Bootle and Crosby Libraries have been significantly different to traditional libraries for nearly a decade thanks to a long-term intervention by Rule of Threes, celebrating and utilising what a library can be.
The project, At The Library, is managed by Maria Brewster, with support from a host of local artists.
Since its foundations it has formed part of biennials, hosted major and challenging exhibitions, stitch clubs, and artist socials, including the new Artists Office events, which invite artists in to the library to have questions answered on everything from space access to project funding.
And now they’ve launched the Kitchen Library, ensuring that Sefton Residents have access to both essential and luxury kitchen items, all available from Bootle Library.
The project has emerged naturally out of a need identified during last year’s Library Kitchen workshop programme, where professional chefs and guest cooks lead community workshops, teaching people to cook sustainably and creatively and build on basic skills they already have.
The workshops were popular, but for many, the opportunity to go home and put what they learned into practice wasn’t possible, because they didn’t have access to blenders, pie tins or bannetons.
As of now, there are 35 pieces of kitchen kit available to lend from Bootle Library as easily as borrowing a book.
Bootle Library’s community kitchen houses the spices, ferments, jams, cordials, recipes and equipment used for meals hosted in the library.
This year, they are also developing a small lending library of donated kitchen equipment, which will be available to borrow: a sustainable way to use equipment needed for a one-off cooking project or seasonal celebration, or which you might not otherwise have access to.
Alongside community members, guest cooks, artists and writers, the team are also thinking about what else a Kitchen Library might mean.
Can an ingredient tell a story? Are recipes a type of archive? What does sustainable mean? What does local mean? Can a meal, once eaten, ever be preserved? Is cooking a form of translation? When we cook, what do we borrow from?
The Kitchen Library also hosts regular Chopping Club events, as well as monthly Fermentation Bonanza workshops by Abundance and Plenty, the food and fermentation project of former At The Library volunteer Basia Lesniak.
Kitchen Library is a collaboration between artists Niamh Riordan and Gregory Herbert, exploring reciprocity and sustainability in systems of food production, and the ways in which food shapes our landscapes and communities.
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Words from multiple sources, recycled text. Maria Brewster, Gregory Herbert, Patrick Kirk-Smith
