And now here we are in 2001. Last year a new public library in Peckham won the Stirling Prize for architecture. Last month Norfolk’s mighty new county library opened in The Forum, a return-to-form building by Sir Michael Hopkins. Hackney is building a new central library and museum. Brighton, Bournemouth, and Swindon are making plans. Birmingham has just launched an architectural competition for what could be the first big state-of-the-art public library of the 21st century - replacing its vast, crumbling 1970s version. It is likely to cost at least £50m and maybe as much as £75m.

Sounds like a lot? It isn’t. That’s just Britain, but the library revival is happening everywhere. Public libraries routinely costing between £90m and £120m are being planned and built in Amsterdam, Marseilles, Milan, Turin. Top architects are invariably involved. In America, the technology-rich West Coast states are building them like crazy - chief among them being Seattle, where the world’s most fashionable architect, Rem Koolhaas, is building a $200m behemoth. Nobody over there thinks that computers will make such places redundant. Local - and global - employer Microsoft is heavily involved.