Folkestone Library Move: KCC Puts Grace Hill Building on Disposal Track

Kent County Council has now put Folkestone’s old Grace Hill library on the disposal track while pressing ahead with a new library home at 14 Sandgate Road. The paperwork says this is prudent asset management. Much of Folkestone appears to think it looks rather more like a council confusing a civic landmark with a line in an estates spreadsheet.

On 20 March 2026, KCC formally started the notice period on its intention to dispose of 2 Grace Hill, the former Folkestone Library, to Folkestone Town Council. At the same time, KCC’s own Folkestone Library page said that, following scrutiny on 3 March, it was proceeding with implementation of the decision, and that work was underway at 14 Sandgate Road to create the new home for Folkestone Library and the town’s Adult Education Centre, with an opening expected in May 2026. In plain English, the county council has chosen its direction of travel: Grace Hill out, Sandgate Road in.

That new site is not some rumour passed around town over a cup of tea. In the official minutes of KCC’s 13 January 2026 committee meeting, members were told that “the best site found” for a temporary full-service town-centre library was the former Woolworths building at 14 Sandgate Road. The same minutes said the move would also bring in Adult Education Services and provide a dedicated, fully equipped library with both adult and children’s sections. So the old Woolworths is no longer the fallback. In County Hall terms, it is the answer.

Grace Hill, of course, did not get here because the town suddenly fell out of love with libraries. KCC’s papers say the building was temporarily closed in December because it had become unsafe for staff and customers, with water ingress and mould at the heart of the problem. The council then ran an eight-week public consultation from 18 July to 11 September 2024. It received 600 responses. And here is the awkward bit for County Hall: 55 per cent of consultees disagreed with KCC’s proposal to leave Grace Hill and find an alternative town-centre location, while 38 per cent agreed. KCC’s own report also acknowledged that the Save Folkestone Library group helped promote the consultation widely. A lesser institution might have taken that as a flashing warning light. KCC seems to have treated it more as ambient decoration.

The formal machinery then rolled on exactly as public cynics have come to expect. On 13 January 2026, KCC’s committee voted to endorse the proposed direction by 8 votes to 4, with 1 abstention. The resolution backed 14 Sandgate Road as the location of the Folkestone town-centre library and registration service “for the foreseeable future” and backed open-market disposal of the Grace Hill building. The cabinet member decision itself was then taken on 6 February 2026. After a later scrutiny-stage challenge, KCC stated on its public webpage that it was proceeding with implementation. That is the modern local-government magic trick in action: consultation, concern, call-in, paperwork, then the same answer with slightly better formatting.

Yet this was never a simple choice between “do nothing” and “move on”. Creative Folkestone’s published proposal set out a different model altogether: restore the Grace Hill building as a multi-use community and cultural hub, with space for a public library run by KCC alongside education, creative industries and community events. KCC’s own January 2025 report recorded that Creative Folkestone had indicated it might be willing to take on responsibility for the building through a disposal or long lease at peppercorn rent so it could pursue funding not open to KCC, and said officers had been engaging with the organisation since late 2023. One Folkestone went further in January this year, saying the wider partnership idea could see up to £6 million invested in the building, though it also complained that KCC had still not brought all parties into direct talks together.

Then came the town council. Following a resolution on 22 January 2026, Folkestone Town Council sent KCC a letter offering to buy the Grace Hill freehold for a nominal sum. The letter said the town council understood it would become liable for the building’s short-term liabilities and wanted to work with community partners to regenerate it as community space, with a “tacit commitment” to return the library to Grace Hill when the building became fit for that use again. By March, KCC’s own library page confirmed it had received that offer, and the disposal notice published on 20 March was specifically for a proposed disposal to Folkestone Town Council. So what looked in January like a straight march towards auction has, at least for now, been interrupted by local politics, local pressure and the inconvenient fact that people in Folkestone still care what happens to public buildings.

KCC’s own equality material makes the story more uncomfortable still. It says that reopening Folkestone Library at Grace Hill, including in a combined public-and-community model, would restore the full town-centre service in one building, make equivalent stock and event space available in one place, and could increase take-up of library and other services. It also notes that Grace Hill is close to communities that could particularly benefit from access to those services. Yet the same documents also acknowledge downsides to the Sandgate Road move: that a move to 14 Sandgate Road could adversely affect some disabled people, and that the journey uphill from Grace Hill to Sandgate Road could be harder for some people with mobility issues and for carers, even while KCC argues the high-street location is more central and better connected. In other words, even KCC’s own paperwork does not tell a fairy tale. It tells a trade-off. County Hall has simply decided which side of that trade-off it values more.

To be fair, none of this means 14 Sandgate Road is doomed to fail. It may turn out to be a decent, practical, popular library. Folkestone badly needs a full town-centre service back under one roof after years of fragmented provision, and KCC clearly believes the former Woolworths can deliver that more quickly and more cheaply than restoring Grace Hill itself. But that is not the same thing as saying the handling of Grace Hill has been wise, imaginative or worthy of the building. Too much of the official language has sounded as though the problem with Grace Hill is that it stubbornly refuses to behave like a compliant asset in a disposal policy. Historic buildings do have that irritating habit of meaning something to people.

And that is the heart of it. KCC has been able to tell residents about repair bills, holding costs, valuation processes, estate strategy and disposal routes. It has been much less convincing on the bigger question: what is a library building for in the first place? If the answer is merely “to house the service at the lowest tolerable cost”, then Sandgate Road may satisfy the spreadsheet. But if the answer includes civic identity, heritage, memory, public space and the idea that some buildings are part of a town’s common life rather than just its property portfolio, then Grace Hill was always about more than damp walls and budget lines. Folkestone Town Council’s intervention has at least kept the door ajar. But this episode has already told us something important about the county council now in charge: when forced to choose between civic value and managerial neatness, KCC under its current leadership has shown itself to be an authority that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The Shepway Vox Team

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