The Forum is a new civic space with rather a nice library attached, a horseshoe-shaped brick building with a huge glazed frontage looking out across the city from its vantage point in the highest part of town. Moreover it is a covered space, which makes a lot of sense in view of the icy winds that tend to gust across Norfolk. Small wonder that people are reported to be queuing to get into the Pizza Express there. You don’t normally associate Pizza Express with libraries. Nor do you normally find television studios there, but you will: the BBC is building its regional studios as part of the complex, above the almost-mandatory “visitor experience” - which turns out to be a rather good exhibition of all things East Anglian.

Hopkins’ Forum is by no means perfect. I don’t like the way that it turns its back on the rest of the city, presenting an impermeable brick façade. I feel it should have been enlivened with shops and restaurants around the outside to correct this. And given its lofty position, it is almost incredible that its top floor and roof is given over to dumb mechanical and electrical equipment. What marvellous roof gardens, observation galleries, restaurants you could have had up there, if only you’d put all that robotic stuff in the basement instead! But despite such lost opportunities, the Forum does pretty well simply by providing a covered public space - for performances or just hanging out - which feels part town square, part market hall. And at the back of which, of course, is the new library.

Such buildings tell you that something very welcome is happening: that there is a revival of a neglected form of civic pride, and that it is being focused now on libraries as much as art galleries - which have tended to hog the limelight in recent years. Will Alsop’s enormously popular Peckham Library - which though radical in appearance, and teeming with youngsters, is actually a thoroughly old-fashioned piece of public sector patronage - showed that such places could wear their hearts on their sleeves once more. But finance remains a problem unless novel solutions are found. According to Rab Bennetts, architect of the new central library for Brighton and Hove, the municipality would normally have been able to afford a library costing no more than £4m. But by cross-subsidising the library in a private finance scheme including a hotel, apartments, offices, shops and restaurants, Brighton will get a library worth around £8m or £9m as part of a £30m regeneration scheme. “People are going to have to get a lot more clever if they want to get better public buildings,” Bennetts observes.

In an ideal world, perhaps such private subsidy would not be necessary. But Britain has never really been able to support its public library system unaided. Without the generosity of philanthropists such as steel magnate Andrew Carnegie from the turn of the 20th century - in his day the richest man in the world - many of Britain’s 3,500 public libraries would never have been built. And today, small branch libraries - many originally funded by Carnegie - routinely hang by a thread as local councils see them as an easy way to save money. The Government sternly discourages this, but the money problem remains.

To survive, libraries have to be much more, to more people, than they used to be. They have to be part of a bigger idea. When it happens on a civic scale, as in Norwich and Peckham, people respond. To judge by the international examples, people are responding all over the world. We have enough art galleries and museums now. It’s time for books to take over the cultural regeneration game.