We want you to help us. Have you got photos, ephemera, memorabilia, stories or anything else that can help weave our rich stories of how library service has grown and changed over the last 150 years in Christchurch.
Email us library150@ccc.govt.nz
Library Cards
I rearched and wrote a book on the 1932 Tramway Strike in Christchurch, on and off across nine years from 1978 onwards. This took me often into the New Zealand room in the old Cambridge Terrace Library. This was a marvellous old room, a two storey atrium with a balcony around the first floor level. It was lit (or mainly lit, I can’t remember) by skylights which had horizontal blinds that could be pulled across by pulleys from below. All the tables, chairs, shelves were woodwork, of the most solid kind, embossed with leather or vinyl inlays. In the late afternoon the the sun would slant down through the half blocked off skylights, sometimes creating golden beams with fine motes of dust floating in them. The whole place, with its quiet and hushed conversations had the air of some old gentlemens club – right down to the occasional researcher (and occasionally myself) who had nodded off, their head fallen across the dried old pages of newspapers from years gone by. They would be gently woken by staff.