Once upon a time there was an old mill by a stream. Built 1870-ish. It is now in need of restoration. The stream is the Ouseburn, which meets the river Tyne as it flows through Newcastle to the North Sea.
And once upon another time, three children fled from a care home on a rickety raft, which spun and trembled in the river Tyne and passed an old mill.
The mill is real; the raft journey is fiction, imagined by David Almond for his novel Heaven Eyes. Almond is a patron of the Centre for the Children’s Book, which aims to preserve the work of Britain’s finest writers and illustrators and put them on show to encourage children (and the rest of us) to read and to imagine.
The directors were looking for a home for the centre. Eventually they found the old mill by the stream past which Almond’s imagined runaways had floated.
The mill becomes the property of the Centre for the Children’s Book this month and should open next year. It will have seven floors: a bookshop, a gallery, a cafe plus exhibition, research, education and performance spaces.
The finished building will be the culmination of an idea hatched in the early 1990s. ‘The thing that kept coming up again and again was that there was no home for the work of British writers and illustrators of children’s books,” says Elizabeth Hammill, the centre’s project director. ‘No one was collecting this material, not even the British Library.”
Hammill was then working in the children’s books department in Waterstone’s in Newcastle. She teamed up with Mary Briggs, a former assistant director of education for Newcastle and now the centre’s business director.
The three main aims were clear: to preserve the material, to put the words and pictures on show and to bring literature to adults and children excluded from it for all kinds of social, economic and cultural reasons. But there was another, broader aim. ‘We wanted to put children’s literature on the map because it has never been valued here,” says Briggs. ‘That has since changed.”
The change began when the Harry Potter series whisked children off into the joys of an addictive page-turner. The artificial line dividing fiction for adults from that for children has been blurred. For the moment there are only good books.
Meanwhile, back in 1996, word of the centre and its aims began to circulate.
‘This is something I have been waiting for, hoping for, for many years,” said Philippa Pearce, author of Tom’s Midnight Garden. ‘I can’t emphasise enough the ongoing value of collecting a body of material from contemporary illustrators and authors that gives insight into the making of books, which may become classics of the future,” says Shirley Hughes, whose illustrations for her wordless Up and Up are already in the centre’s collection.
Quentin Blake, the former children’s laureate, has shown his support by offering illustrations for the centre’s publicity material. He describes the centre as a magnificent idea, stressing how it will build on basic literacy. ‘You need to be able to read. That is like being given a set of tools. But then you need to be motivated to use them.”
The centre’s collections are already growing. ‘The big thing for us is to make the material accessible, to show how books are created, and how they are worked on and revised before taking their final published form,” says Briggs.
The mill on the Ouseburn is close to Byker, one of the north-east’s poorest districts. The centre has already begun working with children and their families there.
‘The thing about outreach work with children’s books is that it’s about communities and quality of life,” says Briggs with missionary zeal. ‘It isn’t about alleviating physical or financial poverty. It’s about giving people access to new worlds.”
Those people can happily include grandparents, who remember the books they read for themselves and those they read to their children and now want to discover new joys for their grandchildren.
Hammill and Briggs may care to consider a motto for their old mill. Perhaps they should look no further than the closing pages of Almond’s Heaven Eyes: ‘Like all stories, [this story] has no true end. It goes on and on and mingles with all the other stories in the world.”