When Amarachi Clarke started her chocolate-making business, Lucocoa, she found information and support at the British Library.

I used to be a keen runner, but when I got injured doing the San Francisco Women's Marathon, I went from being able to run 26 miles to not being able to run at all. I wanted to incorporate really good chocolate into my healing process. I started exploring, but the more I read, the more it didn't quite align with what I was seeing on the shelf. The books were saying that chocolate's like wine and coffee, where different regions create different flavours. I thought, why does all this dark chocolate taste so bitter? 

 

I taught myself how to make chocolate

I’ve got an international development background. I started looking at the chocolate supply chain; it's very murky. No one in the UK really makes chocolate, and the big companies are still using child and slave labour. In 2001, they all signed up to something called the Harkin Engel Protocol, which was supposed to eradicate it. I used to be the Vice President (Welfare) of the National Union of Students, so I know campaigning can do incredible things, but sometimes it can take so long. Those big companies have got enough marketing budget to fob you off.

I thought, let's go down a business route. That's when I taught myself how to make chocolate. In 2015, I converted the second bedroom in our two-bedroom flat into a chocolate factory. We launched at a chocolate show and sold out. Then I took a market stall in Brick Lane for two years, trying to refine our recipes. In February 2020, we moved to our own factory in Bermondsey. It probably wasn't the best time to move, but we're still there three years later. We are London's first bean-to-bar chocolate maker. When we started, there weren’t many in the country, and then we became the first in London, which is wild. 

 

The BIPC is almost too good to be true

The British Library’s Business & IP Centre is pretty special. They have all this research that we wouldn’t be able to buy by ourselves. Every time industry reports come out, I go down to the Library to go through what they’re saying the trends are, and see how that compares to what we’re doing. In the early days of Lucocoa, the Library was advertising their Innovating for Growth programme (which has now been succeeded by Get Ready for Business Growth) but you had to have a revenue of over £100,000 to take part. We qualified the year after we moved factories. I had one-to-one meetings with experts and it made me really think deeply about our purpose and strategy. 

If you’ve got a small business, or are thinking of starting one, the Library’s BIPC will help you understand what you’re trying to do. You can research your market at the click of a button. We never used it for intellectual property, but I know that if I was starting again, I would. I made mistakes on one or two of the trade marks I was filing, and I'm pretty sure that if I’d gone in and asked a couple of questions, somebody would have told me. The BIPC is one of those things that's almost too good to be true – but honestly, just believe it. 

 

People mistake us for Willy Wonka

It takes three days to make a bar of chocolate. We receive tasting notes for each sack of beans, like citrus or roasted nuts, and then I try to find those notes as we roast and grind. We say, okay, for me personally, what do I like tasting? You can't do what all the big companies do, which is shove them in the oven and just burn them – that’s how you get bitter chocolate. It's like eating burnt toast. It's not supposed to taste like that. 

We roast our beans at a lower temperature to extract the flavor. We crush them and remove the shells, then put the nibs – the insides of the cocoa beans – into big stone grinders. We add coconut sugar, lucuma and cocoa butter, if it's dark chocolate, and milk, if it's milk chocolate. On the third day, we cool some of the chocolate down and temper some to make it into bars. People mistake us for Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, when really it's a lot of heavy lifting and measuring things quite precisely. You need to concentrate. 

 

I even made brownies on This Morning

Our name is Lucocoa: 'lu' for lucuma, 'co' for coconut sugar and 'coa' for the cocoa beans and butter. I wanted to hold us to account, and make sure we would continue to work with these core ingredients. We’re passionate about three things: cleaning up the supply chain and paying people what they’re worth, making chocolate taste how it's supposed to taste, and not using white refined sugar. We use coconut sugar instead, and a fruit from Peru called lucuma, which is a superfood. Our customers love the taste of our chocolate and the fact that we're doing something good.

A lot has happened since we've grown – I even made brownies on This Morning. We do school visits now. In February, we hosted 80 Year Two students over three days, which was absolute carnage, but their little faces were so excited. We do quite a lot of bespoke work – a client recently asked us to make a bust of Sir Christopher Wren out of chocolate for the 300th anniversary of his death. We’ve worked with Google, and Puma, and Spotify. We’ve been asked to do quite a lot of stuff.   

 

As told to Lucy Peters

 

Alex Johnson has had six books published by British Library Publishing, the Library’s dedicated in-house publishing team. Trained as a journalist, he spent 15 years at The Independent, and is the online editor of Fine Books and Collections magazine. 

I grew up in quite a bookish family. My father was an English teacher and an archivist. My mum was a librarian, and ran a mobile bookshop. I've always liked reading and writing. Because of that, I went into journalism, initially – not a great reason to go into journalism. But it was always in the back of my mind that I wanted to write books. 

I think I’ve now written six books for the British Library. I'm interested in books as objects, the world of books, and the whole idea of reading, and that's in line with what they do. As a library, I think they're seen as a force for good. People are very respectful of an institution that's been going for so long. My mother is delighted that I've done so many things with the British Library, although I suspect she's still hoping that I'm going to become a lawyer.

 

Tintin’s stayed with me throughout my life

My first book for the Library was A Book of Book Lists: A Bibliophile’s Compendium. My own three favourite books are A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (that's 12 books, but I'm counting it as one), Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor and The Adventures of Tintin. When I was younger, I was a big fan of Tintin; then when I did A Level French, I started reading it in French. My wife was born and brought up in Spain, so eventually I started reading it in Spanish, too. It’s stayed with me throughout my life.

The next two books of mine that the Library published were Shelf Life, Writers on Books and Reading, and Edward Lear and the Pussycat: Famous Writers and their Pets. I was surprised by how many writers wrote with their pets sitting on their laps. Edith Wharton used to write in bed, surrounded by her dogs. John Steinbeck's dog Toby ate the first manuscript of Of Mice and Men, which, it seems, Steinbeck took in his stride. 

 

Charles Dickens had a pet raven

Charles Dickens had a pet raven whom he wrote into Barnaby Rudge, and which arguably inspired Edgar Allen Poe's poem ‘The Raven’. He had two or three with the same name – various incarnations of this raven, Grip, who were either lovely or appalling. After he died, they had one of them stuffed, and now it's in the Free Library of Philadelphia. 

When writing about Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her dog Flush, I was intrigued to find out how widespread dognapping was in Victorian England, a subject I'd previously known nothing about at all.

In 2020, the Library published my book How to Give Your Child a Lifelong Love of Reading. I think the important thing is to be guided by the child, and not be prescriptive about what's good. Children are more likely to read and finish books that they've chosen themselves than those which their parents have forced on them. Whatever they're enthusiastic about, whether it's Charlotte Brontë, or football, or spiders, books can be useful paths to getting more out of an interest.

 

How many Dylan Thomases does it take to change a lightbulb?

When I was a child, we regularly went to the library. I'd go with my parents: we'd take out whatever the maximum allowance was, whizz through them and go back the week after. I think that was an early introduction to how marvellous libraries are. My wife and I have done the same with our children: they've done summer reading projects at the library. I grew up in Shropshire, and the local library was the one where the poet Philip Larkin got his first job as a librarian. He had very mixed feelings about the residents, and the ambivalence was mutual. 

The next book I wrote for the Library was The Book Lover’s Joke Book. How many Dylan Thomases does it take to change a lightbulb? None, they just rage, rage against the dying of the light. I'm here all week. Don't forget to tip your waitresses.

This autumn, I have another book coming out with the Library: The Book Lover's Almanac: A Year of Literary Events, Letters, Scandals and Plot Twists. It’s a day-by-day look at the world of books and literature. We're starting off each chapter with births and deaths, and when books were first published or plays first performed. Every day there’s a little story about things that happened on that date, and each month finishes with writers’ famous last words. 

As told to Lucy Peters.

In March this year LibraryOn launched its £1.09m grants programme. Supported by Arts Council England and facilitated by the British Library, the fund enables library services to boost their digital presences and enhance their discoverability for new and existing users. In consultation with the library sector, we created a grants programme which was easy to access and designed with the digital needs of libraries in mind. Library services and consortia could apply for between £10k and £70k for capital expenditure.  

We received 68 applications representing 69% of all English library services. From an Expressions of Interest stage, we invited 43 applicants to submit a full application. The first stage panel included an Arts Council England representative and the digital lead for Libraries Connected. Types of projects included upgrading existing websites or creating new ones, digital marketing activity and purchasing new software. The total value of applications came to £1.6m.  

We invited a full panel of sector experts to decide which of the final projects would receive funding. Individuals from CILIP and Good Things Foundation, as well as previous library Heads of Service, took part in a robust decision-making process.  All applications were considered and discussed in detail; we were very keen to ensure a good geographical spread of projects as well as a range of activity was supported.   

The panel awarded funding to 27 projects with a total value of £1,080,846. To give a flavour of the successful applications:  

• In the North, eleven projects were funded including a new website for Sunderland libraries to revitalise customer experience; a digital advertising campaign in Sefton; an animation and VR project working with young people in North Lincolnshire; a new library app in Kirklees and upgraded events booking for Gateshead.  

• The Midlands received funding for two applications, including a website refresh, virtual floor plan, photography and library app for Stoke-on-Trent; and a library app for Leicester Libraries.

• London had five successful applications. They included a collaboration between the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) and Camden libraries; an online discoverable catalogue in Lambeth; and an interactive website project for Newham.  

• The South East received funding for five. They included creation of online assets such as photography, film and animation for West Sussex; virtual tours and photography in Surrey; and Suffolk reimagining its website’s user experience.  

• In the South West four projects were supported, including online space booking for Libraries Unlimited; a new website in Gloucestershire; and an online history and archive project for Southampton.     

Awards were also given to three consortiums, meaning 20 services from around the country will benefit from activity including ASK for a Book; a website providing personalised book recommendations from libraries, a film and photography project (reflecting findings from user research, where people said they would be more likely to visit a library if they could see what the spaces and events looked like) and upgrades to websites so we can increase our understanding of how local and national library sites work together for users.      

We’re inviting participating projects to take part in a community of practice to support skills development and share ongoing learning. We hope the process will be a useful experience which will have sector-wide benefits and enable services to learn from one another and exchange knowledge.          

Liz White, Head of Public Libraries and Community Engagement at the British Library said: “We’re excited to see this grant award for library services in areas across England, balancing investment in core offers with a wide variety of opportunities for digital innovation, user research and shared learning about ways of working. This reflects our north star goal to increase the number of people using public libraries and raise awareness about their enduring value and importance.” 

Luke Burton, Director of Libraries at Arts Council England said: “We are delighted to see such an exciting range of digital projects and improvements being funded through the LibraryOn grant scheme which is supported by the Arts Council’s overall £3.4m award to the British Library. The team has been progressing the development of the LibraryOn platform at pace over recent months and allowing digital improvements and potential future integrations are critical to the next steps of demonstrating the value and uses of a single digital presence for public libraries in England. I look forward to seeing all of these projects progressing.” 

Head to the LibraryOn website to find out more about the awards in detail. 

If you work in the public library sector and have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at [email protected]. You can also email us to subscribe to our sector newsletter for regular updates.  

Jill Brown 

Digital Grants Manager, LibraryOn