August 2026 has mostly consisted of the following for the Congregational Library:
1. Getting boxes out of the Tower
We have been asked to clear the Tower of the empty cardboard boxes we were storing there – with over 900 boxes unpacked, we had to put them somewhere – so we have been offering them out to other libraries in Cambridge. We have had quite a few takers and have now promised or given away 500 of those boxes. Unfortunately this is going to be a running problem as we have only unpacked slightly more than a third of the total boxes in storage…
2. Enquiries
After spending the first six or seven months of the year with very little to do, we have had a sudden explosion in enquiries and bookings to use the reading room. Since the beginning of July alone we’ve had almost half the total number of enquiries of the entire year, and we have people coming from as far away as India, the United States, and Australia. We truly have a global presence. We are very pleased: keep sending us those enquiries! The more you use us, the more useful we can be.
3. Unpacking
Well, obviously this was going to be on the list – but the exciting news is we have finished unpacking the main run in the Cheshunt Room! We have ended up with some extra space there so our local Church Histories are now moving out of the Carrie Room, where we had originally intended to put them. These are some of our more popular books – if you’re researching the history of your local chapel or church, we might have a book for you – so it’s exciting to see them coming out of boxes at last.
4. Heat
We’ve all been very hot this month, and dry too – today (27 August) is the first time it’s rained properly since what feels like forever. The books in the Cheshunt Room have been sitting pretty (that room’s environmental conditions are remarkably stable), but the Tower and Carrie Room have had some extremely dry readings, and the third floor of the Tower went up to 51 degrees Centigrade on one occasion. We are monitoring these conditions and discussing how to deal with them: no books are going into the top two floors of the Tower until we can mitigate these conditions. In the meantime, I think the books are as relieved as we are that the weather has turned a little bit cooler.
Our catalogue is still available online if there is anything you would like to see – some items may still be offsite, so give us a week of notice if you’d like to consult our collection. If you need more information about us or about the activities of the Congregational Memorial Hall Trust more generally, please visit our website – and of course follow us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
See you next month!
