Northfield: IELTS General Training Reading practice test

Tuesdays, 7.00–9.00 pm, ten weeks. Never studied Spanish before? This friendly course will have you ordering meals, asking for directions and chatting about your family by the end of term. The fee of £85 (£55 for students and anyone over 60) includes the course book, which you will be given at the first class. Places can be booked at reception or on our website.

Wednesdays, 6.30–8.30 pm, eight weeks. Whether you have never held a brush or have been painting for years, local artist Maria Okafor will help you find your own style, working from still life and photographs. Paints are provided, but please bring your own brushes and a pad of watercolour paper; a list of suitable products is available from reception. Wear old clothes, as paint can stain. £95.

Thursdays, 7.00–9.00 pm, six weeks. This course is for people who already know how to use their camera on automatic and now want to take control of light, focus and composition. You will need your own digital camera; unfortunately, mobile phones are not suitable. The fee of £110 includes a guided photo walk around Northfield Park on the final Saturday morning. Book online or at reception.

Mondays, 6.00–8.00 pm, five weeks. Learn to check your oil and tyre pressures, change a wheel and understand the warning lights on your dashboard. Sessions take place in the motor workshop at Northfield College, a five-minute walk away; on the first evening, please meet in our foyer and the tutor will walk you over. Overalls and gloves are provided. Because of the size of the workshop, the course is limited to eight people. £70.

Tuesdays, 6.30–9.00 pm, six weeks. Discover how to make healthy, tasty meals for a family of four for under £10. Each week you will prepare two dishes in our fully equipped kitchen, and you can take home whatever you cook, so bring a couple of containers with lids. All ingredients are included in the £120 fee. Please tell us about any food allergies when you book.

Mondays and Thursdays, 7.30–8.30 pm, all year round. These relaxed classes are suitable for all ages and fitness levels, and each one ends with ten minutes of guided relaxation. There is no need to book: just turn up and pay £6 at the door. Mats are available to borrow, though you are welcome to bring your own. If you have a back or joint problem, please have a word with the instructor before your first class.

Welcome to Hallam Distribution. Whether you are joining the warehouse, the transport office or customer services, this guide explains what will happen during your first five working days. Please read it before your first shift.

On your first day, please come to the main reception in Building 2, not the warehouse entrance, by 8.30 am. A member of the People Team will meet you there, take a photograph for your identity badge and check your right to work in the UK, so remember to bring your passport or, if you do not have one, your full birth certificate and a letter showing your National Insurance number.

Everyone who works on site, including office staff, must complete a half-day safety course before being allowed into the warehouse. It covers fire procedures, the safe use of ladders and manual handling, which means lifting and carrying heavy items without injuring yourself. At the end of the course you will be given a pair of safety boots and a high-visibility jacket, both of which must be worn at all times in the warehouse. If your boots are uncomfortable, ask your supervisor to order a different size rather than wearing your own shoes.

For your first month you will be paired with a buddy, an experienced colleague from your own team who has volunteered to help new starters settle in. Your buddy is not your manager and will not be checking your work, but they are the best person to ask about the everyday things nobody writes down, from how the canteen works to who to speak to about a problem with your rota.

You will be paid on the last Friday of each month, and your payslip will be available on the staff portal rather than on paper. Holiday requests should be made through the portal at least four weeks in advance; between November and January, our busiest period, holiday is only granted in exceptional circumstances.

At the end of your first week, you will have a short meeting with your line manager to talk about how things have gone and to agree your targets for the probation period, which lasts three months. This is also a good opportunity to raise any concerns about your duties, your hours or anything else.

It is ten o'clock on a Saturday morning, and Northfield Central Library is already busy. On the ground floor, a teenager watches a 3D printer build a replacement part for her bicycle, layer by layer. Upstairs, a retired engineer is showing a group of pensioners how to make video calls on their new tablets, and at the public computers a man is printing his CV for a job interview. Only a handful of the people in the building have come to borrow a book.

Scenes like this would have puzzled the Victorian reformers who founded the public library movement. When Parliament passed the Public Libraries Act in 1850, allowing larger towns to raise a small local rate to set up free public libraries, the aim was self-improvement, and some of the Act's supporters argued that a warm, quiet reading room would give working men somewhere to spend their evenings other than the pub. Northfield's first library, paid for largely by a local mill owner, opened in 1887 with 3,000 volumes. For well over a century, its business was books, and its measure of success was how many of them went out of the door.

By that measure, the recent story makes grim reading. Twenty years ago, Northfield's libraries lent around 420,000 books a year; last year the figure was just under 160,000. The reasons are familiar: cheap paperbacks, next-day delivery from online retailers and, above all, the smartphone, which competes for exactly the hours people once spent reading. Yet the number of visits has fallen far less steeply than the number of loans. 'People stopped coming in for books, but they never stopped coming in,' says Ruth Adeyemi, who has managed the central library for eleven years.

Some of the missing loans have not so much disappeared as moved online. Members can now borrow e-books and audiobooks through an app, and audiobooks, popular with commuters and with people whose eyesight is failing, are the fastest-growing part of the service. Digital lending is not the bargain it might appear, however. Publishers often charge libraries far more for an e-book than a reader would pay in a shop, and some licences expire after two years or a fixed number of loans, at which point the library must pay for the title again.

The most visible change, though, is on the ground floor. In 2019 the library turned its little-used reference section into a makerspace: a workshop equipped with 3D printers, a laser cutter and sewing machines. Not everyone was impressed, and one letter to the local newspaper dismissed the project as an expensive distraction, arguing that a library should stick to books. Adeyemi rejects the charge. In her view, the makerspace is the library's original mission applied to new materials: giving people access to things they could not afford to own themselves.

Increasingly, the library is also where people come for help that has nothing to do with reading. As banks, council services and the benefits system have moved online, people without a computer, or without the confidence to use one, have turned to library staff instead. Adeyemi estimates that her team now spends more time helping visitors complete online forms than handling loans. In winter the building doubles as a warm space for residents struggling with heating bills, and a nurse runs a free blood pressure clinic there once a month. 'We are one of the last indoor places where you can stay all day and nobody expects you to buy anything,' she says.

Not everyone welcomes the transformation. Long-standing members complain that the building has become noisy, and the silent reading area, which once filled most of the first floor, has shrunk to a single room at the top of the building. Graham Pryce, a local councillor, argues that libraries are quietly filling gaps left by cuts to other services. 'If the library is doing the work of the jobcentre and the health service, then those services should be contributing to the cost,' he says. Dr Hanna Lindqvist, who studies public services at a Scandinavian university, sees a wider danger in what she calls mission creep: an institution that tries to meet every need, she warns, risks being funded for none of them.

Behind the debate lies money. Library services are paid for by local councils, whose budgets have been under severe pressure for more than a decade, and libraries have often been among the first places to look for savings. Northfield once had five branch libraries as well as its central one. Two have closed, and a third, in the village of Kestlebury, is now run entirely by volunteers. Such community-managed libraries are often praised for keeping their doors open, but the evidence is mixed. A recent study of forty volunteer-run libraries found that most were open for fewer hours than before and struggled to recruit helpers under the age of sixty, raising doubts about how long they can last.

Meanwhile, libraries are learning to raise money of their own. Northfield Central now rents out its meeting rooms to local businesses in the evenings, runs a small café in what used to be the newspaper room, and has persuaded a building firm to pay for its summer reading challenge for children. Visitors to the makerspace pay for the materials they use, though not for the equipment or for staff time. 'Everything we add has to pay for itself, or be paid for by someone else, so that the core stays free,' Adeyemi says.

Perhaps the deepest problem is the way success is still measured. Council reports continue to judge libraries mainly by the number of books they lend, a figure that captures almost nothing of what happens on a Saturday morning in Northfield. Some library services have begun to record other things as well, such as attendance at events, hours of computer use and the number of people helped into work, and these tell a very different story. The question now is whether the people who fund libraries can accept that a building full of people who are not reading is not necessarily a building that has failed.