Jim - We moved out of London nearly 20 years ago back to tory dominated south west England....

The library here and in the next town down the road have both been closed permanently in the last 2 or 3 years..
We used to have a substantial CD collection,
accumulated over years by a Librarian
who was obviously a UK Folk Music enthusiast...
Also a lot of British folk books,
I know that because of all the late fines I used to pay on them...

The loss of such resources is far more immediately important to us out here in the provinces,
than any big specialist library in the capital city...

It's great that those special academic collection libraries continue to flourish,
but they are not so relevant to ordinay folks as our local public lending libraries were for so many decades...