100 years of a Carnegie Library

31 March 2026 marked 100 years since the official opening of Gateshead Central Library. Like many, the library was funded by the Carnegie Trust. The building gave the opportunity for a much improved library for local residents, with a lot more space than previous premises. The design gave residents the ability to browse the shelves for the first time, as well as a reading room for 40 magazines. 

We recognised the centenary as significant, not just as an historic milestone but as an opportunity to promote what libraries offer today and to attract new users. We wanted to use the centenary as a celebration of the library service as a whole, and to plan a programme of events in all of our libraries. With that in mind, we bid for funding and secured two grants for the two separate areas of work:

• £20,000 from the North East Combined Authority’s Culture fund, to support a festival of events over a six month period from October 2025 to March 2026.
• £72,460 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to link our local history collections to the last 100 years of Gateshead’s history and raise awareness of Gateshead Archive, which is home to our unique collection located within the Central Library. This work takes place throughout 2026.

A multifaceted cultural programme

Our culture programme has had several different strands.

A programme of author events

This has included events with a number of successful crime writers – Abir Mukherjee, LJ Ross, Trevor Wood and Peter James. These have all been well attended and have helped us to develop our audiences, with many travelling from outside Gateshead to attend. We also included a wider cultural offer for adults, including a Murder Mystery event and a History Wardrobe costume talk, linking classic novels of the last 100 years with the fashions of the time. A centenary book list will encourage readers to try something new and mark some of the most influential titles of the past century. Agreed by our library team, we will ask residents to vote for the final book and mark the best book of 2026 as a way to round off our centenary activities.

A targeted membership drive 

For the first time we have a data sharing agreement with schools, with the aim of signing up full classes of Reception year group when they visit the library. We have created a special limited edition library card as an added incentive, which we give to children when they visit with school to create excitement about visiting again with families. We aim to join 1,000 new members through this strand of work, which also supports our National Year of Reading activity.

A programme of creative digital activities 

This is designed to encourage residents to get involved in our digital programme. We included different sessions in all of our libraries to create a coaster, bookmark, tote bag or mug using photos from our archive collections, plus the opportunity to create art deco notebooks. With our funding we could offer these sessions for free.

 A programme for children and young people

This included employing a storyteller in residence to run sessions in libraries and in 12 local schools, plus a comic book masterclass with artist Kev F Sutherland. In his session with schools our storyteller Chris Adriaanse retold the story ‘The Lamp from Fairyland’ which was written in 1926. He involved the children in some of the decisions made and used these as a discussion point. The children then spent time creating their own copy of Lamp from Fairyland. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

Finally, we have used some funding to work with a local design company, Creative Heritage Studios CiC, to create a range of merchandise for the library which will be sold in our library shop. This helps to build pride in the library and the offer of libraries, with a ‘local library lover’ range.

Improving awareness of local history collections

The second strand of our centenary programmes links our local history collections to the centenary. The aim of this was to improve awareness of our collections and also secure new content for collections where there are known gaps. Our programme has included:

Creation of a new exhibition space

This showcases our unique materials including photographs, scrapbooks, maps and objects. The exhibition space is adjacent to our shop and will be eye catching to visitors and therefore much more prominent to users of the wider building. Material in the immediate future will include items linked to the construction of the Tyne Bridge, opening of the Metrocentre, the Garden Festival, building of Angel of the North. This investment leaves a legacy for the building of improved space for our Archive collections.

A programme of heritage events 

These include talks from authors and local historians, plus  workshops to help residents to make use of our collections in their own research.

Targeted work with specific communities 

Freelance workers have held heritage sessions with local South Asian communities to gather new material. The library’s resident LGBTQ+ heritage group have identified a range of historic material from existing archive collections and a freelance researcher has gathered new material from other local repositories. Gateshead has a significant Orthodox Jewish population, and we will work with Jewish schools local to the library to run local history sessions with them, as well as working with community elders to improve the content within our collections. Further work with the Jewish community will see pupils visit the Archive to view collections in person.

 

Bringing in new audiences with a Celebration Day  

The biggest event in our centenary programme was a Celebration Day on Saturday 7 March. This offered activities for all ages from 10am to 4pm. Most activities were drop in and were free. Just over 1,700 people attended in total. Our ‘Meet the Author’ event with Peter James and actor Richie Campbell, delivered in partnership with the Queen’s Reading Room, was the biggest feature of this day but all activities were busy. Over 200 people took part in drop in MakerPlace activities and around 200 people took part in drop in creative activities led by local artists.

Our Celebration Day helped to bring in new audiences and to promote the current offer of the library service, with publicity on the Tyne pages of the BBC website and on local radio. We have also had a successful social media campaign of ‘centenary champions’ – library users who showcase different areas of work and the impact this has had on them.

On 31 March we ran the final events in our culture programme, with two local schools visiting, an artist workshop and a heritage tour. Our storyteller in residence took his final session, in which he sealed a time capsule which we created.