“Libraries gave us power,” sang the Manic Street Preachers in the opening line of their 1996 hit, A Design for Life. It was a customised version of an inscription that their lyricist and bassist Nicky Wire had spotted above the entrance to a Victorian library building in Pill, a neighbourhood in Newport in south Wales.
Pill library has since been repurposed, but the lyric has travelled around the world. In 2009, it was inscribed on a commemorative plaque at the opening of the new Cardiff central library, at which the Manics were invited to perform. “The weight of those almost Orwellian words became intertwined with an idea about what the miners had given back to society when they built municipal halls and centres across the country – beautiful looking institutes that they proudly left for future generations,” said Wire.
