Published: 5 January, 2011
by JOHN GULLIVER

STARTLED, I looked again at the notice fixed to a garden railing.

Was it really possible that £345,000 had been raised in just a few weeks by residents of Primrose Hill to save their library?

I had scoffed at the target these people had set in November to raise £1million to take over the library in Sharpleshall Street from Camden Council.

Impossible, I thought. Perhaps £100,000, at a stretch even £200,000, but surely nothing more than that.

I’m glad to be proved wrong.

As Primrose Hill has become a fashionable bolt-hole for the money crowd, not to speak of the celebrity lot, I assumed donations in chunky cheque transfers would flow in from certain residences.

But even so, I thought, that could soon dry up, leaving the organisers more than a few bob short of the target figure.

But in the last two or three weeks of December, the money has just rolled in, it seems.

The last time anything like this happened was in the 1990s when, miraculously, the good people of Hampstead clubbed together to raise about £2m to save Hampstead Town Hall – neglected and left dying by Camden Council.

But that was for a large wonderful Victorian edifice – while the library occupies just the ground floor of a modernish, undistinguished building.

All this made me think of the public values espoused by people in Primrose Hill.

It is something better and bigger than the incoherent concept of the Big Society promoted, admittedly less so in recent months, by David Cameron.

And I would like to think it is something more than the values – worthy though they are – promoted by the Women’s Institute or the National Trust.

There is something of a moral quality about the effort being put in for the library appeal that raises high the public spirit.