Book swaps success with Transport for London!

Success! Yesterday we met with Transport for London at their impressive offices at 55 Broadway. We outlined what we’d like to do, and they’re very much in favour of helping us to make book swaps in London’s tube stations into a reality.

They’re very keen on safety and making the scheme as easy as possible for people to use, so they’d like the station book swaps to be mobile so that they can be moved into place during rush hour (as well as put away overnight to prevent vandalism). It’s also looking like metal will be the way to go for the shelves, to make them sturdy and durable.

We’ve also made some progress with interest from volunteers for Stratford and Tooting, and from some of the station staff as well, so we will try and concentrate on these stations first, and then move through some of the others, learning lessons as we go.

Our next steps will be to sort out the design of the mobile shelves which we will do with some help from our friends at the London College of Communication. After that we’re going to start approaching engineering and manufacturing firms to see if they can make shelves for us.

We’re also keen to look at sponsorship options for the shelves (but that’s something we’d need to get TfL’s say so for as well). Any suggestions about firms to make shelves or possible grants and/or sponsors would be gratefully appreciated!