When the rioters came for Spellow Library, they used the nonfiction section as kindling.
Deborah Moore, then the library’s manager, arrived the next morning to find that the shelves and couches recently purchased as part of a refurbishment project had been stacked up to build a pyre on the ground floor. The books that had survived the riot, part of a wave of anti-immigrant, racist disorder that erupted across Britain in August last year, were yellowed by smoke, their pages curled from the heat.
Anger came first, she said, then sadness, then a determination to replace the hundreds of books that had burned, even as the stench of their destruction filled her nostrils. The feeling was, “Watch us come back from this, because we won’t be beaten.”
The library stands in Walton, a deprived neighborhood of the northwestern English city of Liverpool. A year and a half before the fire, it had been renovated, transforming it into a community hub that offered training workshops for the unemployed, parent and toddler groups and a contact center for the local council. Then, in August, it became one of the most high-profile casualties in Britain’s largest outbreak of public disorder for more than a decade.
In the hours after a knife-wielding attacker killed three young girls in Southport, a coastal town about 20 miles from Liverpool, disinformation claiming he was a newly arrived Muslim immigrant was spread by far-right accounts on social media. In fact he was born in Britain, to a Rwandan Christian family. But anti-migrant violence broke out in more than a dozen places in England and Northern Ireland, leading to more than 400 arrests.
The killer, Axel Rudakubana, was sentenced to life in prison last week. Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, described his actions as an example of a new kind of terrorism, involving loners obsessed with violence rather than driven by any one ideology.
Liverpool was among the first places to erupt in disorder. The rioters went as far as trying to stop firefighters from entering the library, the local police said in a statement at the time.
Alex McCormick, a 27-year-old woman from a nearby suburb, saw the images of smashed windows and blackened pages at the library and immediately decided to start an online fund-raiser to help replace the books.
“We can’t be burning books, we can’t do this,” she said. “We’re not like this, but to the rest of the world, this is now what we look like.”
Her target was 500 pounds, about $610, but soon thousands started rolling in, some of the money from celebrity donors. Ms. McCormick, who was getting married that month, found herself distracted from her wedding preparations by monitoring large and small acts of generosity. Young people mobilized their own libraries to send books; others donated the books of late loved one ones; while community members gave whatever they could. Within three weeks, the GoFundMe had raised £250,000.
“That’s an unfathomable amount of money for one library,” she said. When she returned from her honeymoon, a member of the local council called to say that Queen Camilla had donated books: The collection included the Diary of Anne Frank, “Love in the Time of Cholera” and “The Tiger Who Came To Tea,” a British children’s classic by a writer and illustrator who fled Nazi Germany as a girl.
Ms. McCormick, a member of another local library with a daughter named for a favorite literary character, said she hoped the outpouring would give people a truer image of her city, and of public sentiment in Britain.
“In the end, 11,500 people donated money to the fund-raiser and hundreds more people donated physical books,” Ms. McCormick said. “There wasn’t 11,500 people on Country Road causing trouble and burning the library.”
The library reopened in mid-December, four months after its destruction. Liverpool City Council paid for the rebuilding, at a cost of £200,000. A council spokesman said the money Ms. McCormick raised would be used for community programs.
In the weeks after the violence, the neighborhood was gripped by a sense of unease, residents said. People of color said they were afraid. A youth worker who helps run coaching sessions for young people said he had encountered some who participated in the riots, and found them struggling with shame and regret. It compounded the hopelessness many young people from Walton already felt.
Everyone felt abandoned, said Sarah Atherton, who grew up in the neighborhood and whose children use the library. She said parts of the area had long felt forgotten.
The police arrested nine people for the disorder on County Road, and one man was sentenced to 22 months in prison for taking part in the violence and throwing a glass bottle at police officers.
On a cold night in December, County Road was crowded once again, with dozens of residents carrying lanterns in a parade for the reopening. An arch of balloons over Spellow Library’s entrance brought color to a street that had lad lost many small businesses and amenities during a decade of austerity measures under the Conservative-led government of the 2010s.
A few days later, on the first Saturday since its reopening, the library was a buzzing hive. A woman came in and happily exclaimed, “You’re open!”
Iakob Drozdova, 11, was thrilled that his old library card could check out the new books. He signed up for a drawing class while his stepmother, Sofia Drozdova, waited on the plush new chairs, reading. For Ms. Drozdova, who said she fled Russia with her wife and their family over the Kremlin’s anti-gay laws, the library had become a haven. The August violence, she said, was an exception in an otherwise safe neighborhood.
“I don’t even have the words in my native language,” Ms. Drozdova, who was a librarian in Russia, said of the fire.
On her first visit back, Fungai Chirombe made a beeline for her favorite section: Self-help and Wellness. In the months since she moved from Zimbabwe to reunite with her mother, she has checked out over 50 books. The library is at the center of her new home, where most have welcomed her, even if someone hurled a racial slur at her mother just a week before, she said.
“I’m just happy to heal,” she said, cradling a stack of new books. “There’s so much material.”
Children gathered around a crafts table and filled cellophane cones with chocolate powder and marshmallows to make googly-eyed reindeers. In the children’s reading corner, a neighborhood troupe put on a pantomime of “Pinocchio,” while in another corner a teenager squinted at a computer screen, trying to figure out her math homework.
“It’s noisy,” said June Serridge, who was researching her family tree. “But it’s nice to be back.”
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