Hopes raised for Old Stafford Library as it is removed from sale
An historic building at the heart of a campaign to bring it back into use has been taken off the market by its owner – raising hopes of a rescue.
Old Stafford Library – which is on the Victorian Society’s Top Ten Endangered Buildings list – has now been removed from sale, it has emerged.
It had been on the market with a price tag of £750,000.
The move comes after a ‘reasonable bid’ from the Stafford Old Library Trust was rejected.
The hope is that the Carnegie Library at The Green will re-emerge for sale at a much lower price so the trust can raise the asking price and keep it as a community space.
Last year the Victorian Society urged Stafford Borough Council to buy the Grade II listed building, at risk of falling into disrepair, and start improvements immediately.
Partly funded by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie and opened in 1903, the building, off Lichfield Road, served as Stafford’s library until it closed in 1998.
It was sold to a private investment fund and an investor by Staffordshire County Council in 2012.
It was put up for sale with Stafford-based estate agent Millar Sandy – but the trust, which wants to preserve the building and use it as a community hub, said other firms had valued it at about £250,000, a third of its asking price.
Placing it on last year’s endangered buildings list, the Victorian Society said the building ‘should have no problem finding a tenant yet it has been little used for nearly 20 years since the library closed’.
Concerns about the library’s future have also been voiced by the newly formed Friends of Stafford Group which met with the town’s MP Jeremy Lefroy last month(APR).
It formerly housed Clement Lindley Wragge’s collection of ethnographic, zoological and geological material and was also used by Staffordshire County Council as a base for its arts and music education service.
