It's a small world coincidence! I was one of the team that established Pimlico Library, when I worked for Westminster City Library Service from 1972-1976. It was a thrill buying the books and processing them for the shelves. They were stored all over the place, wherever other branches had space, while the building was being erected.
Most of the accessioning took place in the basement of Church Street Library, which was near to the renowned street market in Marylebone. This caused an unusual and rather creepy problem, in that there were a lot of cockroaches in the area, attracted there by discarded waste food. Hordes of them invaded the boxes of books, apparently hooked on fresh paper and binding glue. This created a terrible stink, many of the books were ruined by staining and had to be thrown away. Sitting there in the quiet of an evening, giving books Dewey classification numbers, I could hear hundreds of cockroaches rustling through the pages. The memory of this eerie susurration has never left me.
We did lots of publicity for the new library, which in those pre-Internet days meant delivering hundreds of flyers through doors and doing radio and newspaper interviews. Pimlico was quite run-down in the 70's, with some vacant lots still showing bomb damage from the war 30 years before. It was just beginning a process of gentrification, and our library was a much-needed facility. Moving thousands of books into the building was satisfying, and rather did my back in! To see the place looking pristine, not a book out of place, all fresh and unused was a librarian's wet dream....
Opening day was a riot. We were invaded. I've never seen so many people in a library. By the end of the day, the only books left on the shelves were five foreign language novels. Everything else had been borrowed, and we had to scurry around other branches to get replacement stock for our second day. It took about a week for things to calm down.
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