The library is the last free living room in town

Sit in a café for long enough and the staff's glances will tell you it is time to give up the table. Linger in a shopping centre without buying anything and a faint unease sets in. Park benches are of little use in rain, snow or blistering heat. So how many places are left in a city where you can sit for hours, buy nothing and answer to no one?

In most towns, the answer is a single word: the library.

More than books

I recently spent an afternoon in our local branch library and watched the people around me. Students revising for exams. A middle-aged man filling in job applications on a public computer. A grandmother reading picture books to her grandson. Retired readers slowly turning newspaper pages. Teenagers with no quiet corner at home to do their homework. Some of them were not there to read at all. They simply needed somewhere safe, warm and quiet.

The library is a society's quietest and most powerful way of saying: everyone belongs here.

Modern libraries are embracing this role more deliberately. Some run digital skills courses, some hold weekend workshops for children, some teach older residents how to use smartphones. A few even lend sewing machines, garden tools or musical instruments. The library is becoming less a warehouse of books and more a neighbourhood centre.

Yet these institutions are often the first to face budget cuts. Opening hours shrink, new acquisitions dwindle, and experienced librarians are not replaced when they retire. The notion that "everyone reads online now" rests on the mistaken idea that libraries are only about books.

In fact, the digital age has made libraries more important, not less. For millions of people without home internet, without a computer, or without the skills to tell reliable information from nonsense, the library remains the most trustworthy door. And a librarian's guidance carries a human touch no search engine can offer.

Local authorities need to see libraries not as a cost line but as social infrastructure. Opening hours that stretch into evenings and weekends, proper resources for children and young people, small branches spread across neighbourhoods: these are among the most productive investments a town can make in its own character.

In cities where everything has a price, the library may be the last place that does not ask you what you are buying when you walk through the door. Protecting it means protecting public life itself.