Over a thousand Gedling Borough residents have benefited from Nottinghamshire’s 70-year-old mobile library service in 2023.
The monthly service which has been a staple of literacy for many of Gedling Boroughs’s residents with limited access to reading materials since the 1950s has reportedly served 1,200 people during the first four months of this year.
The mobile library is currently run by Inspire Culture, a charitable community benefit society that aims to deliver cultural and learning services across Nottinghamshire.
According to Nicola Ellis, Library Manager for the Southwell Cluster, the service provides books-for-loan for both adults and children, while also carrying many titles of large print and audiobooks.
She said: “The mobile library has been operating in these areas since the 1950s and is extremely popular.”
The service primarily focuses on dispatching its fleet of mobile libraries to areas within Gedling with no access to traditional libraries.
These include delivering books to remote areas, sheltered housing complexes and schools with limited reading materials, in order to improve the community’s overall quality of life.
Nicola’s route, East South Mobile Route 6, currently covers Lambley (Woolacombe Drive, Chedington Ave, Negus Court, Grange Close, Daisy Day Nursery), Stoke Bardolph (Stoke Lane Corner), Colwick (Egling Croft), Carlton (Fairway Drive), and Netherfield (Brierley Green), among various other locations in the Boroughs.
Route 6 is active in the Boroughs on certain Wednesdays every month, and the overall service covers the South of Nottinghamshire, all the way up to the Leicestershire border, covering all corners of the county.
The service also reaches other areas of the Gedling Boroughs, which include Bestwood, Newstead, Papplewick, Woodborough, Linby, and Ravenshead
She said: “We cover mostly rural areas but go into areas where there isn’t easy access to a library.
“We are based in the Southwell Library, where all the books are sorted and admin is done, and we visit a few care homes, nurseries, pre-schools, as well as residential areas.”
The mobile library service is open to everyone and is free to join using an Inspire Library card, as are all Inspire libraries in Nottinghamshire.
To find out when the service will be available or which routes it takes click on Inspire Culture.
