Library closures are a betrayal, says Mark Rylance

Mark Rylance is about to open a show in New York and is nominated for an Oscar, but that hasn’t stopped the actor speaking out against library closures near his home in London.

The Wolf Hall star said it was a “betrayal” for Lambeth council to stop funding five libraries and transfer three of them to a gym operator to turn into “healthy living centres”.

In order to save to save £4 million the Labour council wants to shut Waterloo Library, turn Upper Norwood Library into a “community hub” and hand Tate South in Oval, Minet in Camberwell and Carnegie in Herne Hill to Greenwich Leisure. At least a quarter of the borough’s library staff will lose their jobs.

Rylance, 56, said he accepted that libraries needed to evolve, but called for them to be protected as “part of the fabric of our communities”.

He said the closures undermined the principle of education for all cherished by the likes of Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie, whose philanthropic legacy included 2,509 libraries worldwide such as the one in Herne Hill, which opened in 1906.

Rylance said: “To sell them off to private interests is a betrayal of the wishes of someone like Mr Carnegie who educated himself out of extreme poverty as an immigrant in America. How did he do that? At a library.” He backs proposals by Green Party councillor Scott Ainslie to form a staff- and community-run organisation to run the libraries.

Last night Rylance won the best supporting actor Bafta for his role in Bridge Of Spies, and is nominated for the same part at the Oscars. He is in previews for Nice Fish, which opens in Brooklyn on Sunday.

Jane Edbrooke, Lambeth’s cabinet member for neighbourhoods, said the council had been “imaginative in our proposals that keep the majority of our libraries open”.