LIBRARY users in Liskeard could see the service return to the town centre this autumn after Cornwall Council stepped in with a £150k funding plug.

The Real Ideas Organisation (RIO) has taken on a project to restore and refurbish the Grade II Listed Passmore Edwards building as a multi-use space with the library at its heart.

RIO secured a significant Architectural Heritage Fund grant in 2019, but a bid for European Regional Development Funding fell through at the second hurdle. This bid was not just for Liskeard but for Market Towns workspace schemes in Saltash and Bodmin as well, said CEO of RIO Lindsey Hall.

In a presentation to Liskeard Town Council, Ms Hall was upbeat about the project and expressed relief that physical work will be able to go ahead at last “within weeks”.

The aim will be to get phase one – the library service – up and running first, and continue with the work on the upstairs part of the building, once further funding, potentially including from the Arts Council, has been obtained. Expected Community-led Development funding of £100k would fit the kitchen out for use as an enterprise kitchen.

In response to questions about what uses the building could be put to, and how this would fit within the picture of other workspaces planned in Liskeard, Ms Hall said it would be important to keep talking and working together.

She said this was important at both the development stage, so that projects would complement each other, and at the operations stage, so that people might for example be referred easily from one place to another which might suit them better.

At RIO’s successful project in Devonport, for example, she said that in recent times they had seen food production start-ups needing kitchen space, and that RIO could provide a stepping-stone for a person requiring a base – as well as offering space to groups working in the community such as the Real Junk Food Project. The key thing, she said, would be to be able to ‘flex’ and respond to changing need locally, rather than being rigid.

City College Plymouth and C-Tech were both talking with RIO about the potential for offering retraining and skills development at the Library.

It was the multi-purpose aspect that the ERDF panel had not been keen on, Ms Hall explained.

“It has all been deeply frustrating, largely because ERDF took a very long time to come back with queries, most of which were around the technicalities of multi-use spaces and combining workspace with other, largely, cultural activities. In the end, the multi-use nature of the library and the other spaces in the bid is why it wasn’t successful.”

Cllr Smith asked what the current shortfall in funding stood at and Ms Hall replied that another £300k would be needed to realise the project “in the most ambitious way”.

Meanwhile head of library services at Cornwall Council, Julie Zessimedes, described how Liskeard was one of 25 devolution projects going on across Cornwall with libraries at their core.

An initial £100k investment has been provided by the local authority to many of these places to ensure that the libraries, many of which are historic buildings, are wind and watertight and meet health and safety regulations.

The decision to give an extra £150k to Liskeard had been made to ensure that phase one could get moving, she said.

A spokesperson for Cornwall Council said: “The Council’s Devolution Programme has a capital pot that can be used to support the transfer process for assets and services. It was agreed that funding would be provided from this budget to support the transfer of Cornwall Council’s building at Liskeard. Using this funding will support the transition of the library to local management to ensure that residents can continue to access the much-valued services that the facility provides.”

Ms Zessimedes acknowledged that some people felt that the library had been moved out of the town centre to Luxstowe House “prematurely”. She said that a click and collect service had continued to run through the pandemic. The temporary service would be enhanced as of April 12, with some limited browsing to be allowed.