Third places are critical to our social infrastructure. They create a built environment that is a safe, stable and socially cohesive place to live. Coined by sociologists, this term refers to the places where people spend time between home (first place) and work (second place). They are the neutral places where we meet, socialise and build relationships with our communities. Third places can be public buildings, such as libraries or community centres, private sector enterprises like pubs, restaurants or health clubs, or voluntary groups such as youth clubs or soup kitchens.
Crosby Village was once thriving ‘third’ place however the villages’ economic resilience was undermined by a generation of national chain stores with little interest in localism and forcing out traditional local family business.
However, as the means of distribution moves online, where our basic needs are now mainly managed, chain-store retailing is collapsing. Our once bustling high streets are rapidly descending into ghost towns of run-down empty properties.
This must be framed as an opportunity to take back control of our town centres and create a more personalised and socially permeable experience, that adopts the model of a traditional, local, family run village catering for our basic and emotional needs.
Health, wellbeing and pro-social behaviour can play a key role in a resilient contemporary narrative for town centres. But we need to change the way we think about the way we provide community services.
Sefton Council identified a site known as The Green within Crosby town centre as a key priority for regeneration in their 2017 Local Plan. In Winter 2023, the proposed site remained an unassuming council-owned surface car park (more grey tarmac than green). The Council’s proposal to redevelop it into a new co-located library and health centre ticked all the policy boxes, namely improving pedestrian connections and footfall, providing an active ground floor use facing key routes, and increasing the vitality and viability of the centre all within high-quality public realm.
Developed to Stage 3, the project was paused in Summer 2024 amid political uncertainty following local and national elections. The scheme proposed a new build co-location of public library and health centre in a 3-storey curved landmark building addressing a key Crosby gateway site in Sefton, north of Liverpool.
The Community values of a Library
The library service holds a unique place in our society. Libraries are welcoming, comfortable and informal places that set the scene for authentic human connection and social empowerment.
For nearly 120 years, Crosby’s libraries have been preserving and documenting the community’s local culture and heritage; enabling its individuals to improve their emotional and physical wellbeing. A hallmark of a healthy community is diversity and difference. It’s what gives us our unique sense of identity. No institution understands this better than a library. Through a commitment to openness and inclusivity, everyone is welcome. They encourage tolerance and interaction between likeminded people from different backgrounds and generations. They enable positive social engagement, improving wellbeing through individual and group activities and local support networks.
Libraries achieve this in two simple ways. Firstly, they actively reach out into the community to understand people’s needs and respond by creating a culture that offers free informal advice based around a wide variety of cultural resources. Secondly, they do their work within a space that is emotionally informal, welcoming, comfortable and free of any agenda. People can simply drop-by, be themselves and enjoy the comfort of company or solitude, activity or self-reflection whenever they like.
Libraries have succeeded by being flexible and adaptable to the community’s needs. Their vision of social empowerment has comfortably outlived the UK’s industrial and post-industrial eras. Yet in the digital age, they are facing something of an image problem.
A lack of community understanding of the benefits they offer, the growth of internet services, limited library funding and opening hours, have led some to unfairly assume that they are outdated and unnecessary – despite evidence that there is a continuing high demand for their services. The way society interacts with itself is continuously evolving, particularly in the digital environment; however, this does not excuse the need for real social space.
This is demonstrated in the rise in the influence on our high streets of ‘Third Places’ such as coffee shops, bars, restaurants and in our homes and phones the virtual ‘Third Places’ of social media. Yet third places can be agenda-driven, they can be expensive, class or culture orientated, or wholly inappropriate for someone’s needs. All most people are looking for, is a neutral space in which they can engage in shared behaviour that feels like a home away from home. Rising demand for existing activity space like this is causing pressure on library resources and highlights the need for more.
The challenges that libraries face in addressing this challenge today is that the variety of services that are on offer is largely reliant on the voluntary sector, which struggles to provide a consistent level of resource, or a collective narrative that communicates their vision and purpose. Most people only want to volunteer their services during the day, implying that paid services may only be available during the evenings and weekends. The consequence of this behaviour is that libraries operating hours are limited to the daytime, effectively preventing people in full-time employment from appreciating the real social value of the service.
The Community Values of Primary Care
For more than three generations, Primary Care has stood on the frontline of Crosby’s community healthcare programme. It is an institution that has stood the test of time and is a great source of local pride. While healthcare has evolved significantly since 1948, the fundamental principles of the NHS remain reassuringly consistent, and the local GP is widely considered to be a touchstone of community life.
Primary Care operates its activities under a single clear mission and vision, providing frontline services promoting health and wellbeing in the community; focused on improving, preventing, diagnosing and treating physical and mental health problems. It’s a message that is clear unambiguous and explicit in its aims. It is a comprehensive, equitable and free service, available to all and critically it pays attention to sections of society where health and life expectancy are not keeping pace with the rest of the population.
From the people’s perspective, the idea of the traditional family doctor looking after his patients from the cradle to the grave, getting to intimately know the names and details every single person in their community still fires powerful emotional connections between home and community.
Yet while General Practitioners are considered a hard-working and trusted group of professionals, they face the intense pressure and emotional challenges of operating within an overstretched, underfunded and physically fragmented healthcare system.
The foundations on which the health and care system was built have become siloed and divided: between health and social care; between physical and mental health, between children’s and adults’ services; and between community-based care and hospital-based services. Perhaps more fundamentally, there has been a cultural divide between the professional and the person.
Since the introduction of the NHS, society has gradually abdicated responsibility for the care of its own to the state. As we shift toward more individualistic and self-interested behaviour, loneliness and social isolation are becoming as dangerous to health as smoking and obesity.
Overstretched GPs rarely get a chance to step outside their consulting rooms and engage in the beneficial preventative community health care that could implement a positive shift towards self-reliance and a reduction in people requiring expensive clinical treatment.
There is a feeling that the traditional siloed structures under which Primary Care units operate have allowed opportunities for innovation to stagnate. Catching people before they fall into the healthcare system through education and conversation will be a critical step forward in innovation.
The NHS England Long Term Plan identifies that the case for a more joined-up approach and challenges Primary Care and the voluntary sector to join forces. Local practices will be obliged by their constitution to work in strategic partnership with other organisations and communities, including voluntary sector initiatives to create Primary Care Networks. Yet there is evidence that their naturally anti-social, underfunded, process-driven approach to service delivery is leaving Primary Care units ill-prepared for this challenge.
The Opportunity
Sefton Council’s mission to improve the prospects of Crosby Village, its Library and Primary Care Services through a combined and integrated approach is explored through three ethical questions designed to make the project’s opportunities explicit.
Why create closer connections between the public library and primary care services?
There is a clear opportunity to modernise the Primary Care healthcare delivery model and strengthen the Library Service’s voluntary sector offer at the same time. The 2019 NHS Long Term Plan sets out a mission to transform the healthcare model by creating local Primary Care Networks aimed at establishing a fully integrated community-based health service. They will comprise a range of services such as GPs, pharmacists, district nurses, community workers and allied health professionals working alongside the voluntary sector. The spaces that libraries provide for social interaction and connectivity are ideal for facilitating the
integration of these new networks. Co-locating the Library Services alongside Primary Care Services will pro-actively promote and manifest the positive impact that libraries are already delivering in our communities.
How will it improve the quality of public services essential to Crosby’s social infrastructure?
Combining the two organisations within the same building, allows us to align values of kindness in libraries alongside those of dignity and respect in healthcare. Libraries are the beating heart of our community. They are pro-social, non-hierarchical, agenda-less, free and universally accepting of everyone. Librarians are experts in relational kindness; they understand the vulnerabilities and complexities of human relationships and know how to make people feel valued. The informality, comfort and freedom libraries provide has a positive effect on us; they make people want to interact with each other more. For some, it is a conversation and the joy of being heard and understood by likeminded people in a noisy book club or children’s library; while others seek out spaces for quiet solitude and self-reflection.
Libraries are often the first point of contact for people with undiagnosed or untreated mental health issues. The library will provide the ideal conditions to develop an earlier understanding of health issues and implement management and prevention strategies, for a range of people from those with moderate health issues to those languishing on the edge of clinical diagnosis.
Alongside Primary Care Networks, they can jointly implement flexible and innovative collaborative care models for the treatment of mental health, preventative care and self-reliance, within a humane, socially inclusive and stigma-free environment.
Primary Care has an opportunity to leverage library services ethics and practices to enable Primary Care Networks to share information and experience. A partnership such as this has the potential to create a balance between procedure and flexibility, allowing for the provision of a greater range of services that pro-actively and pro-socially respond to the community’s needs.
Simply put, Library and Primary Care services working closely together, enhance each other’s strengths and offset their weaknesses in incalculable ways. They are only limited by the imagination of the people and the networks that use them. By aligning both together within the same building, we make explicit the opportunities that they bring to Crosby’s social infrastructure.
What benefits will it bring to Crosby village and its community?
Crosby Village is struggling because it’s original purpose of providing jobs, opportunity and social connection was displaced by the influence of the national retail chains. These chains dedicated themselves to satisfying our basic needs, only engaging at a superficial level with our emotional ones. Now that their influence is on the decline and the high street retail era is coming to pass there is an opportunity for the community to take back control of their village and make it their own.
Like many towns, the decline of the high street has become a conversation about the struggle to regain our communities’ sense of identity. Health and wellbeing and pro-social behaviour can play a key role in a contemporary narrative of a new renaissance.
This project exists to ensure that vital social networks can take root and establish themselves around existing community centres. By aligning with the village’s other private sector ‘Third Places’, we have an opportunity to ensure that the village supports a broad, diverse offer capable of dealing with economic change. The village will do this by attracting and connecting a range of innovative offers that meet the communities basic and emotional needs with a wide and varied audience.
There is an opportunity to recreate a strong sense of place in Crosby Village through the provision of agenda-free, neutral third spaces where people can come together and take notice of one another. A place that is free, open and accommodating, where a conversation is the main activity. A wholesome place for friendly regular engagement in a home away from home and most importantly a place where people can feel connected, valued and special.
Reflection
In the 21st Century, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the benefits of a one-size-fits-all homogenous society may be meeting our basic needs exceptionally well. However, there is evidence that diversity and difference is a healthy part of society, and consequently, peoples’ behaviour is becoming more individualist and self-interested than in previous generations.
Social services like Libraries and Primary Care recognise that the current system isn’t meeting peoples’ increasingly complex needs and expectations. The same applies to the social centres of our communities, which have over the last generation been undermined by a one-size-fits-all retail offer. An opportunity exists to provide the support and conditions for Crosby’s residents to take ownership of their village and make it work for their basic and emotional needs.
This approach is not without its challenges. Traditional values associated with the delivery of primary care services are still very much entrenched in its culture. There will be a need to develop an understanding and trust in the library’s ability to manage the complex interplay between, the community’s need for informality and for someone to lead, organise and coordinate the delivery of collaborative care models within their spaces.
For Primary Care, the last few years have taken place within the context of a vastly changing policy discourse. In Sefton, healthcare is held back by the variability of the estate, combined with an increasing demand for services and falling levels of trust in traditional institutions to be able to deliver.
A library’s social value is underrepresented in some people’s perception of the modern digitised world. Social media is making our outlook on life more complicated and blurred as our attitudes towards traditional values are influenced at the expense of opportunities to build authentic relationships based on empathy and trust through face-to-face contact.
The voluntary sector act and behave quite differently to the public sector in terms of their relationship with their limited resources. They prioritise a community’s basic and emotional needs ahead of public policy. They are not often given to performance or risk management processes, preferring to trust and act on their judgement. Nevertheless, a joined-up approach to delivering voluntary services under a single vision will be a big step towards a sustainable relationship with Crosby’s social infrastructure needs. However, this will require a shift in everyone’s traditional appetite for risk upstream where public and voluntary services interface.
Public libraries are in a strong position. They continue to be valued and used by about half the population as a community service. However, the frequency of use is declining, and people are less likely to see the service as of value to themselves personally. Library services and their advocates need to be future-focused and outward-looking. Their advocates need the foresight to take a flexible view of the future and determine how public libraries can make a social difference, ensuring that the public and policymakers see them as part of the solution.
Crosby Village Library is designed to create the physical conditions for social capital to naturally develop, flourish and inspire the community’s personal and collective wellbeing. The building will create an environment that allows relationships to blossom and new social groups to emerge. People will be encouraged to cross paths and linger, gather informally, strike conversations and get to know one another within relaxed, informal, comfortable, agenda-less spaces.
Through careful consideration of space and place-making, the project will become a gateway toward a new ethos for the village, setting the scene for inspiring a community identity that is stronger, safer, happier and healthier than today. Where local a commerce focused on pro-social activities can be encouraged to take root and thrive again within the traditional heart of Crosby.
