SOMETIMES a straightforward protest is just what’s needed: meet at point A and march to point B while chanting rudies about the government. But then, sometimes, the situation requires something a little less traditional…

The Conservative/Liberal Democrat government which came to power in Britain in 2010 was, from the start, absolutely obsessed with closing public libraries. It was as if they’d time-travelled back 150 years to collect not only their ancestors’ policies but their prejudices too.

Economically, library closures were a result of forever-austerity (proud partner of the forever-wars), but culturally they sat with the 19th-century belief that allowing ordinary folk to read books could only end in tears.

Stony Stratford is a market town in Buckinghamshire which forms part of the city of Milton Keynes. In the winter of 2010-11 rumours began spreading that the city council was planning to close Stony’s branch library as part of a massive programme of spending cuts. The library was well-used and much-valued, a real community centre, and local people were furious at the thought of losing it.

The town council (the lowest tier of local government) and a pre-existing Friends of Stony Stratford Library (FOSSL) group became the core of a popular campaign to save the library. They did all the usual things — letter-writing campaigns, petitions, posters in shop windows, and a picket of a city council meeting one snowy night before Christmas — but what they really needed was a protest that would at once demonstrate the depth of local feelings and capture the attention of people further afield.

The original idea for what became the Wot No Books campaign came from a Stony resident who happened to be a retired librarian. “A semi-serious (or half-joking) off-hand remark made at, it would appear, just the right time,” was how he described it later. His inspiration for the scheme which went on to make news all around the world was an unusual one. Decades earlier, at university, he’d enjoyed a rag week prank known as drink-a-pub-dry, in which students would secretly select a boozer, descend on it in numbers, and as the name suggests attempt to leave it devoid of beer. Doesn’t sound all that funny for the pub’s regulars, but that’s students for you.

Could something along those lines work at a public library? FOSSL took to the concept immediately. Supposing they were able, by encouraging supporters to all borrow books at the same time, to leave a significant gap on the shelves? That would surely be worth a photo-op in the local paper? In the event, it all went a bit further than that.

A Milton Keynes Council library ticket entitled you to borrow up to 15 items at once. Between the 12th and 15th January 2011 hundreds of residents did exactly that. There were estimated to be around 16,000 books in the library, and they stripped it bare. There wasn’t a single book, DVD or other borrowable object left in the entire place — just yard after yard of empty shelves and “an eerie kind of silence.”

Borrowings hit about 380 per hour, the (presumably exhausted) staff calculated. “It’s just gone absolutely mad,” said FOSSL. “It’s a very simple but clever idea and it’s given something that people can act on and make their voice heard.” Of course, anyone reading this who’s ever worked in a library or supermarket will immediately be thinking of the horrible job, when the protest was over, of shelving 16,000 books all at once.

“The library with no books” was an irresistible image backed by a great story, and it was picked up by regional, national and international press, TV and radio as well as by social media. The ruling LibDem/Conservative group on Milton Keynes Council was at first determined to press ahead with the cuts, but before long popular pressure became too great to resist. At the end of February the library closures were delayed for a year, and a year eventually became forever. Stony Stratford council took over ownership of the library building, while the city continued to provide the library service.

That library is not only still there today, but better than ever. On March 22 2022, Stony Stratford’s world-famous little library reopened to its eager public after being closed for a while during a major programme of refurbishment, improvement and remodelling. There’s no doubt that the key to this win by the people of Stony was mass participation. It’s a victory that deserves to be celebrated for generations to come — and perhaps, given the inspiration behind Wot No Books, proof of the old literary maxim, “If there is hope it lies in the pubs.”

You can sign up for Mat Coward’s Rebel Britannia Substack at www.rebelbrit.substack.com for more strange strikes, peculiar protests, bizarre boycotts, unusual uprisings and different demos.