Peckham Library

South London's Peckham Library won the 2000 RIBA Stirling Prize, which honours the "building which has been the most significant for the evolution of architecture in the previous year." Bob was working very near the library today and since neither of us had seen it before (and I always like an excuse to sign up for another library card), we walked up and had a look. The building announces its function on both of its larger sides,

and the interior is comfortable, bright, and slightly sci-fi, with three wooden pods (spaceships?) providing sunlit spaces for a meeting room, children's library, and Afro-Caribbean library.

The librarian who gave us our Southwark library cards was very friendly, and it turned out that she has exactly the same birthday as me (but was born a few hours after me, considering the time difference, and gleefully rubbed in the fact that I was thus older than her) and used to live in our neighbourhood. "I liked it up in Stokey, but I love it here. You've got to move down to south London," she said with a prideful smirk, "because that's where all the real Londoners are--it's all tourists in north London." She conceded that Stoke Newington Church Street was definitely something special, but enjoyed playing up the north London/ south London rivalry. When we left the library, we took the stairs instead of the lift, which gave us another look at the different panes of coloured glass at the back of the library, this time from the inside. The views north toward the City were given a nice new twist through these shifting tints: