Croydon Central Library
library in Croydon UK
Croydon Central Library is Croydon's main public library, located inside the Croydon Clocktower in Croydon, south London. It is owned by the London Borough of Croydon on behalf of Croydon Council. The library is located on four floors inside the building. There are also children's rhymetime sessions.
Croydon's first central library was at 100-106 North End. The library moved to the Croydon Clocktower buildings when they first opened in May 1896, the library was located in a central wooden panelled room (later used as a local studies library and now used as the David Lean Cinema), it was then notable opening with a large collection of over 100,000 volumes and for being one of the first public libraries at the time with open access shelves.
An extension was built to the Clocktower municipal buildings in the early 1990s with a new four floor library space opening in November 1993.
One notable chief librarian W. C. Berwick Sayers was instrumental in advancements in library classification and children's librarianship.
It was the third-most-used public library in the UK in 2010.
Croydon Libraries is part of The Library Consortium (TLC) shared catalogue.
“Croydon Central Library” enters the record as library in Croydon UK. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Croydon, Central and Library can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5189648. VIAF identifies the subject as 143554446. Authority coordinates are 51.372, -0.100. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1896, 1993 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Croydon Central Library” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.