Ever since the British Library decamped to its new home at St Pancras in 1997 and the subsequent creation of the Great Court, the British Museum has struggled to come up with a plan for the old Library Reading Room.
This is the central structure in the Great Court that (as part of the Foster and Partners millennium overhaul of the Museum) was faced with Portland Stone and has staircases curling around its outsides.
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For a while it housed some of the museum’s temporary exhibitions, but with a new purpose-built exhibition galleries opening it stopped being used for this in 2013, and the space became generally inaccessible to the public (occasional guided tours notwithstanding). However, from July last year it was reopened for all, and it is utterly glorious.
Once restricted to those holding Library “reader’s” cards – a select group that included Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Karl Marx and even Lenin (using the pseudonym Jacob Richter) – one now simply steps through the doorway to gaze up at the oculus at the top of the room’s domed roof.
That dome (inspired by the roof of the Pantheon in Rome) has a diameter of 140’ (around 42.5m) and has a cast iron framework, with the ceiling suspended from cast iron struts that hang for the frame. Rather wonderfully the ceiling is made from papier mache, displaying huge optimism that the roof would never leak.
The architect was Sydney Smirke (based on plans by the Principal Librarian Antonio Panizzi) whose father Robert did the main block and huge Grecian facade of the Museum. It was officially opened on 2 May 1857 with the first visitors treated to a ‘breakfast’ (that included champagne and ice cream) laid out on the catalogue desks.
Surrounding the Reading Room (in the area that is now the Great Court) were iron bookstacks – 3 linear miles of them (nearly 5km), that gave around 25 miles (40km) of shelving. Inside, radiating out from the central catalogue desk, were 38 tables that could accommodate 302 readers.
Visit now and you can see some early conceptual work from various architecture practices prior to the redesign of the museum’s western galleries being put out to competition.
There is more information on the history (plus some wonderful photos of the design and construction, and the Reading Room in use) on the British Museum site here.
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