East Street Library: council confirms reduced opening hours

The council is reducing the opening hours at Brandon, East Street, Grove Vale and Nunhead libraries. Opening hours at the borough's eight other libraries – including John Harvard Library in Borough High Street – are unaffected.

The changes were approved by Southwark's cabinet last autumn after a five-month public consultation on the future of the library service.

"Following an extensive public consultation, we've had to scale back the opening hours at four of our smaller libraries but this will help us meet the £400,000 worth of savings we need to make from our library's budget following extensive cuts in central government funding," explains Cllr Veronica Ward, Southwark's cabinet member for leisure and culture.

"Residents should be assured, however, that we are absolutely committed to developing our library services, as can be seen with the new state of the art library in Canada Water and a new library in Camberwell coming soon."

East Street Library is a small branch library situated at the corner of Old Kent Road and East Street. It has a special collection of Spanish books for the borough's Latin American community.

• Waterloo Library in Lower Marsh could see its budget cut by up to a third under plans currently being considered by Lambeth Council as part of its 'cooperative libraries consultation'.