Another star performance from Tate South Lambeth

The latest official figures show that numbers of visits to Tate South Lambeth are continuing to rise at a very strong rate.

In the ten months from April 2015 to January  2016 Tate South Lambeth recorded over 136,000 visits, a rise of 71% (or over two thirds ) on the figures for the same ten months  a year earlier. That is by far the fastest rate of growth among all Lambeth libraries, which – excluding TSL – was only 1% year on year in this period.

In visit numbers TSL ranked fourth behind the three large town centre libraries, in Clapham, Brixton and Streatham. But these libraries are open 54 hours a week. TSL is open for 39 hours. If you look at visits per hour, TSL currently ranks equal with much better resourced and much bigger Streatham.

Lambeth councillors have made much of the fact that they must concentrate resources on the best-performing libraries. So why is Tate South Lambeth currently on the death list?