advisory organisation, Forum for the Future. What social entrepreneurs have in terms of great ideas and innovation, they lack in capital and reach, he says. Big business, in contrast, lacks the first but has plenty of the second. “It should be a perfect marriage between the two in theory,” he says, “but you rarely see that in practice.”

Yet the sharing economy is an “irreversible trend” and corporations ignore up-and-coming innovators in the space at their peril, Kellard says. Opportunities to network and experiment might be more realistic at this stage than full-on partnerships. He cites innovation hubs such as the Unilever Foundry and Telefonica-backed Wayra by way of example.

Another hurdle is low public demand. At present, it’s just too easy to click online and “blindly buy more stuff”, says Sam Stephens, founder of the neighbourhood-based sharing platform Streetbank (also supported by B&Q). In his darker moments, Stephens fears it will need a cataclysmic economic shock to make the average consumer think seriously about sharing over buying.

He hopes, however, that democratically-run, community-owned sharing enterprises can turn the tables on consumer capitalism. If everyone shared everything, GDP would collapse, he admits. But, he says, “we’d still have a perfectly healthy economy. It’s just our resources would be used much more efficiently.”