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Europe|The Rebirth of the Library That Burned in Britain’s Anti-Immigrant Riots
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/27/world/europe/library-riots-burned-uk-liverpool-spellow.html
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After the Spellow Library in Liverpool was targeted during England’s unrest last summer, more than 10,000 people donated to its restoration.
Jan. 27, 2025Updated 6:11 a.m. ET
When the rioters came for Spellow Library, they used the nonfiction section as kindling.
Deborah Moore, then the library’s manager, arrived the next morning to find that the shelves and couches purchased as part of a recent refurbishment had been stacked up to build a pyre. The books that had survived the riot, part of a wave of anti-immigrant, racist disorder that erupted across Britain in August last year, were yellowed by smoke, their pages curled from the heat.
Anger came first, she said, then sadness, then a determination to replace the hundreds of books that had burned, even as the stench of their destruction filled her nostrils. In an interview last month, she said the feeling was, “Watch us come back from this, because we won’t be beaten.”
The library stands in Walton, a deprived neighborhood of the northwestern English city of Liverpool. A year and a half before the fire, it had been renovated, transforming it into a community hub that offered training workshops for the unemployed, parent and toddler groups and a contact center for the local council. Then, in August, it became one of the most high-profile casualties in Britain’s largest outbreak of public disorder for more than a decade.
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In the hours after a knife-wielding attacker killed three young girls in Southport, a coastal town about 20 miles from Liverpool, disinformation claiming he was a newly arrived Muslim immigrant was spread by far-right accounts on social media. In fact he was born in Britain, to a Rwandan Christian family. But anti-migrant violence broke out in more than a dozen places in England and Northern Ireland, leading to more than 400 arrests.
The killer, Axel Rudakubana, was sentenced to life in prison last week. Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, described his actions as an example of a new kind of terrorism, involving loners obsessed with violence rather than driven by any one ideology.
